Author Description

Though a growing body of scholarship situates contemporary literary authorship within a romantic tradition of writers attempting to distance themselves from the market function of their texts, focusing on postcolonial writers shows that anxiety about commercialization is not the only form of authorial self-consciousness. In postcolonial texts, this anxiety is subsumed by a concern with the threats to self-authorization posed by the political uses of cultural texts. For the writers I discuss, postcolonial authorship is irrevocably implicated in the increasingly global market for literary fiction, and is threatened not by proximity to commercial expansion and mass production, but instead by forms of politicization encouraged by the ruche marketing of postcolonial literatures to a dominantly Anglo-American market. Thus, Salman Rushdie's Fury (2001) laments the irreparable loss of any authorial control that might police the way a writer's works are used by a variety of political factions. In his recent fiction J. M. Coetzee responds to his fraught South African reception by making a figural connection between the idea of public judgment or trial and the parameters of his own career. Robert McLiam Wilson's Eureka Street (1996) considers Seamus Heaney's career prominence, and the increasing presence of transnational capital in Northern Ireland, in order to implicate Wilson's own work in the marketing of violent political narratives for international export. And finally Zulfikar Ghose uses The Triple Mirror of the Self (1992) to depict the relationship between postcolonial textual production and Anglo-American reception in a way that emphasizes or even explains why it excludes his own works. Each of these writers thus disputes the way his authorial agency is undermined by the association of his works with an overly determined set of political and national affiliations, fostered by the niche marketing of postcolonial literatures in English.