2 the postcolonial exotic: the cult of authenticity - de gruyter

2 The Postcolonial Exotic: The Cult of AuthenticityCertain countries and cultures, especially postcolonial ones from Africa or Asia, are defined, described and consumed in specific ways in the global literary-cultural mar-ketplace. Africa, for instance, would be a hotbed of embedded, natural corruption and violence. Deola, the protagonist of Sefi Atta’s A Bit of Difference, discovers that the Nigerian newspapers she reads in Nigeria are remarkably different in the focus of their news coverage from the English newspapers she reads in England:

The Sunday newspapers are on the dining table. The headlines are about trade and politics, not the news she is used to reading about Nigeria overseas, which is about Internet fraud, drug traf-fickers, Islamic fundamentalism and armed militants in the Niger Delta. (56)

Atta is gesturing at the exoticization of Nigeria in the Western/global media.In 2001 Graham Huggan published his The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the

Margins. Here he examined what he presciently termed the ‘global commodification of cultural difference’ in the fiction from the formerly colonized nations (vii). Con-trasting the politics of postcoloniality with that of postcolonialism (the latter being the academic arm of the socio-political condition of postcoloniality) he writes:

Postcoloniality’s regime of value is implicitly assimilative and market driven: it regulates the value-equivalence of putatively marginal products in the global marketplace. Postcolonialism … implies a politics of value that stands in obvious opposition to global processes of commodi-fication. Yet a cursory glance at the state of postcolonial studies at Western universities, or at the worldwide marketing of prominent postcolonial writers like Salman Rushdie, is enough to suggest that these two apparently conflicting regimes of value are mutually entangled. (6)

Huggan concedes that while exoticism has some purchase, ‘reconstituted exoticisms in the age of globalisation include the trafficking of culturally “othered” artifacts in the world’s economic, not cultural, centres’ (15). Huggan identifies three effects of the exoticization: the ‘mystification … of historical experience; imagined access to the cultural other through the process of consumption; reification of people and places into exchangeable aesthetic objects’ (19). Later Lisa Lau would propose that the exoti-cization of Third World culture was achieved by Third World authors themselves, a process Lau terms ‘re-Orientalism’ (2009). Chris Bongie had made a similar point in his 1998 work Islands and Exiles where he argued for the ‘self-consciously belated (re)inscription of this [imperial] exoticist project’ by early twentieth century writers so that there is discernible a ‘bridge ... a relay between the worlds of colonial and post-colonial literateurs’ (16).

Brand postcolonial is the effect of the marketing of difference. But it is also due to the cultural production of simulated authenticity, the tensions and contests around authenticity and the competing authenticities of non-European texts circulating within First World reader communities. Authenticity as a valorized term itself is a part of this cultural production, and often serves as shorthand for the acceptance or rejec-

© 2018 Pramod K. NayarThis work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License.

Introducing the Postcolonial Exotic 23

tion of works from hitherto invisible races, ethnic groups and communities. ‘Simu-lated authenticity’ is the effect produced through specific strategies where authen-ticity is the effect in fictional representations. Simulated authenticity is also debated in popular-critical discourses and degrees of verisimilitude to ‘the real thing’ – the

‘core’ ethnic identity or culture – discussed as the merits or demerits of a literary text because of expectations of authenticity.

2.1 Introducing the Postcolonial Exotic

The exotic demands not only difference but a marketing and perception of authentic difference. If, as critics from Fredric Jameson (‘Third-World Literature’, 1986, also see Ahmad 1992) through to Arif Dirlik (1994, 1997) and Huggan have argued, the Third World text or author is seen, or fashions herself, as a metonymic representative of her nation and culture, then the text and author are, in the global marketplace, valued for their difference of origins, histories and cultures. This Western valuing of difference has produced the charge of exoticism against expat, globally recognized postcolonial authors in English.

Admittedly, every culture possibly experiences, perceives and evaluates another culture as exotic. For many postcolonial nations and their more or less elite reading publics, brought up through Western education on a diet of English/European texts, the English countryside or cultural practices may seem less exotic. If Indian travel writing to England, 1860-1930, is any index, the travellers were prepared for the exotic. The travellers, as argued elsewhere, demonstrate not open-eyed wonder but an ‘informed enchantment’ (Nayar 2012): conscious, knowledgeable and anticipating of the wonders of England. Literary fiction of the late twentieth century, I suggest, achieves a similar effect when it introduces the rest of the world to Euro-American readers. It on the one hand retains the exotic appeal of the Other while offering know-ledge – Orientalist or post-Orientalist – of the same. The postcolonial author fits into this dual process of exoticizing and de-exoticizing the non-European to the European.

Critics of Indian Writing in English claim that ‘the phenomenal success of the genre in the West is deeply related to a cultural affinity between I[ndian] Writing [in] E[nglish] and their audience’ (Majumdar 2014: 66). Being expatriate and there-fore ‘often alienated from the very culture that he supposedly represents … the writer then compensates for his lack of cultural connectedness by resorting to reductive or exotic constructs of the nation’ (71). However, it is not clear how the home-grown and stay-at-home novelist is better qualified to present a clearer, more ‘real’ picture of the nation, given that any author (i) has only a limited range of experiences to draw upon, even when s/he lives within the postcolony and therefore can only imagine what the other’s life might be like (ii) all experience of the nation is always already mediated by the author’s training, cultural literacy and language even when within the country. That is, the assumption of autochthonous access to a culture’s

24 The Postcolonial Exotic: The Cult of Authenticity

meanings denies the role of mediation in the process, and enables the home-grown to claim authenticity and accuse the expat author of exoticization. When Meenak-shi Mukherjee, a prominent commentator on Indian writing in English, claims that

‘any assertion of a broadly Indian identity was undertaken generally to emphasize otherness and exoticity rather than to make a political statement’ (2000: 15-16), the converse is also frighteningly true. When a so-called native language writer claims authenticity over the expat this political statement constructs a xenophobic other-ness and exclusivity that recalls nineteenth century discourses of purity and contam-ination. Further, the charge of exoticism is sustained on the proposition that episte-mological frameworks for the native and expat author are remarkably different (‘they cannot know the country as well as we do’) – a proposition that ignores the foun-dation of literary construction: the aesthetic and sympathetic imaginations. Muk-herjee claims this assertion of Indianness in expat authors arises from the ‘anxiety of Indianness’, as she titles her 1993 essay. They strive for greater authenticity to compensate for writing in a ‘foreign’ language. As the novelist Vikram Chandra puts it, this suggests a ‘mind-bending faith in the untouched and original Indianness of

“regional writing”’ (2000). Chandra also notes that almost every ‘regional’ writer worth her or his salt was an avid reader of English works, and Tagore, he notes, was ‘despised by his orthodox Bengali contemporaries for his loose Westernized ways and his new-fangled, imported ideas’.

It is within an admittedly never-ending debate the postcolonial exotic needs to be examined.

The postcolonial exotic is located within two regimes of value: as a fantastic, unfamiliar, primal space of cultural practices, and as a very real material history of the present. The former is a hark-back to the colonial era, while the latter arises with cultural globalization.5

Distances, in both time and space, are central to the appeal of the exotic. When Graham Huggan speaks of the margins that are valorized in postcolonial thought, or when the postcolonial in her self-representation speaks endlessly about the periph-eries, a distance is instituted. Mary Baine Campbell in her study of travel writing in Early Modern Europe has proposed that a distancing in space and/or time could both serve the purpose of exoticization (1988). Anne McClintock proposes the idea of

‘anachronistic space’ where Europeans traversing the colony figured the journey ‘as a journey backward in time to an anachronistic moment in prehistory’ (1995: 40). The current geopolitical region identified as the ‘Third World’ or the ‘Global South’ was, in history and its narratives (fiction, travelogues), represented as the distant, peripheral, un-understandable, and therefore Other to the central, modern Europe.

5 Cultural texts such as movies from the formerly colonized nations that now feature regularly in film festivals and seem to have a considerable market in various parts of the Euro-American world (Brosius) are an equivalent to the literary fiction from the postcolonial.

