Combining analysis with detailed accounts of authors' careers and the global trade in literature, this book assesses how postcolonial writers respond to their own reception and niche positioning, parading their exotic otherness to metropolitan audiences, within a global marketplace.

This book asks what reading means in India, Nigeria, the UK, and Cuba, through close readings of literary texts from postcolonial, spatial, architectural, cartographic, materialist, trauma, and gender perspectives. It contextualises these close readings through new interpretations of local literary marketplaces to assert the significance of local, not global meanings. The book offers longer case studies on novels that stage important reading moments: Alejo Carpentier’s The Lost Steps (1953), Leonardo Padura’s Adios, Hemingway (2001), Tabish Khair’s Filming (2007), Chibundhu Onuzo’s Welcome to Lagos (2017), and Zadie Smith’s Swing Time (2016). Chapters argue that while India’s literary market was disrupted by Partition, literature offers a means of moving beyond trauma; in post-Revolutionary Cuba, the Special Period led to exploitation of Cuban literary culture, resulting in texts that foreground reading spaces; in Nigeria, the market hosts meeting, negotiation, reflection, and trade, including the writer’s trade; while Black consciousness bookshops and writing in Britain operated to challenge the UK literary market, a project still underway. This book is a vindication of reading, and of the resistant power and creative potential of local literary marketplaces. It insists on ‘located reading’, enabling close reading of world literatures sited in their local materialities.

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.

Internationally recognized for its superior scholarship, Modern Fiction Studies was one of the first journals to publish articles on postcolonial studies. Since postcolonialism's inception, scholars have defined, clarified, and enriched its conceptions and theoretical development in the pages of MFS. This anthology collects the best and most important articles on postcolonial literary studies published in MFS in the past thirty years. Postcolonial Literary Studies brings together groundbreaking scholarship focusing on significant works of fiction by such writers as Chinua Achebe, J. M. Coetzee, Jamaica Kincaid, V. S. Naipaul, Arundhati Roy, Salman Rushdie, Bapsi Sidhwa, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, and more. The essays feature ideas that helped shape the discipline from its earliest stages to the present and represent some of the finest examples of literary, theoretical, historical, and cultural criticism. With its focus on literary figures and texts, rather than solely on theory, this volume fills a significant gap in the fields of postcolonialism, global studies, and literary criticism in general. This rich collection of essays by the field’s leading scholars will prove indispensable to instructors and students across a broad spectrum of humanistic studies. It not only highlights the development and transformation of postcolonial literary study but also, by mapping out new directions of study, considers its continual significance and expansion.

Indian Writing in English and the Global Literary Market delves into the influences and pressures of the marketplace on this genre, which this volume contends has been both gatekeeper as well as a significant force in shaping the production and consumption of this literature.

Introduction: Postcolonial literary studies now / Jenni Ramone -- NEW CONTEXTS. The global and the neoliberal: Indra Sinha's Animal's people, from human community to zones of indistinction / Philip Leonard -- Disaster, governance and (post-)colonial literatures / Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee -- The postcolonial book market: reading and the local literary marketplace / Jenni Ramone -- Postcolonial economics: literary critiques of inequality / Melissa Kennedy -- Postcolonial studies in the digital age: an introduction / Roopika Risam -- "Another world is possible": radicalizing world literature via the postcolonial / Wendy Knepper -- NEW NARRATIVES. Postcolonial poetry / Emma Bird -- Postcolonial noncitizenship in Australian theatre and performance: twenty-first century paradigms / Emma Cox -- Graphic history: postcolonial texts and contexts / Binita Mehta and Pia Mukherji -- Postcolonial life-writing / Jocelyn Fenton Stitt -- Decolonization and postcolonial cinema in Canada, Brazil, Australia and Nigeria / Kerstin Knopf -- NEW DEBATES. Postcolonial refugees, displacement, dispossession and economies of abandonment in the capitalist world system / Stephen Morton -- Postcolonial sexualities and the intelligibility of dissidence / Humaira Saeed -- Contemporary migration and diaspora studies: current debates and the role of literature / Subha Xavier -- Postcolonial studies and African American literature / John Cullen Gruesser -- Faith, secularism and community in womanist literature from the neocolonial Caribbean / Dawn Miranda Sherratt-Bado -- Secularism in India: principles and policies / Manav Ratti