The United Colours of Benetton and the Rainbow Curriculum

1My starting point is ‘The United Colours of Benetton’. If advertising is to be believed, we are all one big happy family, black, brown, yellow and white, revelling equally in the joys of consumer capitalism, presented iconically as a great social leveller. In the same way that the craze for fusion cooking and restaurants creates the illusion that the world is our oyster whose succulent flesh is available at the flick of a fork to satisfy the jaded palates of ‘foodies’ from Islington to L.A., the myth of the multicultural promotes the idea of a post-Internationale internationalism where we all sit down to sup at the global banquet.

2The family and food are the two homely metaphors I have chosen as prisms through which to analyse the status of world literature in the twenty-first century, what has been referred to as ‘a new kind of fiction that deals with a new kind of world’ (Iyer 48), grouping together a whole host of diverse and diasporic talents. Successive appellations for fiction with its roots either outside, or marginal within, the imperial centres of the British Isles and North America have now been superseded by the evocative ‘world’ label, reminding the potential consumer of the commercial success of world music and the fact that we are, after all, supposed to be living in a global village. By dropping the adjective ‘Third’ from World Literature, it has been possible to forget the contestatory roots of writers originating outside, or situated marginally within, Western metropolitan centres and thus to recuperate difference as part of a marketable cultural commodity. For some this is the sign that ‘World Literature’ is really ‘World Bank Literature’, so little resistance does it offer to life under the auspices of the World Bank and the IMF (see Kumar).

3Important questions are obviously raised by this convenient categorisation which allows an unproblematic grouping together of very different entities which at first sight seem to have little in common except the fact that they are somehow ‘foreign’ in relation to a native English-speaking orthodoxy. This is little more than a symptom of a late capitalist economy whose marketing strategy is based on homogenisation ma non tro ppo, artfully designed to leave a tantalising trace of strangeness to tickle the taste buds of customers wishing to dine out on heady new sensations. Otherwise why would such disparate writers as Salman Rushdie, Toni Morrison, Kazuo Ishiguro, Michael Ondaatje, Chinua Achebe and J.M. Coetzee be thrown into the same melting pot? And yet, despite all, readers/consumers of every stripe do sense instinctively that some common ground is being covered by their work. The job I will undertake here is to survey the ground of world literature and map its coordinates, to elaborate a notion of collective cartography which if not independent of, is at least situated critically in relation to, the market forces which dominate contemporary culture (see Stiegler 154).

Finding the Ingredients: Our Appetite for the Exotic

4The recent and somewhat rapid emergence of a new canon or even counter-canon (see Krishnaswamy 143) can be seen as a response to a crisis in the world of letters with postcolonial studies at the forefront of a new orthodoxy validating ‘difference’ and ‘otherness’, but which is also partly market-driven, as cultural commentators have not been backward in noticing: ‘academics face a crisis of dwindling materials; classic books have been studied to death. With the added allure of subverting Western hegemony, post-colonial studies opens up new turf and allows the re-examination of old ground’ (Jacoby 32). In his influential study, The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins, Graham Huggan underlines the interrelated network of economic factors, including the media and literary prizes, underlying recent canon formation: ‘Several, though by no means all, of the Booker prize-winners belong to a recognised postcolonial canon [. . .]. These writers comprise by and large a list of international figures whose names circulate freely within the media and on school/university curricula and examination lists. This self-perpetuating process of recognition, much enhanced of course by the global media, is reflected in the regular appearance of the ‘big names’ (Achebe, Atwood, Naipaul, Rushdie) on many of the prize’s heavily publicised shortlists’ (Huggan 119).

5Thus the rise of postcolonialism is synonymous with the appearance of a new and expanding field, including criticism and theory as well as literature. According to Jacoby again, ‘Post-colonial theory is all over the map’ (Jacoby 37), and a quick surf of the Internet will provide ample evidence of the way in which Rushdie, Roy, Coetzee, Ishiguro, Morrison, Ondaatje, Achebe, Atwood and others have replaced Conrad, Lawrence, Woolf and Joyce on university syllabi worldwide as touchstones for the study of English literature in the Arnoldian sense of the term, in other words, the best that a culture can produce. However, there may be an inherent contradiction between the countercultural values of such works and their legitimisation as classics. Of course for the publishing industry only benefits accrue from a strategy which enables them to corner two ends of the market at the same time and is thus highly cost-effective. Nevertheless, the question which remains to be asked is ‘the best of what culture’ exactly? The re-drawing of the world map of literature with a favourable bias towards the texts and authors oppressed by empire can be construed not only as a neo-colonization by literary academics of other related fields: political economy, sociology, history and anthropology, but also as the branding of a certain kind of literature as a cultural commodity for the global market.

7But let us return to my recipe. What are the superficial ingredients necessary for the successful world novel? Primarily and most importantly, the foregrounding of the exotic in some way, either thematically, stylistically or simply by virtue of the ethnic status of the author, or, best of all, thanks to an exotic or exoticised location. Significantly, Rushdie’s penultimate novel, Fury, set in contemporary New York, bewildered and displeased critics who bemoaned the passing of magic realism and its replacement by an eerie Baudrillardean poetics of simulacra. For the exotic is not required merely on the level of setting, characters or theme, although this does of course help, but must also appear somehow or somewhere in the texture of the writing itself, set within an identifiable paradigm, nevertheless. Defamiliarisation of some kind is an essential ingredient, and to some extent we may use this as a definition of the ‘difference’ and ‘otherness’ mentioned earlier on. There is always something profoundly unhomely about such works which openly flaunt their strangeness on one level or another, whether it be stylistic, linguistic, thematic or formal. However, the point is precisely that this strangeness must be easily recognisable by a certain type of Western reader, belonging to what Huggan terms, ‘an internationally minded, but largely English-speaking public culture’ (Huggan 69). If it appeals to other reading communities, that is an added bonus. This particular brand or strand of literary exoticism is not only acceptable to, but expected by, a Western metropolitan audience as well as all those educated within its wide-ranging influence. The best-selling success of Vikram Seth’s sub-Dickensian, sub-Austenian epic, A Suitable Boy (1993), can be explained not so much by any self-conscious display of the anxiety of influence but, on the contrary, by its uncomplicated reliance on the tried and tested formulas of melodrama and romance. However, as we shall see later, if this novel has brought Seth success worldwide, it may not necessarily make it to the top ten of world novels.