Introducing the Postcolonial Exotic 25

The exotic is primal, pre-modern and distanced in time, representing a state and stage before modernity. Continuing, in some sense, the colonial concern with the

‘noble savage’, the exotic today functions as a symbol of primal purity, uncontami-nated by Western culture. The distancing in time works to bolster the authenticity of a Third World culture precisely by underscoring this primordial nature – whether in terms of their dress, customs or even geography. When the Third World author stages her authenticity, it very often demands a turn to the primal. This could be the wilds of the Australian outback and its lawless robber gangs (the Australian novelist John Carey), the toilet-less cities in India (the Indian novelist Vikas Sarup), caste (the Indian novelist Manu Joseph), community (the Indian novelist Kiran Desai), religious bigotry (the Pakistani novelist Mohsin Hamid) or patriarchal tyranny (the Pakistani novelist Tahmeena Durrani, the Bangladeshi novelist Taslima Nasreen), among others. The exotic here is the survival of the primal and the pre-modern. Distancing in time, such as the postcolonial novel’s insistence on older practices, even as they speak the lan-guage of cultural nationalism (which has its uses), suggests an exoticization.6

The line between representations of the real social-historical conditions in the postcolony and the primal-exotic is blurred. This is so because corruption, poverty and dirt are not primal-exotic for the postcolonial novelist: they are the real world in India and other post-colonies. However, the larger point is that this real is situ-ated on a historical timeline at a point apparently corresponding to an earlier stage in modernity and development. Thus, rather than a ‘simple’ return to the primal or pre-modern, the staging of authenticity is the effect of a linkage between temporal dis-tancing and the contemporary: that the early stages of the modern continue to exist in the contemporary. The older stages of civilizational development and the present co-exist. It is the polychronicity of the poverty, the slums, and the patriarchal laws which hark back to an older world but existing and active in the present that invokes the primal-exotic. Other commentators have noted ‘hi-tech’ cities (India’s software industry’s major cities, such as Bengaluru) exhibit startling old-world poverty, prim-itive living conditions and the world’s most advanced offices all sitting adjacent to each other in startling disparities and contrasts (Madon 2004 and Heitzmann 2004). The exotic then is the primal-in-the-contemporary.

Such a representation implies, of course, a certain teleological narrative that is itself European in origin, as Dipesh Chakraborty argued (1992). The evolution of humans and culture from the pre-modern to the modern, from feudal to post-industrial, religious to secular, theocratic to democratic, is a narrative that has established itself

6 Sandra Ponzanesi has argued that the rhetoric of cultural nationalism has, however, lost its cache in the era of cultural globalization (2014: 54). It is more accurate, I think, to argue that cultural nation-alism recast in creative ways through adaptation and revisions, enables a simulated authenticity that serves the postcolonial well in the era of cultural globalization by sidestepping the either/or (either the local, national or the world) conundrum.


as the normative mode of thinking about histories. It is assumed, Chakraborty points out, that there are no other forms of writing history. This means, the postcolonial author retains the teleological assumptions when she maps the primal even within the contemporary as an atavistic echo of the distant past. Thus, even when speaking of software companies and the informational cities of contemporary India, authors like Manu Joseph (Serious Men, 2010) feel compelled to make references, however veiled, to the indelible caste identities of their protagonists. This is also the forging of a continuity between a supposedly pre-modern practice – caste, patriarchy – and the present. In Nadeem Aslam’s fiction dealing with Pakistan and Pakistani migrant com-munities in England, for example, he depicts the migrant as carrying the baggage of their pre-modern practices, such as honour-killings (although neither caste nor patri-archy is absent from ‘modern’ India). The primal within the contemporary is a central feature of the postcolonial exotic. It distances the present through the invocation of cultural revenants. That is, the staging of authenticity positions the postcolony as a space where timelines collide and where the primal past (in terms of social conditions, for instance) and the technologized, near sci-fi present jostle for space, where impos-sibly ‘primitive’ cultural practices imbued with caste- and gender- based oppressive hierarchies continue to hold sway in the age of advanced techno-capitalism.

This does not mean that the primal is fictional, or that patriarchal tyranny and caste have disappeared except in the fiction. As Christa Knellwolf has argued, the exotic is at once fantasy and real historical responses to Otherness (2002: 11). The postcolonial as exotic maps the very real historical remnant – tribalisms, caste, etc. – in the present, but it also caters to the continuity of an Orientalist fantasy where the Orient can only be seen through the lens of such categories as tribalisms or primitiv-isms. In other words, the postcolonial text functions at the interface of a continuing fantasy (dating back to the colonial era) and a historical response to very real material social condition.7

The exotic here is the convergence of an investment in the fantasy-representations of the cultural Other, and the historical documentation of the material realities of the cultural Other today, where it becomes difficult to separate the two regimes of value.

The exotic within these two convergent regimes of value is carefully positioned between the familiar (proximate) and the strange (distant). The exotic represents, as Natasha Eaton has argued (2006), a boundary between home and the world, between the familiar and the strange. The exotic recalls a boundary, ‘inside which familiarity reigns and outside which is wild’ (Aravamudan 2012: 227). It was also, in the colonial era, ‘a mode of European self-representation, asking how and why it is used to gen-

7 Speaking of fantasies, the depiction of Indian women on the covers of South Asian fiction has come in for critical scrutiny. Lisa Lau has argued that ‘the ambivalence [of book covers] is inclined towards depicting Indian women as either virtuous, pure, and submissive, or glamorous, alluring, and sexy. Both depictions, whether designed to extol or eroticise, are clearly inclined to exoticise’ (2015: 57).

The Postcolonial Exotic: The Cult of Authenticity 27

erate diverse models of selfhood in the context of global economic expansion and exchange’ (Jenkins 2012: 5). Laura Rosenthal sees exoticism as serving an important function: it offered ‘multiple cosmopolitan possibilities’ for the cultural reinvention of the self, society and the nation (2012: 11). That is, the country seeking a self-fashion-ing could choose from many options and cultural models to emulate, adapt and adopt. I have argued (2015), following this line of thought, that England right from the Early Modern, did engage in such a self-fashioning. This ranged from its self-representa-tion as a discoverer-trading nation (Early Modern), an empathetic nation appalled by slavery (late eighteenth to early nineteenth), discoverer and explorer nation (mid-late nineteenth century), among others. In every era one discerns a self-fashioning in which English literary texts demonstrated an Englishness intimately linked to other geocultural spaces. In other words, English literature argued a case for Englishness as a transnational Englishness.

Many of these characteristics of the exotic in the globalized world remain unchanged. The convergence of different value regimes ensures that the self- construction/representation of the First World as modern involves a degree of incor-porated Otherness, the cosmetic multiculturalism and co-optation of difference (as Hardt and Negri argued in Empire, 2000) and the continuing concerns with the Other’s primitivism, whether in the form of the consumption of ethnic chic or the global humanitarian regimes founded on assumptions of Third World backwardness. That is, the self-representation of the humanitarian West and the cosmopolitanized West require the co-optation of cultural difference within diverse domains: philan-thropy, cultural production, military intervention, among others.

If travel writing once generated a social imagination of discovery, conquest and colonialism, as numerous critics have argued, the postcolonial author and text forge a social imaginary where the exotic can be experienced in safe ways. ‘Harmless’ travel fictions such as Thomas More’s Utopia, were always rhetorical strategies in and through which ‘the desire for a better (or different) world can be expressed and satisfied without corrupting the sources of practical geographical knowledge’ (Camp-bell 1988: 212-13). Even before the actual travel to new places, there was the imagin-ing of and desire for Other places, of the world itself. The Theatrum Orbis terrarum, the Western world’s first atlas prepared by Abraham Ortelius and published in 1570, offered not only a map of the known world but also a metaphor for literary imagina-tions to work with: this was the theatre of the world. Just as atlases and maps in the Early Modern era produced an entire range of accounts of the worlds beyond England and Europe, ready for conquest or mercantile purposes, the postcolonial novel is the literary map of places in the formerly colonized places the world could go to.

The controlled exposure to the exotic enables the cosmopolitanization of the First World, a theme to which I return in a later chapter. The exotic postcolonial icon then ‘intervenes’, as Celia Lury puts it (2004), in the global flows of capital and labour by producing a cultural flow alongside and within them, a flow that can be consumed in the form of fiction, poetry and films.


Postcolonial authors and texts, from Achebe to Adiga, function as icons in the global literary-cultural marketplace. An icon, as Celia Lury defines it, intervenes in the social imaginary, producing similitudes and generating inferences and inducing continuity in movement (Lury 2012: 256-257). It becomes the source for the elaboration of ‘the social imaginary or ground of abstraction as the possible field from which relations of similitude might be inferred’ (254). An icon, says Bishnupriya Ghosh

‘activates a distinctive semiotic economy that lends itself to forging social bonds – to unifying a popular through signification’ (2010: 337). Both Lury and Ghosh speak of the icon as generating a possibility of tracing similitudes. What is the similitude and unification that emerges from the exoticization of postcolonial authors?

