Authors’ market-positioning doubts rather than opportunism shape postcolonial literary strategy

Evidence

Instead of the authorial better knowledge implied in Huggan’s schema, Brouillette suggests that “writers’ relationships to their ostensible communities are as likely to be agonised and alienated as they are to be opportunistic” because “postcolonial literature evinces a complicated process of indulging, resisting and critiquing its imagined consumption.” She sees “the industry of postcoloniality” as displaying “a touristic conscience” that “fuels the way authors respond to their own reception and market positioning” and where a set of literary strategies evolves, dependent on “shared assumptions between the author and the reader,” with the aim of mitigating “postcoloniality’s touristic guilt” about consuming the products of other cultures. Brouillette recognizes how the desire among readers for education about the supposed realities of other cultures produces a market for texts “that fulfil that interest most often … with a broadly anti-imperialist political liberalism.” — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 458

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘touristic conscience’ and ‘shared assumptions between author and reader’ concepts give the reader language for how Home Boy and The Reluctant Fundamentalist are framed for consumption. — connects to: the MOC “The Word Is a Fence: Language as Battleground, Property, and Partition”
• DEEPTHINKING: Brouillette’s account upends the simple opportunism-versus-integrity binary by locating the touristic conscience inside the author’s own agonised relationship to imagined readers — genuinely layered.
• QUESTION: What would ‘indulging’ versus ‘critiquing’ imagined consumption look like concretely in Hamid’s and Naqvi’s narrative choices?