Narratives of Difference in Globalized Cultures: Reading Transnational Cultural Commodities

This book discusses how the marketing of transnational cultural commodities capitalizes on difference and its appeal for cosmopolitan consumers in our post-modern globalised world. At what price? What ethical and political doubts 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 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 with a wide variety of representative narratives taken from diverse cultural fields. The chapters included offer counter-readings that disrupt hegemonic representations of cultural identity within the contemporary, neoliberal and globalized landscape.

Table of contents

Introduction: Interrogating the Production, Circulation and Reception of Difference in Globalized Cultures  1

I. READING METHODOLOGIES

Subversive Translation and Lexical Empathy: Pedagogies of Cortesia and Transnational Multilingual Poetics, Merlinda Bobis  13

The Production and Productivity of Humanitarian Fiction: Postcolonial Shame and Neocolonial Crises, David Callahan  37

Still Devouring Frida Kahlo: Psychobiography versus Postcolonial and Disability Readings, Zoë Brigley Thompson   57

The World Republic of Readers, James Procter  81

II. COUNTERNARRATIVES OF THE METROPOLIS

Success and the City: Working in the World's Capital in Monica Ali's Brick Lane, Darragh Patrick Hall  97

Borderless (Alien) Nations: Disposable Bodies and Biopolitical Effacement in Min Sook Lee's Docu-Poem, Libe García Zarranz  117

Public Art in the Production of a Global City: Jamie Hilder's Clashing Versions of Vancouver, John Halveda  133

A Nation Goes Adrift: Subaltern Inter-Identity in José Saramago's The Stone Raft, Maria Sofia Pimentel Biscaia  157

III. DISRUPTIVE GENDERS

'Something Terrible Happened': Spectacles of Gendered Violence in Nadine Gordimer's The House Gun, Sorcha Gunne  185

Alternative Modernities and Othered Masculinities in Mira Nair's The Namesake, E. Guillermo Iglesias Díaz  203

(Un)Veiling Women's Bodies: Transnational Feminisms in Emer Martin's Baby Zero, Aida Rosende-Pérez  223

Index  245