In terms of marketing, academia and consumption, this similitude has been effectively established: authors as diverse as Adichie and Mudrooroo are clubbed in the category ‘postcolonial’. The continuity of movement that Lury points to in the case of the icon is, in this case, the continuity across geographical, historical and material contexts where multiple and divergent histories and traditions from which these authors emerge are smoothed into an unstriated flow, the postcolonial. We infer their colonial past, their anti-colonial history and their postcolonial concerns as part of the field we recognize as postcolonial, or Third World. The semiotic economy and social bonds, in terms of both market and cultural value, is the accordance of this recognition. In other words, the postcolonial is an icon that cathects into itself the histories of colonization, racism, anti-colonial struggles and the postcolonial present. It functions as a shorthand term that requires, like the icon, no footnote or gloss because its iterability is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

2.2 Manufacturing Authenticity

2.2.1 Authenticity is an effect

The postcolonial aura around Monica Ali, Kamila Shamsie, Mohsin Hamid and texts like The Kite Runner, Shalimar the Clown, The Ibis Trilogy and The True Story of the Kelly Gang draws upon an aura of simulated authenticity around their authorship, their themes and their texts. It draws, further, upon the postcolonial anxiety, if anxiety is what it is, around ‘authentic’ representations of ethnic, racial and national identities. The point is not, I hasten to add, whether there is merit in the argument that there are authentic and inauthentic representations of reality. The point, rather, is the discourse of authenticity that frames texts and authors, where mimetic rep-resentation is taken as the index of aesthetic and political truth. This section is not about the unpacking of authentic and inauthentic representations in postcolonial texts. Instead, it examines the construction of authenticity itself as the frame.

Authenticity, argues Paul Gilroy, ‘enhances the appeal of cultural commodities and has become an important element in the mechanism of racialization necessary

The Postcolonial Exotic: The Cult of Authenticity 29

to making non-European and non-American musics acceptable items in an expanded pop market’ (1993: 99). The early postcolonial theorist and activist Frantz Fanon warned that in his anxiety to identify with his people, the cosmopolitan intellectual places ‘a high value on the customs, traditions and the appearances of his people; but his inevitable painful experience only seems to be a banal search for exoticism’ (1965:177). Sarah Brouillette in her Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace (2007) also believes that the postcolonial writers in particular carry this ‘exces-sive burden’ of ‘national authenticity’ (177). I propose that rather than an anxiety or a burden, the postcolonial author pays attention to strategies of manufacturing authenticity as a mode of leveraging the local with(in) the global. It is not an adherence to specific cultural codes as much as an attention to the choreographed and calibrated process of adhering that garners visibility and accrues value to brand postcolonial. It is at once an assertion of locality and a mode of locating oneself in the global cultural arena where difference is valued in and of itself.

Authenticity, often taken as a self-evident condition, is a construct. In the post-colonial cultural industry of the globalized era, the theme of authenticity has found gravitas as a legacy of anti-colonial cultural nationalisms (where asserting one’s pre-colonial, supposedly ‘pure’, authentic past was a nationalist project in the face of Westernization), and as a mode of gaining visibility for the nation in the global cultural arena.

Authenticity begins, Charles Taylor reminds us, as a quest for self-fulfilment. It is about being true to oneself (1991). However, this quest expresses itself as a binar-ism: self and Other, I and not-I. Authenticity, writes Shelly Eversley, ‘implies value; aesthetically it distinguishes the imitation from the actual, and socially, it offers the means to see and know human particularity’ (2004: ix). More importantly, Eversley suggests, authenticity is a way of ‘making race real’ (ix).

Authenticity is an effect of discursive and narrative strategies.

2.2.2 Binarisms

In his response to Meenakshi Mukherjee’s oral comments on the use of tropes from the Hindu epics in his novel at a book reading that he documents, Vikram Chandra wrote:

This rhetoric [of authenticity] [from Mukherjee] lays claim not only to a high moral ground but also a deep, essential connection to a “real” Indianness …the practitioners of this rhetoric inevi-tably claim that they are able to identify a “Real India”…(2000)

Later he goes on to note that this rhetoric also creates a binary: the ‘Indo-Anglian’ writer who lives mostly in the West, and the ‘regional’ Indian writer. They also assign to writing in vernacular/regional languages, Chandra argues, ‘a pristine purity of content and purpose, an austere and lofty nobleness of intent, and following from this virtuous abnegation, an ability to connect to a ‘Real India’.


Chandra’s furious response reveals the binarism in operation in debates about authenticity. It assumes, as Chandra notes, a transparent access to a ‘real’ India that only authors in native, i.e, Indian, languages possess, and which the West-located author writing in English can only imitate. Thus, we discern in the debate around authenticity a binary of real versus fake access to traditions and literary histories.

The Mukherjee charge against expat Indian authors of being gripped by the ‘anxiety of Indianness’ posits a real Indianness (of authors writing in Indian lan-guages) versus a fake one (in diaspora, migrant authors writing primarily in English), and therefore a binary around authentic Indianness. Rajeswari Sunder Rajan (2001) sees this identity as the effect of the Indian author in English ‘positioned to look in two directions, towards their Indian English readers on one side, and their readers in the West in another’. Sunder Rajan claims that in doing so, ‘they could and some-times do fail between explaining too much and explaining too little: hence the anxiety’ (‘Writing in English in India, Again’). However, she herself admits that Rushdie dis-plays ‘little of this anxiety’!

This academically instituted binary (real versus fake, regional versus Western-ized) assumes, as Chandra points out, that there is a real Indianness accessible only to certain authors and denied the rest. The oppositional logic implies that ‘Indian’ is a readily knowable, understandable category that pre-exists the discourses. In other words, the binarism proposed (regional vs diasporic, Indian language author vs Indian author in English) presupposes that there is a clear category ‘Indianness’ or ‘Indian’ that both precedes and supersedes its linguistic and narrative constructions in literature and cultural texts.

Further, the debate around authenticity transforms an abstract idea called India and Indianness into a concrete reality which, according to the debate, is visible in some language-texts and not in others. This binarism works only when we ignore the fact that all ideas of India, Indianness – racial identities, in short – are mediated, whether in X language or Y.

The binarism also operates along a different axis. Those seeking and claiming authenticity also think in terms of an essentialism to cultural forms and cultural iden-tities, a certain fixity and unchanging nature to them.8 There is an implicit assump-tion that any representation of a given culture must include some timeless features, an essence. Thus, brand postcolonial is the result of two energies: an energy derived from the literary representations and debates around unchanging (postcolonial) cul-tures (‘truly…’) and an energy derived from literary representations and debates that position the (postcolonial) culture as dynamic, plastic, adapting to the new world

8 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak argues that ethnic communities often consciously adopt stereotypical modes of self-representation as a form of ‘strategic essentialism’ (1985). This choice is driven by the assumption that such self-stereotyping generates, besides income in a tourist-cultural marketplace some social goals (e.g. improving the mobility of their children, challenging negative stereotypes).

The Literary Investment in Race and Ethnicity 31

order. Brand postcolonial is at once about being and becoming, about the culture that is and what it is becoming in an engagement with a changing world.

2.3 The Literary Investment in Race and Ethnicity

Shelly Eversley argues that there is a literary investment in race that drives the debate around authenticity (xii). Postcolonial critics and authors alike therefore, ‘implic-itly and explicitly confirmed the idea of racial authenticity as a measure of [Asian or African] literary and cultural achievement’ (xii).

The postcolonial aura around Hamid, Hossaini, Roy or Achebe is drawn from two converging investments: on the part of the postcolonial cultural industry that pro-duces authors and their authority, and on the side of the audience/readership. Fol-lowing Eversley, I suggest that the convergence of investments is one of cumulative investment in racial identity via the medium of the literary text and the author. The Afghan cultural scene is embellished and writ globally through Hossaini, like the Igbo one through Achebe.

It is the investment in race that drives the interest in and quest for authentic-ity. In other words, the literary investment in race is a version of the contribution of and by the race or ethnic group itself to the world of literature, to world literature or the global novel. The postcolonial contributes a postcolonialness to the world, in the distinct and unique form of postcolonial literature. When the world seeks to under-stand the uniqueness of a tribe or a community, it has to turn to that tribe’s literary expressions. Conversely, when a tribe or community wishes to make itself known to the world as a distinct identity, it needs a literary expression of this identity. There is a racial recognition of the literary and a literary recognition for the race.

