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IBARW: Exotification
Aug. 10th, 2008 10:40 amSo, international blog against racism week! One of the things I've been seeing around this week, as I usually do during IBARW, is the exhortation to read more books by authors of colour. It doesn't appear to matter where the author is from; what their ethnicity is; what their positions and politics are. What matters to the mainly-white people I read is that they are writers of colour.
I'm taking a very good paper this year; it's about exotification, as a category of taste and as a process by which dominant cultures engage in marginalisation. This included reading a challenging but interesting extract from Graham Huggan's book The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins. In the extracts we look at, he goes into some detail about a phenomenon he calls Bookerisation: the fetishisation of works by writers who position themselves, or are positioned, as marginal writers. That means black writers, asian writers, indian writers, maori writers. He points to the number of authors of colour who have won the Booker Prize in the last couple of decades (lots, including Salman Rushdie, Keri Hulme, Kazuo Ishiguro) to lend weight to his claim that this is a significant phenomenon: being a "marginal writer" has become important in our categorisation of taste.
Doesn't this sort of sound like a good thing? - in the context of IBARW? One person on my flist accurately identified our need to read books by authors not like us in order to change our expectations, the "default person" in our heads (who is overwhelmingly white. My default person is a young white woman - just like me, but I don't think that's why she's my default person.) But at the same time, this is an urge that marginalises even as it popularises. Our taste for stuff that we can fit into that category "exotic" - what does this mean for the stuff we put in that category? Yeah, it means Salman Rushdie sells really well. We imagine we're getting some insight into India and pat ourselves on the back. But Salman Rushdie is a Muslim indian who was educated in England through high school and university; his own father was Cambridge-educated; he lives in the UK, writes in the UK. How does his experience as Indian conform to India? What insight do we suppose we get? We universalise these authors' experiences and writings in a way we don't universalise white writers, or writers from developed countries. We don't imagine Charles de Lint's books give us a special insight into Canada, or Fiona Farrell can teach us more about the New Zealand experience than Kelly Ana Morey (♥ highly recommended.)
I don't have a good answer to the dilemma I feel I have. I recognise a fetishization of works by writers of colour on my flist, and in my culture; I recognise the packaging and marketing of these works as appealing to a taste for the exotic that marginalises, that homogenises, and that commercialises these writers, that Others them as inexorably as it popularises them. On the other hand, if I throw up my hands and say, well, when I read Salman Rushdie I'm participating in a culture that fetishizes the Other and I don't think that's good for anyone - so I'm only going to read books by white authors, where does that leave me? What do I do with that? Is my solution to say, oh well, what I'll do is, I'll read these books by writers of colour but I won't do it in a fetishizing way, I'll do it because I enjoy it? Why do I enjoy it? What does it mean that I enjoy these books (and movies) in the way I do? Am I making these cultures my consumables? Someone offer me a solution!
I'm taking a very good paper this year; it's about exotification, as a category of taste and as a process by which dominant cultures engage in marginalisation. This included reading a challenging but interesting extract from Graham Huggan's book The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins. In the extracts we look at, he goes into some detail about a phenomenon he calls Bookerisation: the fetishisation of works by writers who position themselves, or are positioned, as marginal writers. That means black writers, asian writers, indian writers, maori writers. He points to the number of authors of colour who have won the Booker Prize in the last couple of decades (lots, including Salman Rushdie, Keri Hulme, Kazuo Ishiguro) to lend weight to his claim that this is a significant phenomenon: being a "marginal writer" has become important in our categorisation of taste.
Doesn't this sort of sound like a good thing? - in the context of IBARW? One person on my flist accurately identified our need to read books by authors not like us in order to change our expectations, the "default person" in our heads (who is overwhelmingly white. My default person is a young white woman - just like me, but I don't think that's why she's my default person.) But at the same time, this is an urge that marginalises even as it popularises. Our taste for stuff that we can fit into that category "exotic" - what does this mean for the stuff we put in that category? Yeah, it means Salman Rushdie sells really well. We imagine we're getting some insight into India and pat ourselves on the back. But Salman Rushdie is a Muslim indian who was educated in England through high school and university; his own father was Cambridge-educated; he lives in the UK, writes in the UK. How does his experience as Indian conform to India? What insight do we suppose we get? We universalise these authors' experiences and writings in a way we don't universalise white writers, or writers from developed countries. We don't imagine Charles de Lint's books give us a special insight into Canada, or Fiona Farrell can teach us more about the New Zealand experience than Kelly Ana Morey (♥ highly recommended.)
I don't have a good answer to the dilemma I feel I have. I recognise a fetishization of works by writers of colour on my flist, and in my culture; I recognise the packaging and marketing of these works as appealing to a taste for the exotic that marginalises, that homogenises, and that commercialises these writers, that Others them as inexorably as it popularises them. On the other hand, if I throw up my hands and say, well, when I read Salman Rushdie I'm participating in a culture that fetishizes the Other and I don't think that's good for anyone - so I'm only going to read books by white authors, where does that leave me? What do I do with that? Is my solution to say, oh well, what I'll do is, I'll read these books by writers of colour but I won't do it in a fetishizing way, I'll do it because I enjoy it? Why do I enjoy it? What does it mean that I enjoy these books (and movies) in the way I do? Am I making these cultures my consumables? Someone offer me a solution!
