Market Aesthetics

The Purchase of the Past in Caribbean Diasporic Fiction

Elena Machado Sáez

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780813937069
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In Market Aesthetics, Elena Machado Sáez explores the popularity of Caribbean diasporic writing within an interdisciplinary, comparative, and pan-ethnic framework. She contests established readings of authors such as Junot Díaz, Julia Alvarez, Edwidge Danticat, and Robert Antoni while showcasing the work of emerging writers such as David Chariandy, Marlon James, and Monique Roffey. By reading these writers as part of a transnational literary trend rather than within isolated national ethnic traditions, the author is able to show how this fiction adopts market aesthetics to engage the mixed blessings of multiculturalism and globalization via the themes of gender and sexuality.

New World Studies
Modern Language Initiative

1. Mixed Blessings

Readerships, Postcolonial Ethics, and the Problem of Intimacy

As my introduction discussed, the genre of historical fiction poses challenges to the dominant understandings of globalization in the humanities. Caribbean diasporic fiction is especially attuned to the contradictions accompanying a contextually minded product entering a decontextualizing marketplace. In Voicing Memory (2003), Nick Nesbitt reminds us that in the contemporary public sphere, “once repressed” historical contexts are “no longer absent” but have become “commodit[ies] offered up in newspapers; on local television; in annual commemorations” (6). While Nesbitt is specifically referring to the way cultural institutions deploy the history of slavery as an empty commodity, he also accepts the broader implications of this phenomenon, that “memory itself has become a commodity, circulating throughout society as mnemonic spectacle” (6). I see historical fiction as an ideal cultural product for discussing how the market mediates the consumption of once marginalized histories. This chapter sets the stage for my later readings of the novels by theorizing how Caribbean diasporic historical fiction is responsive to its circulation as commodified memory. Caribbean diasporic fiction self-consciously frames itself as a commodity in order to propose a postcolonial ethics of reading history. The form and content of this genre seek to embody and reconcile some of the contradictory pressures imposed by the way it imagines its readerships. The concept of niche marketing proves useful for understanding the diverse range of audiences that such texts encounter and how the readerships’ patronage of certain genres and styles shapes Caribbean diasporic writing. The authors rhetorically position their historical novels at the intersection of multiple readerships in order to comment on the challenges of narrating counterhistories in a mainstream public. Within their historical narratives, the writers often offer models of what can go right or wrong in cross-cultural interactions, seeking to flesh out the ethical (im)possibilities of intimacy.

Imagining Readers and Market Niches

Caribbean diasporic writers face unique problems of audience and authority. Hans Robert Jauss’s formulation of horizons in “The Identity of the Poetic Text in the Changing Horizon of Understanding” (1985) helps clarify the relationship between market processes and audience reception. Jauss sees the “‘dialogicity’ of literary communication,” or the conversation initiated by a text’s circulation, as inevitably entailing a “problem of otherness: between producer and recipient, between the past of the text and the present of the recipient, between different cultures” (9). For Caribbean diasporic writers, this problem of otherness is heightened by the commodification of ethnicity, which complicates the objectives of the text’s ethical imperative of historical revision. Jauss’s use of horizon acknowledges how the imaginaries of both the writer and the reader inform the interpretation of a text. The writers’ horizons of expectation (en)gender a market aesthetics. The creative reimagining of the past is shaped by how the writers envision their contemporary and future audiences. The structure and content of market aesthetics anticipate the reaction(s) of an audience on the basis of the reader reception that Caribbean diasporic writers experienced with their prior works. I engage a paratextual archive of book reviews to supplement the way in which the novels “infer the horizon of expectation of the contemporary public” (20).

Caribbean diasporic writers are aware of how the market positions them as the English-language representatives of their islands of origin and critically engage the market label of the author as authentic spokesperson. Taking advantage of the market’s framing as well as the global circulation of their fiction, Caribbean diasporic writers see the dehistoricized condition of the contemporary public sphere as providing a gap of context that they are positioned to fill in. The authors recognize this dehistoricized condition as an opportunity to reach an audience unarmed with competing historical sensibilities. The pedagogical tool of historical fiction aims to teach readers to see evidence of the Caribbean’s centrality to the formation of American, Canadian, and European politics and culture. Each historical novel reflects the writer’s unique implementation of pedagogy in terms of how the structure and form convey historical context to the reader. Caribbean diasporic authors employ a variety of pedagogical approaches: realist and postmodernist narratives, chronological and antichronological plots, didactic and Socratic forms. In chapters 2 and 3, I describe two approaches to the teacherly imperative: how writers either seek to historicize the decontextualization of the diaspora, as in the case of Andrea Levy and David Chariandy, or offer historical narratives of the Caribbean past to fill in the present gap of context, as in the case of Julia Alvarez, Michelle Cliff, and Marlon James.