Four Pakistani authors, Mohsin Hamid, Mohammed Hanif, Daneedayal Mueenud-din and Kamila Shamsie satirize this linkage of race-ethnicity with literary produc-tion in a 2010 Granta piece on ‘How to Write about Pakistan’:

When it comes to Pakistani writing, I would encourage us all to remember the brand. We are cus-todians of brand Pakistan. And beneficiaries. The brand slaps an extra zero onto our advances, if not more. Branding can be the difference between a novel about brown people and a best-selling novel about brown people. It is our duty to maintain and build that brand.I know I don’t need to reiterate here what brand Pakistan stands for, but since my future income-stream is tied up with what you all do with it, I’m going to do so anyway. Brand Pakistan is a horror brand. It’s like the Friday the 13th series. Or if you’re into humor, like Scary Movie. Or Jaws, if nature-writing is your thing.

(https://granta.com/how-to-write-about-pakistan)

It is not clear which of the four this above passage is by, but that is really beside the point. The passage satirizes the essentialist stereotypes that Pakistani authors perpet-uate in order to find recognition and money. ‘Brand Pakistan’ as a ‘horror brand’ is


the conflation of racial identity with literary needs and representations. The passage also argues that literary ‘achievement’ is measured in terms of the general percep-tion, derived from other genres and cultural texts, such as news reports of jihadis and bombers, of the race. The race invests in the literary texts and the literary embod-ies the race. There is, of course, a reification involved in the literary production of Pakistan: it brings a particular kind of Pakistan into being, an idea of Pakistan that then runs along on its own in the world (and in the literature for the world to read), independent of evolving dynamics and histories in that country. It simultaneously brings a Pakistan into being, and alienates it from the changing social forces. The brand becomes a thing with a specific value, which connects both the country and the literary text.

Racial and ethnic authenticity is a measure of literary achievement precisely in so far as any literary achievement is measured in terms of an adherence to a spe-cific notion of authentic racial identity. Together, then, the cultural production of race and the racial production of literary achievements contribute to the culture of authenticity.

The arrival of the postcolonial on the global scene demands that she arrives marked as postcolonial – which requires the staging of an authenticity, and concom-itant debates about identity, nationhood, belonging, etc., for global cultural circuits. The postcolonial has to be announced, and announce itself, in and as difference for which its literature should bear the burden of delivering this difference.

The postcolonial’s burden is to not only carry this difference in convincing ways to the global cultural arena but also, because it is linked to racial identities, be embroiled in a politics of possession. The ‘right to represent’, as writers such as Maxine Hong Kingston discovered, was not a given. Take for instance the controversy around Kingston. Critics and authors like Frank Chin argued that there were ‘real’ Chinese American authors as opposed to fake ones like Kingston who merely repur-posed Chinese traditions and recast them in line with white stereotypes. Chin’s 1991 essay was provocatively titled, ‘Come All Ye Asian American Writers of the Real and the Fake’. Chin writes:

Furthermore, Kingston, Hwang, and [Amy] Tan are the first writers of any race, and certainly the first writers of Asian ancestry, to so boldly fake the best-known works from the most universally known body of Asian American lore in history. To legitimize their faking, they have to fake all of Asian American history and literature, and argue that the immigrants who settled and estab-lished Chinese America lost touch with Chinese culture, and that a faulty memory combined with new experience produced new versions of these traditional stories. This version of history is their contribution to the stereotype. (135)

He goes on to add:

With Kingston’s autobiographical Woman Warrior, we have given up even the pretense of report-ing from the real world. Chinese culture is so cruel and she is so helpless against its overwhelming


cruelty that she lives entirely in her imagination. It is an imagination informed only by the stereo-type communicated to her through the Christian Chinese American autobiography. (154)

Chin’s charge of inauthenticity is aligned with the charge of ‘pandering to the West’ through the retention of cultural difference, which, ironically, is what constitutes the postcolonial as postcolonial. If one writes out of difference, it is also expected that one does not give up policing the boundaries of that difference. That is, when literary achievements and racial identities are seen as mutually dependent and reinforcing, to police one is to police the other – or what I am referring to as the politics of possession.

2.3.1 This is where the authenticity plot thickens

Cultural nationalisms and its representations in the age of anti-colonial struggles wrote back against colonial representations, which, nationalists claimed, were misrepresentations. In the postcolonial era, with the conflation of race and literary-cul-tural productions in the drive for authenticity, as argued above, the right to represent and the politics of possession remains. However, it is now tied to maintaining a post-colonial ‘character’ in the face of global culture and cultural imperialisms. While at one point of time it engaged with European colonial culture when ‘writing back’, it now engages with the world itself.

Even as it deals at forensic levels with genocide in Sri Lanka, for instance, Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost ‘gestures repeatedly to the post-1989 world of civil wars and state terror’ (Ganguly 2016: 198). Whether Anil’s Ghost is directly referenc-ing the world’s genocides – that is, whether it is authentic or not in its representa-tions – or is restricted to the local (Sri Lanka) in its authenticity is not the point. As Ganguly underscores, the novel places a premium upon witnessing, by both survi-vors (superstes) and third-person (terstes) (210). I suggest that the appeal of brand postcolonial around Ondaatje’s powerful novel is precisely because it moves between these two witness-roles, and does not allow us to dwell on the authenticity of either because it calls to mind not a genocidal event but a genocidal imaginary across the world.9 The survivor testimony from first-hand experiences might well approximate to the authentic because of its affective response to the horrors, even though forensic examination by the protagonist (who is the third-person witness) is equally authentic because of its scientificity. One reads Anil’s Ghost as a novel of the genocide imaginary,

9 I have elsewhere defined genocidal imaginary as follows: ‘genocidal’ indicates the move towards mass extermination, a tendency and imaginary that by constructing specific models of Otherness could lead to mass killings. It is the manufacturing of conditions in which such extermination might be legitimized and sanctioned. The genocidal imaginary here assigns a specific set of attributes to people and professions (Nayar, Human Rights and Literature: 3).


of which Sri Lanka is one instantiation and instance. Thus, even as it documents the Sri Lankan horrors, it engages with the world, howsoever unevenly.10

2.3.2 Strategies of Authentication

Brand postcolonial and its power is not, I suggest, the effect of any of the above. The success and attraction of the postcolonial text is not its authenticity but its strategies of authentication. The question is not whether a novel from the Third World is true to its context, people or culture. Rather, the question is whether we perceive a simulated authenticity – since readers from around the world have nothing to compare a fic-tional representation of Sri Lanka or Indonesia with – as reliable. In other words, the question is whether strategies of authentication simulate an authenticity effectively.

I take this emphasis on authentication rather than a ‘documentary authenticity of representation’ from Andreas Huyssen (2000: 72). Huyssen in his reading of Art Spiegelman’s Maus argues that the text embodies not mimesis but mimetic approximation. Readers, Huyssen suggests, have to get past the ciphers (mice and cats) to the people behind (the Nazis and the Jews). Through this mimetic approximation, graphic texts seek authentication rather than authenticity (Huyssen 2000). Huyssen’s point is crucial, for he suggests that realist, mimetic ‘truths’ are not essential for the readers to perceive, in the case of Maus, the horrors of the Holocaust even when these are cast close to the form of an animal fable. Rather, Huyssen points to the responsibility of the reader to seek verisimilitude (not exact replicas or identicality, but similarity) by going beyond the ciphers of the text.

Huyssen elaborates:

There are dimensions to mimesis that lie outside linguistic communication and that are locked in silences, repressions, gestures, and habits – all produced by a past that weighs all the more heavily since it is not (yet) articulated. Mimesis is in its physiological, somatic dimension … a becoming or making similar, a movement toward, never reaching of a goal…It requires us to

10 Mrinalini Chakravorty appears to be making this very point when she says:

When Anil’s Ghost and other such novels delineate entire nations of the global south as deaths-capes, they deploy a questionable stereotype that functions only through the homogenization of social actors and cultural spaces. As a consequence, the decolonial space stands apart from and compressed for the explicit burden of violence it bears, becoming allied with other such spaces across the globe. (135, emphasis added)

Even when such a novel stereotypes death, or reduces the nation to a deathscape, Chakravorty writes, the stereotype ‘necessitates thinking of death beyond and individually subjective experience so that there can be a collective ethical response to it’ (142). ‘Primal’ forms of existence such as fear, violence and death, she argues, ‘tenuously unite the postcolony to a larger human community’ (146).


think of identity and non-identity together as a nonidentical similitude and in unresolvable tension with each other. (72)

The postcolonial aura accrues to texts and authors because narrative and rhetori-cal strategies generate this ‘nonidentical similitude’, a tension between believable mimetic approximation and mimetic realism. It is not that everyone uses proverbs in Achebe-land or that all members of a tribe or ethnic group in the Okri-world believe in the same spirits. Just as cultural nationalism demanded a simulated homogenization, cultural globalism – which is the context of the contemporary postcolonial writer – demands a simulated authenticity and non-identical similitude.

