Graham Huggan examines some of the processes by which value is given to postcolonial works within their cultural field using both literary-critical and sociological methods of analysis.

Travel writing, it has been said, helped produce the rest of the world for a Western audience. Could the same be said more recently of postcolonial writing? In The Postcolonial Exotic, Graham Huggan examines some of the processes by which value is attributed to postcolonial works within their cultural field. Using varied methods of analysis, Huggan discusses both the exoticist discourses that run through postcolonial studies, and the means by which postcolonial products are marketed and domesticated for Western consumption. Global in scope, the book takes in everything from: * the latest 'Indo-chic' to the history of the Heinemann African Writers series * from the celebrity stakes of the Booker Prize to those of the US academic star-system *from Canadian multicultural anthologies to Australian 'tourist novels'. This timely and challenging volume points to the urgent need for a more carefully grounded understanding of the processes of production, dissemination and consumption that have surrounded the rapid development of the postcolonial field.

Graham Huggan examines some of the processes by which value is given to postcolonial works within their cultural field using both literary-critical and sociological methods of analysis.

Postcolonial studies has taken a significant turn since 2000 from the post-structural focus on language and identity of the 1980s and 1990s to more materialist and sociological approaches. A key theorist in inspiring this innovative new scholarship has been Pierre Bourdieu. Bourdieu and Postcolonial Studies shows the emergence of this strand of postcolonialism through collecting texts that pioneered this approach-by Graham Huggan, Chris Bongie, and Sarah Brouillette-as well as emerging scholarship that follows the path these critics have established. This Bourdieu-inspired work examines the institutions that structure the creation, dissemination, and reception of world literature; the foundational values of the field and its sometimes ambivalent relationship to the popular; and the ways concepts like habitus, cultural capital, consecration and anamnesis can be deployed in reading postcolonial texts. Topics include explorations of the institutions of the field such as the B.B.C.'s Caribbean voices program and the South African publishing industry; analysis of Bourdieu's fieldwork in Algeria during the decolonization era; and comparisons between Bourdieu's work and alternative versions of literary sociology such as Pascale Casanova's and Franco Moretti's. The sociological approach to literature developed in the collected essays shows how, even if the commodification of postcolonialism threatens to neutralize the field's potential for resistance and opposition, a renewed project of postcolonial critique can be built in the contaminated spaces of globalization.

The “Other”—source of fear and fascination; emblem of difference demonized and romanticized. Theories of alterity and cultural diversity abound in the contemporary academic landscape. Victor Segalen’s early attempt to theorize the exotic is a crucial reference point for all discussions of alterity, diversity, and ethnicity. Written over the course of fourteen years between 1904 and 1918, at the height of the age of imperialism, Essay on Exoticism encompasses Segalen’s attempts to define “true Exoticism.” This concept, he hoped, would not only replace nineteenth-century notions of exoticism that he considered tawdry and romantic, but also redirect his contemporaries’ propensity to reduce the exotic to the “colonial.” His critique envisions a mechanism that appreciates cultural difference—which it posits as an aesthetic and ontological value—rather than assimilating it: “Exoticism’s power is nothing other than the ability to conceive otherwise,” he writes. Segalen’s pioneering work on otherness anticipates and informs much of the current postcolonial critique of colonial discourse. As such Essay on Exoticism is essential reading for both cultural theorists or those with an interest in the politics of difference and diversity.

Combining analysis with detailed accounts of authors' careers and the global trade in literature, this book assesses how postcolonial writers respond to their own reception and niche positioning, parading their exotic otherness to metropolitan audiences, within a global marketplace.

This deeply engaging, historically, and culturally informed book provides new perspectives on a wide range of writers, and at the same time provides a radically new development of many of the most pertinent issues in the field of postcolonial writing and theory. It constitutes a major new engagement between the "postcolonial" and a conception of the literary that is richly innovative in its deployment of psychoanalytic, deconstructive, and other approaches to the text. The book begins with some brief background to the issue of decolonization and its contemporary effects. It is informed throughout by a clear sense of literary and political context, within which chosen texts--by well-known writers (Derek Walcott, Chinua Achebe, Edward Kamau Brathwaite) as well as less well-known ones (Joan Riley, Susan Power, Abdulrazak Gurnah) and writers not often seen in a postcolonial context (James Kelman, Seamus Deane, Hanif Kureishi)--can be situated. The chapters that follow are based around themes such as violent geographics; hallucination, dream and the exotic; mourning and melancholy; diaspora and exile; delocalization and the alibi. This profoundly new approach to the complexities of the postcolonial allows the reader to appreciate some of the richness, but at the same time the political and cultural ambivalence, which underlies postcolonial writing. Throughout the book David Punter continually questions, as one would expect from his many previous books, the definition and scope of the "postcolonial." It is seen throughout as a phenomenon not restricted to the ex- or neo-colonies but as a key characterisation of all our lives at the beginning of the twenty-first century. It is an indissoluble part of the development of national imaginings and, at the same time, an alibi for the emergence of a violently assertive "new world order" committed to the management and obliteration of difference. By juxtaposing texts from different cultural traditions and topographies, from Things Fall Apart to The Bone People, from Anot