While pedagogical strategies are expressed using a variety of modalities, Caribbean diasporic writers imagine the content of their historical vision in similar ways. The authors adopt a postcolonial approach to analyze historical progress, framing the Caribbean as a locale for the development of global capitalism and as a space whose consistent marginalization maintains empire’s illusion of economic independence, moral superiority, and impermeable national borders.1 Caribbean diasporic historical fiction is also fraught with ambivalence about its ability to transform readership sensibilities within a book market that packages ethnicity as a commodity and domesticates multicultural voices. The ethical imperative to inculcate a specifically postcolonial historical vision in its readers is fractured by writerly anxieties about the market packaging of the novels and whether such packaging will instead produce unengaged and uncritical readers of these counterhistories. The struggle to imagine an ethical pedagogical relationship between reader and author is encoded in the depictions of student-teacher encounters. For instance, Elizette’s relationship with Verlia and Verlia’s with Abena in Dionne Brand’s In Another Place, Not Here are of mentee and mentor as well as of lovers. Verlia’s and Elizette’s acquisition of a political education within the context of romantic intimacy emerges as a troubled allegory for the text’s relationship to its audience.

The work of diasporic writers circulates back to book markets in their Caribbean islands of origin, leading to criticisms about these authors’ inability to authentically depict the nation-state’s history. The fallout in the Dominican Republic over how Julia Alvarez’s In the Time of the Butterflies (1994) depicted the Mirabal sisters or in both the DR and Haiti regarding Edwidge Danticat’s portrayal of the 1937 massacre in The Farming of Bones (1998) come to mind. Many Caribbean diasporic writers, including Alvarez and Danticat, have voiced their discomfort about how their work is received by both island and diaspora readerships. David Chariandy, for instance, explains in a 2007 interview published in Callaloo that he was “deeply concerned about titling my novel Soucouyant” and how it “would be received by those I imagined to be intimately familiar with the word—namely, residents and first-generation immigrants from specific Caribbean islands like Trinidad” (“‘Fiction of Belonging’” 810; emphasis added). Chariandy did not want his novel’s title “to suggest that the novel was going to offer authoritative insights on a legend that, I fully know, has been discussed and interpreted in many exciting ways, particularly by those with extensive ‘first hand’ experience with the cultures of Trinidad” (811). Chariandy imagines that his readerships’ authority on the Caribbean culture and “intimate and lifelong knowledge of Canada” could call attention to his inadequacies as a representative voice for the Caribbean and its Canadian diaspora (810–11). His self-consciousness about his position as a writer is particularly evident when he declares that he is “not a sociologist” and is “usually quite wary of attempts to typify the attitudes of entire ‘peoples’ or ‘generations’” (811).

Caribbean diasporic writers see the multiple readerships, regardless of training or cultural origin, as motivated by a similar desire to access a level of intimacy that facilitates authoritative knowledge of multicultural and postcolonial experiences. As Doris Sommer notes in Proceed with Caution (1999), many readers “feel entitled to know everything as they approach a text, practically any text, with the conspiratorial intimacy of a potential partner” (ix). The sense of entitlement is concomitant with the reader’s desire to have intimate access to anOther knowledge. Intimacy is a defining facet of the relationship between reader and text, and readers who are outsiders or insiders to Caribbean culture seek to determine and measure the authenticity of the writer and his or her ability to speak with cultural authority. It makes sense that authors like David Chariandy are described as being “afflicted with imposter syndrome,” “consumed with self-doubt,” and “struggl[ing] with the potential impact of [public] recognition” (Lederman R1). The pedagogical project addresses this problematic by confronting readers with the unreliability of historical truth while at the same time remarking on the audience’s complicity with processes of decontextualization. The conceptual bond between the Caribbean diasporic texts that I discuss is a writerly angst about producing comfortable observers despite or because of a postcolonial rendering of history: the writers claim a certain cultural authority in order to narrate these histories, yet they fear that exoticizing lenses will transform their authority into stereotype. Caribbean diasporic historical novels reference the challenges to their pedagogical project by depicting author-doubles in the form of narrators or historical figures who wrestle with their roles as authentic spokespersons.