The use of myth, songs, folklore, idiomatic expressions and culturally specific tropes in the postcolonial text serves as an authenticating device although these are enunciated often in English and therefore (as Mukherjee charged Chandra) sound awkward and ill-fitted to the rhythm of the novel in English. I suggest that one needs to think of such strategies as mimetic approximations that force the reader to move beyond the immediate enunciation to seek the cultural realities embedded in the text. They are not accurate renderings of, say, the Hindi film song which Rushdie incor-porates into his novels or the Igbo idioms involving kola nuts. They are evocative of cultural moments in their simulated authenticity.

Mimetic approximations such as these begin by crossing racial boundaries into another context of enunciation. Though they ‘belong’ to a cultural formation, they are mobile enough in the hands of the postcolonial author to ‘appear’ in a new for-mation, such as the novel in English. Strategies of authentication are strategies of cultural mobility that locate the idiom, the song, the folktale in two (uneven) worlds. An idiom that is assumed to be naturally located in the black, brown or yellow and to those representative spaces (that is, the literatures and cultures in those languages of those communities and races) makes its way into other spaces and, contrary to debates about authenticity, belongs in both. Cultural mobility of this kind is essen-tially about mimetic approximations precisely because the trope or theme or artistic device is a performance across cultural and linguistic borders which the reader also has to cross in order to engage with the work. That is, the reader learns to understand that the figures and tropes are not to be seen as exact replicas but simulated authen-ticity because they are being elaborated and enunciated in a radically different context such as an Igbo phrase in an English text.

When paratexts, publicity materials and commentaries gesture at the cultural hybridity and mobility of the authors, they do not either valorise or dismiss origins, cultural roots or mobility. Rather, they serve as a strategy of authentication where the author is presented as a person engaged with multiple contexts, diverse origins and constantly mobile. About Mohsin Hamid, we are told in a piece in Observer:

The product of a privileged Muslim upbringing in Lahore, Pakistan, he sailed through Princeton and Harvard Law School and had his pick of investment-banking job offers when he graduated in 1996. He picked McKinsey instead, attracted by the more creative atmosphere.


The biographical account here combines the origins of the celebrity novelist with her/his social, geographical and cultural mobility. The Hamid aura here is not to do with either his origins (Pakistan, Muslim) or his studies in elite institutions or with the choice he made regarding place of work. It emerges from the cultural mobility and cosmopolitanism Hamid embodies: finance, law and creative writing; Pakistan, Muslim, American. Emphasizing the origin localizes him in a far-away land while emphasizing his later-day progress and current location globalizes him through the focus on his mobility. It is, indeed, very much possible to see the mobility of the post-colonial author, as a person and individual, as a cause for ‘brand postcolonial’.

2.3.3 Narrative Interiority as Authentication

A racial or ethnic or postcolonial truth is not reliant solely upon a collective or group identity but rather on aesthetic devices that depict an individual, complex interiority of individual characters. Thus, the success of The God of Small Things or Anil’s Ghost or The Famished Road that leads to the celebrification of Arundhati Roy, Michael Ondaatje and Ben Okri may be attributed not to their realist, magic-realist or surrealist representations of caste, ethnicity and race but rather due to the narrative interiority in these novels. The ‘lower caste’ or ‘Tamil’ identity is not delivered up to us through a survey of collective rituals, ethnic festivities and the quotidian alone – although these do contribute to the authentication – but through an interiority in characterization.

Arundhati Roy writes in The God of Small Things about Ammu, who has embarked on an affair with the ‘untouchable’ Velutha:

What was it that gave Ammu this Unsafe Edge? This air of unpredictability? It was what she had battling inside her. An unmixable mix. The infinite tenderness of motherhood and the reckless rage of a suicide bomber. It was this that grew inside her, and eventually led her to love by night the man her children loved by day. (44)

Rahel sees Velutha in a workers’ march and tells Ammu. Later Roy gives us Ammu’s thoughts:

Suddenly Ammu hoped that it had been him that Rahel saw in the march… She hoped that under his careful cloak of cheerfulness he housed a living, breathing anger against the smug, ordered world that she so raged against. (175-6)

If the first expresses the woman’s rage at the circumscription of her life, thoughts, relationships and emotions within the patriarchal social mores, the second presents her rage as resonant with that of Velutha. Roy thus shows us the interiority of two people differently oppressed – one because of caste and class, the other because of gender and marital and maternal status – and similarly angry. Velutha himself, con-fused by his attraction and cautioned by his awareness of his social status thinks:

Competing Authenticities 37

Velutha shrugged and took the towel away to wash. And rinse. And beat. And wring. As though it was his ridiculous, disobedient brain.He tried to hate her.She’s one of them, he told himself. Just another one of them.He couldn’t.She had deep dimples when she smiled. Her eyes were always somewhere else.Madness slunk in through a chink in History. It took only a moment. (214, emphasis in original)

It is this interiority that lends authentication to the history of class, caste and gender that Roy depicts: the individual affected by the history and the individual’s affective response to the history.

Postcolonial authors move beyond what Eversley terms ‘claims of a racially spe-cific individuality’ (43) to a depiction of what an Asian or Caribbean character feels inside. I extend this to mean the intersection of publicly declared, staged and per-ceived racial, ethnic or communitarian identity with felt, personal and private iden-tity that postcolonial fiction, in particular, documents. Of the former is tangible in the sense of the characters’ clothing, behaviour, social relations – their public persona, in other words – it is the invisible and internal identity that delivers a sense of authen-tication for Velutha, Saleem Sinai, Biswas or Amir.

This of course brings us dangerously close to the psychologization of characters as an index of their believability. The point however is that authenticity and authen-tication are effects of narrative, of rhetoric. Whether a character or an event is close enough to what we consider the real depends on narrative modes rather than any quantifiable and verifiable reality. That is, it is through the effect of mediated rep-resentation – rhetoric – that we come to believe in the authenticity of whatever is represented. Authentication is a discursive strategy that delivers to us a simulated and perceivable authenticity.

2.4 Competing Authenticities

When Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss was gaining global celebrity status, it was simultaneously gathering protests and anger in India itself. Reports appeared in the Indian and British media where readers in India and Nepal Kalimpong attacked Desai for the ‘very wrong picture’ she presents in her novel, and of being racist in her representations (Jordison 2009, ‘Inheritance Irks Nepali Readers’, 2006). The latter report begins with ‘Indian-origin author Kiran Desai’ draws attention to the ‘dislo-cated’ migrant authorial identity, fuelling the theme of inauthenticity from the very beginning. Yet another report protesting the novel was far more direct:

Desai is fortunate in two ways. First, because she is an Indian woman, and this enables a claim to authenticity for which every writer of fiction clamours. Second, she has chosen to write about a marginalised community that has not spoken much for itself through Indian English-language fiction. But combining these two things, however, she has managed to marginalise that commu-nity within its own area. (Chaturvedi 2006)


Authenticity implies possession and ownership of cultural practices, their meanings and cultural memories. It also implies a control over heuristic structures and inter-pretative schema.

Competing authenticities that contribute to brand postcolonial might be seen at two levels. First, visions of culture from within that cultural formation vie for attention under the claims of authenticity. Second, among postcolonial nations, rep-resentations vie for the attention of the global cultural tourist.

In the case of the first, Huggan alerts us to the

competing authenticities that underwrite Aboriginal – and other indigenous –representations, and that demand a closer attention than has sometimes been paid both to the political contexts behind literary (self-)labelling and to the material circumstances behind the production and cir-culation of Aboriginal images and cultural goods. (176)

That is, even before the authenticity question begins to appear in the global reader- or target- communities of the postcolonial texts, one needs to examine the self-rep-resentation of so-called authenticities by the postcolonials. Competing authentici-ties is the effect of cultural factors and the social, economic and political mileage accruing to the self-presentations by indigenous communities, many of which are in contest with each other. Huggan argues that Aborigines have learnt to play the market for their self-empowerment, and this has generated the ‘authentic’ as an economi-cally necessary discourse, constructing an iterable phenomenon whether as cultural festivals, handicrafts or literature.

