Reading in the Global Literary Marketplace: Material and Textual Affects

Abstract

Materialist scholarship on postcolonial literature’s relationship with global publishing industries has radically altered the ways in which we conceive of writers’ and texts’ postcolonial agency. Its interest in the foreclosures of the marketplace has made it difficult to identify texts and practices of reading alike as postcolonial, as textualist traditions have long done so. Yet, even if somewhat devalued by materialist postcolonialisms, reading remains valuable, particularly because it presents opportunities for self-reconstitution and political self-recognition. Indeed, it is precisely because reading is not material or textual, but hybrid, that it holds such ethical and political potential. This essay departs from materialist and textualist postcolonial scholars’ tendency to prescribe strategies of reading, instead concerning itself with describing reading as it actually takes place. Drawing on Wolfgang Iser’s reader-response theory, in conjunction with affect theory and theories of the ethics and politics of reading, the essay develops an innovative model of reading, which understands readers as comprising a reading self and a self-in-the-world. This model of reading reasserts postcolonial literatures’ agencies at the site of consumption as well as democratizes reading by undermining prescriptions of reading and meaning.

Keywords:

• Affect
• global literary marketplace
• reader-response
• reading
• reception

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Kate Spowage and Frances Hemsley for reading earlier versions of this essay, and to the two anonymous reviewers for their valuable input on the draft manuscript.

Notes

1 Issues to do with the politics of language are not specific to postcolonial literatures in the global literary marketplace. Pascale Casanova suggests that, partly independent of their political and economic capital, some languages have acquired greater literary prestige on the world stage (2004, 17–18). The Warwick Research Collective (2015) meanwhile link the inequality of literatures and languages to the inequalities of the modern capitalist world-system.

2 In consonance with Young’s reading of black authors, Ranasinha (2007) finds that South East Asian authors are similarly read through a lens of material and cultural authenticity, and as representatives of broader cultural and ethnic communities. She argues readers in Britain characterize writers as “native informant[s]” or “unreliable informant[s]” according to authors’ fidelity to an imaginary South Asia that is a priori constructed in the West (21–22).

3 For a discussion of the limitations and specificities of professional postcolonial critique, see Procter (2009).

4 In place of the assumed links between reading and geopolitical/cultural identity, Procter and Benwell (2014) have described the way in which we adopt “reading identities”.

5 My characterization of postcolonial texts as “actors” is intended to evoke work carried out by new materialism scholars and those in the field of object-oriented ontologies. See especially Latour (2005) and Bennett (2010), who each make clear that objecthood need not amount to powerlessness or dependence, and might instead be understood as giving rise to an affective singularity.

6 We can locate an understanding of affect as feeling-differently and being-differently across influential thinkers in the field, particularly in the Deleuzian strand of affect theory. Massumi effectively posits affect between potentially iterable points as “the notion of a taking-form” (2002, 9). Deleuze and Guattari similarly put it that “affects are becomings” (1987, 256), and Braidotti (2011) maintains this quasi-definition.

7 With respect to Iser and the politics of reading, see also Fluck (2000, 177–183) on the historical origins of Iser’s thought in postwar Germany, and the necessity amongst bourgeois Germans to gain critical distance from the politics of Nazism.