Caribbean diasporic writers understand their work to be circulating within the publishing niches of postcolonial and multicultural literatures, and as a result they foresee encounters with different audiences: for example, the book club reader, the academic reader, and the classroom reader—in a variety of localities, including the Caribbean nation-state and diaspora. Additionally, the authors acknowledge the readers that they may never reach, the readerships they aspire to but cannot access (for instance, the conundrum of the illiterate reader depicted by Julia Alvarez in In the Name of Salomé, David Chariandy in Soucouyant, and Marlon James in The Book of Night Women). While addressing multiple audiences, Caribbean diasporic writers encode specific readers into their texts. The pedagogical project of historical fiction imagines a global reader (book club or classroom reader) who, if not ignorant of history, at least needs to be taught or trained to envision history in a different way. At the same time, the postcolonial vision of history has market currency with the academic reader and his or her expectations for a “resistant” text. Caribbean diasporic writers also imagine speaking back to Caribbean populations and nations; as Monique Roffey explains, “Trinidadians are my closest readers, the readers I care most about” (“For Books’ Sake,” par. 21). I would therefore amend Robert Fraser’s claim in Book History through Postcolonial Eyes (2008) that “the crisis of the postcolonial author . . . is one not so much of commodification as of audience” (185). I see commodification and reception as interrelated challenges, such that Caribbean diasporic historical fiction ambivalently engages with these nuanced contemporary contexts.

Mapping out the readerships for Caribbean diasporic writing is complicated by the fragmentation of the publishing industry. In Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace (2007), Sarah Brouillette makes the case that critics often ignore the fact that the corporatization and globalization of the publishing industry entail “the twinned processes of niche fragmentation and market expansion” (56). One niche market is that of “serious” literary fiction, and within that are numerous submarkets as well (including multicultural and postcolonial, which are of primary interest to me here). Brouillette argues that within this “fragmented market defined by a proliferation of choices, selling specific identities to distinct consumers facilitates the process of consumption” (66). Brouillette’s analysis of the book market calls into question any mythic formulation of the global reader or claim that the book market produces one type of reading gaze. Rather, niche marketing circulates cultural production to very specific audiences, and as a result one of the main concerns of Caribbean diasporic writers is how their work is funneled into the categories of ethnic and postcolonial literatures and how those categories can shape the audience-text encounter. For example, Belinda Edmondson discusses the niche of African American literature in Caribbean Middlebrow: Leisure Culture and the Middle Class (2009). She describes the conflicted emotions of Caribbean authors regarding their marketing: “For some Caribbean writers, the lure of the American market evokes contradictory desires: they wish not to be pigeonholed as black writers, yet they crave access to the lucrative African American reading market, which buys primarily black-authored books” (148–49). Silvio Torres-Saillant reiterates Edmondson’s point in An Intellectual History of the Caribbean (2006) by remarking on the incorporation of Edwidge Danticat, Eric Walrond, and Paule Marshall into African American literature anthologies and noting how “the designation African American is not devoid of its measure of elasticity” (95). Perhaps this niche explains why some Caribbean diasporic writers make African American historical figures central in their novels: for instance, Caryl Phillips’s Dancing in the Dark (2005) depicts Bahamian Bert Williams’s success as a blackface minstrel celebrity in the United States.2

The incorporation of Caribbean diasporic writing into the niche market of African American writing is also indicative of how the literature is concerned with tracing the origins and migrations of its diasporas from a comparative ethnic perspective, drawing parallels between Caribbean and other immigrant diasporas. One of the best-known examples, Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000), narrates Irie’s Black British experience within the context of her Jamaican family and alongside that of East Indian and African immigrant communities.3 In addition to depicting the contemporary multicultural societies where the Caribbean diaspora finds itself, Caribbean diasporic writing is invested in illuminating historically marginalized ethnicities within the Caribbean. For instance, Cristina García’s Monkey Hunting (2003) and Angie Cruz’s Let It Rain Coffee (2005) focus on the Asian experience within the Cuban and Dominican diasporas. Perhaps unsurprisingly, diaspora and interethnic relationships are dominant themes within the creative work of Caribbean diasporic writers. This comparative ethnic focus forms part of a broader ethical project of intercultural understanding by means of the global book market.