The postcolonial text in the cultural circuits of the new world order which, as Hardt and Negri (2000) have argued, co-opts difference into its scheme of things, pre-sents competing visions of their own country and culture. Thus, the diasporic author, located in the Western world and who has a Western audience, primarily, presents a vision (and this was at the heart of the Mukherjee-Chandra debate on authenticity) of India that might be at odds with that of an author who lives and works in India. The point is, these visions of the same country are not to be seen as antagonistic but in dialogue with each other. Cultural reification, as Arif Dirlik has noted, is complicit with ethnicity (Dirlik 2002). Dirlik suggests that competing visions of cultural identity

speak to different historical circumstances with different social and political expectations. But they are not mutually exclusive, at least I do not think so. But closing the gap between them requires a different kind of language than has dominated cultural discussion in recent decades, a language that is more cognizant of the historicity of the cultural, which in turn is premised on a politics driven not by questions of cultural identity but questions of social and public respon-sibility. (222)

Dirlik is pointing to the different historical circumstances – migration, cosmopoli-tan travel, education – within the same country that shape these different and com-peting visions of their ethnic identities. Therefore, rather than debate authenticity,


one needs to historicize authenticity and cultural identity itself. Instead of charges of ‘inauthentic’ or ‘fake’ being hurled at each other where there is a different vision of the culture being present (from within), one needs to be alert to the context from which any vision of cultural identity is being presented.

We see this Dirlik argument illustrated in certain diasporic authors who, if we concede Mukherjee-Sundar Rajan their argument for a minute, seem to gesture at a

‘core’ authenticity retained by immigrant populations. This retention of a core cultural identity appears to suggest that certain aspects of a culture remain unchanged and uncontaminated despite altered historical circumstances. Take, for instance, Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers. Here Jugnu (whose grandfather is a Hindu) and Chanda are killed for their liaison – without marriage vows – by Chanda’s family – in England. Aslam suggests that despite the migration and acculturation, certain aspects of their Pakistani roots remain embedded. Aslam inaugurates this theme of a persistent social imaginary early in the novel. Speaking of immigrant cultures, he writes:

So the cleric at this mosque [in England] could receive a telephone call from, say, Norway, from a person who was from the same village as him in Pakistan, asking him whether it was per-mitted for him to take an occasional small glass of whisky or vodka to keep his blood warm, given that Norway was an extremely cold country; the cleric told him to desist from his sinful practice, thundering down the line and telling him that Allah was perfect aware of the climate of Norway when He forbade humans from drinking alcohol; why, the cleric asked, couldn’t he simply carry a basket of burning maple leaves under his overcoat the way the good Muslims of freezing Kashmir do to keep themselves warm? (12)

Aslam’s portrait of the freezing Pakistani in Norway and the ‘thundering’ cleric dis-allowing any ‘deviation’ from the cultural practices and norms of Pakistani society, even when relocated into a different climate, culture and context, is a case in point. Later, Aslam would articulate for us, through his portrait of Kaukab’s views, Kaukab who has lived in England long enough but remains ‘authentically’ Pakistani:

The decadent and corrupt West has made them forget piety and restraint, but the countless examples in Pakistan had brought home to them the importance and beauty of a life decorously lived according to His rules and injunctions… (90)

Kaukub’s articulation of ‘pure’ cultural traditions is a component of the postcolonial authenticity debates. The inauthentic is a native character like Mah-Jabin in this same novel who declares: ‘I’ve been to a country full of my own kind of people and seen what that like so I thought I’d try a strange country full of strangers this time’ (157). This adherence to authentic traditions, says Mah-Jabin a little later in the novel, has cost several people their lives:

You would like to dig her [Chanda] up piece by piece, put her back together, and kill her once more for going against your laws and codes, the so-called traditions that you have dragged into this country with you like shit on your shoes. (163)


Mah-Jabin’s savage appraisal of an immigrant culture suggests that it preserves the worst of its anterior, original and therefore ‘authentic’ culture. In Pakistan, Aslam writes, such honour killings are not uncommon; brothers who kill their sisters for dishonouring their family acquired a certain status: ‘their act gave them a certain nobility in the eyes of those around them’ (495).

Despite relocation, there is no change in the social imaginary: this adherence to injunctions and rules, Aslam suggests, is ‘authenticity’. We could then argue that such texts document ‘postcolonial authenticity’ as insularity, a stubborn retention of old values, which results in the continuing (as in, carried over from their originating country/culture) brutalization of the immigrant population and the eventual killing of Jugnu and Chanda. The larger question that Aslam asks is: does the adherence to old values cause an erosion of human values in the postcolonial? Is the ‘authen-tic’ then more important than recognizing changes in historical and cultural circum-stances? Implicit in Aslam is a critique where observance of custom subsumes and overwhelms any possibility of change. It is then a criticism of cultures that remain static despite changed historical circumstances, a reification that sets up the binary,

‘authentic native versus corrupted native’.The second level at which postcolonial authenticities compete is within the cul-

tural tourism market. Literature, as we have seen, comes to embody race, and races make literary investments. Within the global cultural tourist circuit different postco-lonial authenticities compete for space. In tourism studies Haywantee Ramkissoon (2015) speaks of ‘destination competitiveness’ in which ‘the concept of authenticity defined as the interpretation of the genuineness and increased appreciation of the tourism object … plays a significant role in destination competitiveness’ (294). Ram-kissoon elaborates: ‘In addition to the climatic characteristics, the rich culture, cul-tural sites and monuments, and distinctive natural environments make them attrac-tive destinations for seekers of authenticity’ (294). Ramkissoon goes on to argue that through perceived authenticity among the tourists, a greater sense of ‘place attach-ment’ appears, and positively influences the visitors’ ‘cultural intentions’ (297).

Ramkissoon’s point about destination competitiveness built around perceived authenticity suggests that in global cultural tourism, self-representations play a crucial role in how the First World treats the destinations. Their cultural intentions and behaviour hinge upon these representations and the perceived authenticity embod-ied in them. Extending this point it is possible to suggest that competing authentici-ties from the various postcolonial cultures are part of the tourist value regime seeking to draw not just attention but a certain kind of attention to their parts of the world. Taking their place in the comity of nations, in other words, as specific ethnic groups, communities and cultures, requires these cultures to generate a degree and version of authenticity that is believable and which will in turn define future cultural and perhaps political relations as well.

We therefore locate the authenticity debate within questions of cultural capital and cultural markets, converging self-representations (itself divided) and touristy


expectations. It therefore stands to reason that we are discussing different regimes of value. It may not be too far-fetched, then, to imagine a competitive postcoloniality as well, with the formerly colonized nations seeking a global representational – and market – space for ‘their’ literatures and literateurs, each seeking to communicate a greater or lesser degree of authenticity.

When literature and the reification of cultural or national identity go together, as the postcolonial appears to do, then different regimes of value come into opera-tion. Critics writing about Asian American literatures have noted that first generation diasporic writers tend to use materials from their cultures and traditions with greater sincerity, faithfulness and respect whereas from the second generation this use is more creative and symbolic (Wang 1999. Also see the Frank Chin criticism of King-ston above). Wang is signaling a shift in attitude but also in value regimes when it comes to the employment of, say, myth or folklore from tribal and cultural memories. The first we might term an affective value regime, and the second a symbolic value regime (although symbols are not devoid of affect, and affect requires, very often, the symbolic).

Affective value regimes intersect with symbolic value regimes to generate a brand postcolonial adhering to ‘ethnic’ texts. Alexis Wright in Carpentaria, mapping aborig-inal lives and histories, says:

Men such as Norm Phantom kept a library ... full of stories of the old country stored in their heads ... trading stories for other stories ... what to do, how to live like a proper human being. (245)

For Anne Brewster, this emphasis on storytelling is an index of the role it plays in the ethical living ideals/ideas of the community (2010: 88). This is not merely the sym-bolic but an affective value regime in operation, even as the storytelling act brings the community together.

