Narratives of Difference in Globalized Cultures

Reading Transnational Cultural Commodities

Belén Martín-Lucas, Andrea Ruthven, Belén Martín-Lucas, Andrea Ruthven

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9783319621326
• eBook ISBN:
  9783319621333
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book is about how the marketing of transnational cultural commodities capitalizes on difference and its appeal for cosmopolitan consumers in our postmodern globalized world. At what price? What ethical and political conundrums does the artist/writer/reader confront when going global? This volume analyzes why difference - whether gender, sexual, racial, ethnic, or linguistic - has become such a prominent element in the contemporary cultural field, and the effects of this prevalence on the production, circulation and reception of cultural commodities in the context of globalization. At the intersection of globalization, diaspora, postcolonial and feminist studies in world literature, these essays engage critically with a wide variety of representative narratives taken from diverse cultural fields, including humanitarian fiction, multilingual poetry, painting, text-image art, performance art, film, documentary, and docu-poetry. The chapters included offer counter-readings that disrupt hegemonic representations of cultural identity within the contemporary, neoliberal and globalized landscape.

Table of contents

• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Editors and Contributors
• List of Figures
• Introduction: Interrogating the Production, Circulation and Reception of ‘Difference’ in Globalized Cultures
• Part I Reading Methodologies
• Subversive Translation and Lexical Empathy: Pedagogies of Cortesia and Transnational Multilingual Poetics
• The Production and Productivity of Humanitarian Fiction: Postcolonial Shame and Neocolonial Crises
• Still Devouring Frida Kahlo: Psychobiography versus Postcolonial and Disability Readings
• The World Republic of Readers
• Part II Counternarratives of the Metropolis
• Success and the City: Working in the World’s Capital in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane
• Borderless (Alien) Nations: Disposable Bodies and Biopolitical Effacement in Min Sook Lee’s Docu-Poem
• Public Art in the Production of a Global City: Jamie Hilder’s Clashing Versions of Vancouver
• A Nation Goes Adrift: Subaltern Inter-Identity in José Saramago’s The Stone Raft
• Part III Disruptive Genders
• ‘Something Terrible Happened’: Spectacles of Gendered Violence and Nadine Gordimer’s The House Gun
• Alternative Modernities and Othered Masculinities in Mira Nair’s The Namesake
• (Un)Veiling Women’s Bodies: Transnational Feminisms in Emer Martin’s Baby Zero
• Index