While the market distribution of US, Canadian, and British Caribbean diasporic writing can intersect with the African American literary category, other types of publishing channels can produce a different set of classifications. In Caribbean Middlebrow, Belinda Edmondson distinguishes between the marketing approaches to anglophone Caribbean writing taken by mainstream versus independent publishers. While metropolitan publishers like Warner Aspect and Ballantine “are not shy about their commercial interest in subsuming Caribbean fiction into one of the prescribed categories,” Edmondson notes that independent presses often take a different approach, since they “can afford to be more eclectic” and to “concentrate their marketing efforts on a smaller demographic of readers” (157). Mainstream publishers seldom market Caribbean literature “outside the African American genre” because of a belief that “the Caribbean still has no firm place in the American imagination” (158) and that the Caribbean readership is “too small to have its own marketing niche” (156). By contrast, independent publishers see the “un-place-ability” of Caribbean writing as a marketable element that appeals to “readers looking for the ‘unusual’ or exotic” (158). Edmondson gives the example of “Brooklyn-based independent publisher Akashic Books” as one small press that includes Caribbean fiction within its catalog, marketing it in “much the same way as its other popular fiction, aimed more or less exclusively at young white American college students with a taste for ‘underground’ themes” (158). Distinguishing between the marketing tactics of major versus minor publishers provides a different perspective on niche market processes as a context for market aesthetics. To clarify the marketing priorities of small presses, Edmondson discusses Marlon James as a writer whose first novel was published by Akashic Books “to critical acclaim” (159). James can be read as a writer who has experienced the marketing transition from an independent to a mainstream press since his second novel, which I discuss in chapter 3, was published by Riverhead, a division of Penguin. Edmondson cites James’s assertion that “Akashic’s primary readership of white college students worked in his favor” (159), and it’s clear that Riverhead marketed his second novel to an African American readership, since it was a finalist for the NAACP Image Award and led James to be named the Go On Girl! Book Club’s 2012 Author of the Year. The fragmentation of the publishing economy in terms of niche marketing acts as a shared historical context shaping the market aesthetics and postcolonial ethics of Caribbean diasporic authors.

Aspirational Ethics of Market Aesthetics

The criticism concerning Caribbean diasporic literature often focuses on how an ethical relationship with the reader is facilitated and/or delimited by the market. In Exhibiting Slavery (2009), Vivian Nun Halloran argues that historical novels must meet the demands of an “audience willing to spend a defined period of time learning about the past and being entertained in the process” (13). For Halloran, the consumer demand for entertainment means that these postmodern historical novels lack an “ethical perspective” (15). Whereas Halloran positions consumption and ethics as incompatible, I depart from this analysis by situating market demands as an important context for the pedagogical ethics driving these Caribbean diasporic historical novels. Entertainment is one facet of market demands, but there are also academic markets for contextualization. Historical fiction is the product of a complex negotiation between the demands to entertain and to teach, to simplify and to complicate, to make history both palatable and challenging. While teaching the reader about certain historical events and figures, the form that relays historical content plays a key role in shaping reader engagement. The literary “lesson plan” is a combination of seducing the reader and undermining audience expectations.

The literary critics who review Caribbean diasporic fiction often echo the words of Édouard Glissant, who in Caribbean Discourse (1989) calls for the Caribbean writer to “dig deep” into the “collective memory” in order to create a “prophetic vision of the past” that avoids the pitfalls of “a schematic chronology” or “nostalgic lament” (64). Academic readers privilege texts that they see uncovering lost and/or marginal cultural histories, while also expecting that this act of recovery is political, that it is prophetic about changing the contemporary perception of Caribbean society, culture, and history. Conversely, this literary mission is viewed as suspect if it falls into the trap of nostalgic sentimentality or of being too prescriptive and dogmatic about “what happened” in the newly recovered past. Santiago Juan-Navarro’s concept of the “activist reader” from Archival Reflections (2000) is productive for fleshing out the pedagogical impulse of diasporic historical fiction as well as the academic market pressures encountered by Caribbean diasporic writers. Juan-Navarro sees this genre positioning the reader in a way that “oblige[s] him or her to adopt a critical attitude toward the narrated events and to seek a political alternative to them” (265). Inspiring critical thinking and political action, it converts the “active reader” into “an ‘activist reader,’ implicated not only in the creative process of the work, but also in the process of the transformation of the reality to which the work belongs” (265). Historical novels train the reader through their structural and stylistic composition, some even encouraging the reader to participate in the narrative’s construction of meaning. For Juan-Navarro, this training encourages or provokes the reader into a progressive political commitment with the ethical imperative of the historical novel, so that the reader is moved to address the fiction’s social critique by taking responsibility for transformin...