In other cases, these regimes of value shift and intersect in different ways. The abiku – the spirit of the child who died young, according to numerous African

cultural traditions – would be a good instance of the layering of cultural ‘authentic-ity’ within the intersections of affective and symbolic economies. The abiku, a prom-inent figure in African texts by Wole Soyinka and others, acquires enormous sym-bolic value in African diasporic and African American texts. When, therefore, Ben Okri (The Famished Road) or Helen Oyeyemi (The Icarus Girl) employ the figure of the abiku, far from emphasizing any authentic cultural icon, they are generating a con-nection between historical African diasporas and African American literary history. As Christopher Ouma phrases it, ‘the abiku/ogbanje has an inherent ambiguity and a sense of agency that enables migration’ (2014: 191). What the abiku might, or might not, mean for African identities and culture is not the point. Ouma’s reading suggests that resignifications, determined by historical necessity and cultural drives of the present, generate new economies of the affective and symbolic kind. The insistence on migratability and transposability of the icon, idea and imaginary presupposes not


authenticity but adaptability for the sake of continuing relevance. Ouma’s reading gestures towards the potential of cultural markers to serve current needs in new con-texts. This move bypasses the thorny issue of authenticity: the African American can also claim, as much as the African-Canadian Ben Okri, the abiku as an icon and cen-trepiece of belonging as authentic to their present needs, irrespective of its ‘original’ cultural relevance. This generic and cultural mutation in some of the postcolonials bypasses and resists the entire authenticity debate, opting instead for postcolonial cosmopolitanism.

Across generations of, say, African writing (between Achebe and Adichie) we discern a massive shift in the value regimes instituted within their work, their pro-duction and their reception. If Achebe is, in a well-worn phrase, writing back to the empire as an assertion of Igbo, African identity through the use of English, Adichie, comfortably placed within the cultural tourism market, does not require any such assertion and is therefore relatively freer to critique African society or desacralize its mores and customs (in, for instance, Half of a Yellow Sun and Purple Hibiscus). As Adichie looks at Africa and the world, her symbolic value regime is at once a mirror and a window (a trope I shall return to in the Conclusion): looking at her (African) Self and the (global) Other. Note here her devastating comment about Africans in Purple Hibiscus:

The educated ones leave, the ones with the potential to right the wrongs. They leave the weak behind. The tyrants continue to reign because the weak cannot resist. Do you not see that it is a cycle? Who will break that cycle? (244-5)

In Half of a Yellow Sun Adichie would state unequivocally that the postcolonials had never been given the weapons and instruments to ‘negotiate’ the new world. She adds:

‘how can we resist exploitation if we don’t have the tools to understand exploitation?’ (11). Brand postcolonial is the result of a symbolic value regime that, in the hands of an Adichie crafts those tools needed to negotiate the new world order and understand a history of their exploitation. This value regime is self-reflexive, self-critical, but extremely creative. It accords some respect to the traditions received and inherited – African but also Western – and creatively uses these to fashion their contemporary identities. The contemporary postcolonial therefore exhibits the creative tension of adopting folklore, myth and the traditional cultural idiom only to repurpose it for today – for instance offering feminist or subaltern interpretations of these traditions. The charge of inauthenticity is levelled precisely because of the interpretive freedom exercised by the contemporary postcolonial. Radical re-readings, for example, of scriptural and sacred texts for their patriarchal, class or plain discriminatory subtexts immediately generates the accusation of inauthenticity, as though older cultural texts must be immune to revisionist readings. Yet this is precisely what simulated authen-ticity achieves: it is and is not quite the older text we all know. It is close to the already circulating stories and myths, but not quite.


Take for instance a contemporary graphic memoir by a subaltern (Venkat Raman Singh Shyam, a member of the Gond tribal community, with S. Anand) Indian, Finding My Way. The story being narrated is the one of the lower-caste Ekalavya and the upper-caste Hindu warrior, Arjuna, from the Hindu epic The Mahabharata. In the canonical tale Arjuna’s supremacy as an archer is ensured when his Brahmin teacher, Drona, perpetrates a malicious act against the ‘lower’ caste Ekalavya. Both Arjuna and Drona discover that Ekalavya’s skills as an archer surpass Arjuna’s. When ques-tioned, Ekalavya confesses that he perceives Drona to be his teacher (although Drona never taught him). Drona then asks for Ekalavya’s thumb as a kind of teacher-fee. Ekalavya without hesitation chops off his thumb and gives it to his teacher, knowing that this would forever prevent him, Ekalavya, from practising archery. For contempo-rary subaltern texts this incident has been seen as symbolic of the upper-caste strat-agem that deprived a subaltern (Ekalavya is a tribal) from his due. Shyam and Anand recast this legendary tale sedimented in collective public memory across India by weaving in an additional layer that contemporarizes it. The Hindu god of fire, Agni, tells Arjuna and his ally, Krishna:

We can all profit by it. This land is rich in minerals. These primitives, their ancient trees, the strange birds and queer animals that inhabit this land know not what they are sitting upon. If we can mine this wealth, and if this wealth can be mine, we will all prosper. I’ll be back in business, and your Indraprastha will outshine Hastinapura. There will even be an Indraprastha extension. (unpaginated)

This is narrative recension: citing a classic storyline critically in order to draw atten-tion to the implicit deforestation in the Mahabharata’s forest-burning incident. This critical re-reading of the Mahabharata then is added to the themes of illegal mining by business-houses, ‘development’ and urban planning in contemporary India (‘Extension’ is a typical term in urban India for expanded residential enclaves and gated communities). With this Shyam and Anand render the tale of the Pandava’s valour from the ‘original’ Mahabharata into a modern allegory of deceit, exploitation and theft of tribal rights. To contemporarize the Mahabharata through a story of the subaltern’s exploitation is to draw a link between an ancient past and the present by calling attention to a continuum of suffering and social injustice.11

It could be argued that this is the ‘inauthentic’ Mahabharata, and there would be some gravitas to the charge. Yet, what is striking about this creative recension is that it communicates in the space of one image and accompanying text, the entire breadth of contemporary political crimes. It appeals precisely because it finds new subtexts to the ‘original’ tale. Yet such creative interpretations that lead to simulated authenticity

11 I have expanded this argument about Finding My Way as a recension narrative in a forthcoming essay in Narrative.


are necessitated not solely by global demands. Postcolonial nations with their own problems of formulating a cultural identity, faced with subaltern demands, funda-mentalisms and divisive forces, grapple with their colonial histories, but also battle received traditions. When the postcolonial revisions myths, stories, cultural codes she does so to ensure that they speak with and to the contemporary, that the myths and stories enable the country to question itself. That is, revisionary readings seek to bring the past in line with the present’s needs and dilemmas, to see if these older texts can help illuminate the present, even as they seek to understand a genealogy of say, tribalisms, caste-oppression and patriarchy.

That these redrafted cultural identities might be deemed inauthentic is not the point, really. It is the ability to craft simulated authenticities that draws the world’s attention to a new kind of African voice.12 Whether African then functions as a symbol for failed states, native cultural assertions, lingering colonialisms is a moot point that we discern in Adichie’s fiction. This symbolization has considerable cultural value, just as the first phase of the postcolonial, invested in the affective value regime had a cultural cache by/in writing back. On occasion this investment is disputed, satirized and indicted as not quite accurate a picture. Thus, in response to the postcolonial’s foundational belief in a racialized and race-driven ‘West’, an author like Sefi Atta might point to the racialized African. In her A Bit of Difference, Atta has this to say via her character Tessa’s thoughts:

Tessa would probably feel guilty, without realizing that Nigerians are as prejudiced as the English, and more snobbish. Nigerians, given any excuse, are ready to snub. Without provoca-tion and even remorse. They snub one another, snub other Africans, other blacks and other races. Nigerians would snub aliens if they encountered them. (47)

As different postcolonial authors and texts vie for a space in the cultural marketplace driven by destination competitiveness, authenticity creatively manufactured through the symbolic value regimes, helps the making of brands: Brand India, Brand Paki-stan or Brand Africa. Writing about branding, Celia Lury has argued that branding involves ‘making abductive inferences about the possibilities of objects’ (2004: 69). When African becomes a symbol or an icon, then when deployed within the postco-lonial spectrum (of, say the Man Booker Prize or the Commonwealth Prize), it enables the market to conjecture possibilities on postcolonial qualities such as African genius, Indian creativity, the postcolonial use of the English language, and the institution of literature itself. It involves the ‘may-bes’ of products that are first ‘differentiated within particular products and then integrated in product ranges, series or lines’ (Lury

12 This is not to say that Achebe’s generation was blindly reverential and less self-critical. However, the value regimes are different in terms of their engagements with their own culture, in the pursuit of authenticity and the (often necessary) assertion of cultural identity.


69, emphasis in original). The product range or the series is ‘The Postcolonial’ or ‘The Third World’ cultural productions, where even as the market differentiates between Pakistani or Filipino texts, it integrates it into the circuit of ‘postcoloniality’ itself.

