The Postcolonial Cultural Industry: Icons, Markets, Mythologies

The Postcolonial Cultural Industry makes a much needed intervention into the field of postcolonial studies by unpacking its relation to the cultural industry. It analyses cultural productions not as aesthetic objects, or as pure disposable commodities, but as 'practices' that engage the local and the global in specific ways. Starting from Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer's critical notion of the cultural industry, the book moves toward a more contemporary understanding of the cultural industry as a site of co-production, co-shaping and conflict between producers and consumers, marketing experts, readers and audiences, in order to arrive at a more dynamic and paradoxical take on the cultural industry as a cultural field, imbibed concomitantly by economic, political and aesthetic motifs. It explores how institutions such as literary prizes have influenced the level of production, consumption and distribution of postcolonial texts, how the adaptation industry has contributed to the economy of prestige and how ethnic feminist bestsellers convey new issues around postfeminism and the rearticulation of race, ethnicity, class and neo-liberal capitalism in local and transnational contexts. By connecting cultural analysis to marketing strategies and theories of globalization this book offers an invaluable contribution to the field of postcolonial studies, film studies, migration studies, gender studies, cultural studies and critical theory, among others.