Authorial branding makes postcolonial writers visible only as exploitable market commodities

Evidence

Yet against Erica’s failure it is possible to read Changez—and indirectly through him Mohsin Hamid himself—as the image of the successful fiction maker. Brouillette has noted how literary texts by postcolonial writers often sit alongside the paratexts of authorial marketing, such as press interviews and media features (and in Hamid’s case journalistic forays) in a process of “authorial branding.” Taken together, these texts and paratexts emphasize commodification, whereas “the figure of the author becomes … a way of concealing mass production in individualism.” … What’s left is what can be co-opted into the news and media world, the audio-visually consuming consciousness, which defeats and erases them as authors. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 463

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to the reader’s hinge: the monograph’s ‘authorial branding’ frame offers a ready lens for how Hamid and Naqvi’s author-personas affect reception of their Islamophobia-contesting fiction. — connects to: Online advertising economics pushed foreign correspondence toward affluent young freelancers, worsening neocolonial dynamics — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 175
• SEED: Angle: how authorial branding (press interviews, speaking tours) can co-opt the very novels that contest Islamophobia into marketable niche authenticity — interrogate where the contestation survives on the page versus the persona.