This abductive referencing is natural to the brand’s circulation. Brands, writes John Frow, are ‘markers of the edge between the aesthetic space of an image or text and the institutional space of a regime of value which frames and organises aesthetic space’ (Frow 2002). The text has a signature, which is that of an individual, but the brand has a trademark, which is that of the manufacturing company (Frow). The literary text pro-duced by Shamsie, Hamid, Roy or Carey might have a signature, but they are co-opted and circulated as brands with the trademark ‘postcolonial’ stamped across. The postco-lonial is a brand that is situated between the institutional space of literatures and liter-ary studies and the text to be consumed. That is, the simulated authenticity of texts that makes them brands constantly shifts between the aesthetic and the market, between the text and the circuits of cultural consumption. Simulated authenticity is a branding strategy and only requires that the reader/consumer perceive authenticity.

The point I wish to make is: the symbolic value regime employed by Adichie, Hamid or Roy generates a brand for ‘their’ culture through simulated authenticity. This brand is subject to abductive inference by both their own cultures and the global tourist regime which sets out to conjecture about the ‘true’ nature of Africa or Paki-stan. In other words, the symbolic value regime puts in place a series of operations that generates interest in the various aspects of their cultures mainly through infer-ences gleaned from the literary texts. It does not matter that these inferences may be wrong, or that there is considerable ‘inauthenticity’ to the text, the emphasis on cre-atively employing one’s traditions is sufficient to generate the brand. The brand then, with its semantic autonomy, runs on its own in the cultural marketplace.

However, self-branding and branding by the institutional-market forces of global cultural markets does not signify the loss of local rootedness, national concerns or aesthetic values. Between the affective and the symbolic value regimes that generate simulated authenticity it is possible to see a more challenging development that post-colonial authors and their texts exhibit.

I suggest that the postcolonial text works as an instance of ‘contradictory symbol-ism’ (Ong 207).

Simulated authenticity that relies on the appropriation and employment of folk-lore, myth and cultural values from one’s country of origin ensures that the literary work itself exhibits this contradictory symbolism. On the one hand it suggests a pride in one’s culture, a retention of those cultural values – in short, an assertion of one’s national and cultural identity. On the other hand it (simulated authenticity) also signals the desire to participate in the global cultural economy precisely through this marketing of ethnic authenticity. A text or artifact has no fixed value – value is relational and the result of the insertion of that artifact into a system of exchange. The postcolonial is inserted into the global cultural system through, for instance, the fact of authors writing in English, publication from global presses, the translation


industry, reviews and interviews in global cultural sites such as the Guardian or New Yorker. The postcolonial text is animated through its relationality with English liter-ature, institutions where such literature is produced and read, South Asian studies programs, the review system, the prizes. The contradictory symbolism – of being at once an assertion of a national identity and global aspirations – of the text is the value accruing through this insertion into the global cultural system.

The contradictory symbolism ensures that the text participates in localism and globalism, sliding between Empire and national/cultural sovereignty, with the latter being asserted in the form of simulated authenticity. Following the work of Aihwa Ong on Chinese architecture in the global age, I argue that the postcolonial brand is an instance of the production of a spectacle of postcolonial sovereignty in the age of the global. That is, sovereignty and cultural identity of the postcolonial is not over-whelmed, in this reading, by global cultural flows. Rather, it embodies the spectacle of selfassured postcolonialness in the age of global culture. To adapt Ong’s formula-tion, brand postcolonial is the effect of the ‘spectacularization of urban success as well as of national emergence’ (206). If we replace ‘urban’ with ‘global’, we have the postcolonial scene of today.

The simulated authenticity of its texts ensures that this spectacle acquires a certain cache in this age. It is no longer therefore a debate between ‘authentic native Orient’ versus ‘inauthentic colonial Orient’. Rather it is the spectacle of the Orient through the construction of simulated authenticity paving the way for its participation in the spec-tacle of the global cultural market that is at heart of the postcolonial aura. Sovereignty and international aspirations come together in the postcolonial aura.

2.5 Conclusion

The postcolonial aura, which emerges from the various energies, conflicts and con-tests around authenticity, is also derived from a neat side-stepping of the authentic that postcolonial novels in particular engage in.

First, the divide between the postcolonial world and the Western one is debated within the postcolonial novel – as Ganguly proposes – when it takes up witnessing as its key thematic concern and trope: it ‘foreshortens … the distance between the postcolonial world’s violent spasms and the various forms of spectatorship that have been generated in the global West’ (178). Brand postcolonial is the effect of the ‘global postcolonial’ whose frames of witnessing are slightly different, and whose emphasis is no longer authenticity but authentication of engagements with the world and the local, the past and the present, the West and the postcolonial.

The postcolonial texts and authors function as survivor witnesses (to their coun-try’s history) and as third-person witness (to the history of the elsewhere, or the world), where the former informs the way they look at the latter. That is, it is their engagement with the world through their own history of experiencing racism, colo-

Conclusion 47

nialism, fundamentalisms, incipient nation-building processes, the battle for social justice that enables them to be the terstes to the world today.

Second, this is not to argue that their perspective on the world is more or less authentic: rather, I suggest that the combination of superstes and terstes within the postcolonial is not about authenticity as much as a political and ethical response derived from their localized pasts and the global present. R. Radhakrishnan has argued about ‘World Literature’ that the challenge is to ‘imagine into existence and coordinate a simultaneous split screen and double frame partaking of a mirror struc-ture and a window structure capable of focusing on self and other in a double gaze (2016: 6). Note here the mirror-window trope in operation as Ben Okri’s protagonist in The Famished Road delivers an account of his father’s dreams:

He [Dad] saw the world in which black people always suffered and he didn’t like it. He saw a world in which human beings suffered so needlessly from Antipodes to Equator, and he didn’t like it either. He saw our people drowning in poverty, in famine, drought, in divisiveness and the blood of war. He saw our people always preyed upon by other powers, manipulated by the Western world, our history and achievements rigged out of existence. (492)

The father dreams/sees suffering writ locally and globally. He sees one through the other, he sees his own culture and race suffer when he looks into the mirror, and he sees the world through the window. If colonialism destroyed ‘his’ people in some ways, their own ‘divisiveness’ ruined them in other ways. This split screen is what entrances the reader when we step into the postcolonial novel.

The mirror causes and enables the postcolonial to look at the Self, one’s own history and cultural traditions, albeit mediated by the mirror itself, with all the flaws in the glass, and some pieces missing, as Rushdie famously put it in his essay 1982

‘Imaginary Homelands’ (‘It may be that when the Indian writer who writes from outside India tries to reflect that world, he is obliged to deal in broken mirrors, some of whose fragments have been irretrievably lost’). Simulated authenticity is the effect generated when this double structure is in place: looking at one’s own culture even as one looks at the global cultural market.

Third, authenticity is not simply an either/or choice for the postcolonial because authenticity is ‘a metaphorical conversation that occurs … between … evolving and deeply rooted ideals related to a culture’s identity, and … particular individuals and groups whose interactions with these ideals are necessarily influenced by their immediate social contexts’ (Bramadat 2005). Bramadat treats authenticity itself as an evolving concept, debated across stakeholders in different contexts, from those entrenched in the local which they valorize and those whose social contexts cut across regions, cultures and worlds.

Laura Rosenthal, whom I have cited earlier, argues that exoticism serves an important function: it offered ‘multiple cosmopolitan possibilities’ for the cultural reinvention of the self, society and the nation (2012: 11). I suggest that the postcoloni-al’s simulated authenticity that borders on the exoticizing mode, adapting fantasies


of the primal and merging it with real historical materialities, the contradictory sym-bolisms of national assertion and global aspirations, of autochthonous meaning and

‘contaminated’ semantic scope is both mirror and window. It offers the postcolonial the possibilities for recasting the nation and culture in far more ways than cultural nationalism – as Frantz Fanon recognized – allows. The possibilities include a more egalitarian nation, greater social justice and level playing fields for all citizens.

The postcolonial seeks a cultural reinvention of the nation through a creative re-symbolization and interpretation of past for the present, an act which results in (charges of) exoticism and ‘inauthenticity’. Brand postcolonial is the effect of the double structure, the double consciousness and flexible perspectives of cultural iden-tity identified as simulated authenticity, at once a mirror and a window.

Competitive postcoloniality therefore positions authors from the formerly colo-nized nations in the global marketplace of difference, offering textual tourism that relies upon competing authenticities and strategies of authentication. It inserts into global cultural circuits, reflects back upon countries and cultures of origins, and negotiates the pitfalls between stereotyping and authenticity.

2 the postcolonial exotic: the cult of authenticity - de gruyter

Documents