8The expectations of a given reading public are clearly evidenced by paratextual elements which are essential in creating a market for such books, as Wendy Waring cogently reminds us: ‘In general, we can say that the function of the back cover blurb is one of economic interpellation. ist goal is to persuade the reader to buy the book, to convince the reader that the text ‘speaks’ to her or him’ (Waring 460). Amid the habitual encomiums, elements of titillating strangeness are evoked, as well as the blatant Orientalist strategy of ‘othering’ to stimulate consumption. Thus the jacket of Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost explains: ‘Unfolding against the ravishing background of Sri Lanka’s landscape and ancient civilisation, Anil’s Ghost is a compelling literary spellbinder, a timeless work of art and a revelatory journey’ (Ondaatje 2000, inside cover). The basic and somewhat hackneyed ingredients of the Orientalist fallacy are just crying out for deconstruction by the postcolonial critic: exciting exotic location presented as a female body waiting to be ‘ravished’ by the reader, as well as anthropological tourism, for the book is hawked as a spiritual and metaphorical journey as well as a geographical one. More interestingly, Ondaatje’s narrative is presented as a product of high culture, ‘literary’, holding out the promise of universal and possibly classic status, ‘timeless’.

9Similarly, Toni Morrison’s Jazz is described in the following terms: ‘This is Harlem in the Twenties, the capital of black America and seething, exotic backdrop of Toni Morrison’s excellent new novel. . . Jazz shimmers with that other Morrison hallmark, pure poetry. This is Shakespeare singin’ the blues: a real dazzler’ (Morrison 1993, back cover). Enough has been written about the othering of African-Americans, some of it by Morrison herself (see Morrison 1993), for me not to dwell upon this obvious manifestation of it here, but it will be noticed that the familiar selling points are very much in evidence in this example: exoticism and eroticism, cultural tourism (‘Harlem in the Twenties’), high literary quality (‘excellent’) and possibly classic status. Naturally, publishing houses see only advantages to the oxymoron of ‘modern classic’, first coined by Penguin Books. By proposing classic status for contemporary novels, publishers and the critics, whose opinions often implicitly converge with the universal market, give them added credibility.

10It is worth noting as well how these cover blurbs play with the conflicting desires of Western readers; the excitement of strangeness but also its simultaneous recuperation. Thus Eliot’s ‘Shakespeherian rag’ springs inevitably to mind when perusing the back cover of Jazz, illustrating the way that intertextual criticism may well usefully reveal hidden connections, but can also be an instrument for forcefully reinserting a text within a familiar system, in short, a form of literary appropriation. At the stroke of a critic’s pen, Morrison’s strangeness, manifested above all in her abuse of language and form, is recuperated as part of an ongoing project of literary experimentation, taking its cue from the Anglo-American elite of High Modernism. Readers are encouraged to read it within this conventional prism rather than taking it on its own more unsettling terms as an attempt to expand consciousness through continual improvisation.

11Cover illustrations also play an important role in constructing potential readers, signalling clearly the kind of journey on which they will embark if they buy the novel: thus the black and white photo of Thirties Shanghai on the front of the British edition of Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans superimposes coloured images of evening-dressed white Westerners dancing in its streets. Is this to be taken as an unwitting, or, an intended, comment on the superposition of Western culture on its host country?

12However, it should not be forgotten that there may be important differences between the reader constructed by the paratextual signals and those constructed by the text itself, thus queering the postcolonial pitch, for neither readers nor publishing houses can be seen as totally homogeneous. According to Wendy Waring: ‘all of us are potentially both committed ‘ideal’ readers [. . .] and market readers—tourists, book browsers in the neo-imperialist marketplace’ (Waring 464). Of course, it all depends on how that ‘us’ is construed. Waring is visibly speaking from within the Western academy and using its criteria to judge. Not everybody is reading from the same guidebook or using the same maps to find their way around the labyrinth of world literature, as the example of Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (1997) proves.

13Superficially the novel is the example par excellence of the successful marketing of exoticism for a global audience and, according to Graham Huggan, ‘the latest Westernized novel of the East [. . .] a tourist novel, recycling intoxicating myths of a fabulous but dangerous Orient to an eager Western readership already attuned to the exotic formulae of Indian fiction’ (Huggan 76). From the lush cover illustration of a brilliant lotus flower to the irresistible photo of the stunningly beautiful author on the inside cover, Roy’s novel is nothing short of ‘an object lesson in commodity fetishism’, a media-friendly self-promoting artefact, a jewel in the crown of the world publishing empire of fiction in English.

14However, the novel also illustrates other less predictable, if equally profitable impulses. Working within the now familiar paradigm of complicitous critique elaborated by Linda Hutcheon to deal with the paradoxical status of postmodern fiction (see Hutcheon 1989), The God of Small Things both displays and ironises its exotic romanticism simultaneously. It is aware of its compromised status as a product of the Western film industry, the Western canon of great books and the travel writing business and self-consciously flaunts itself before a thrill-hunting public who are thus left no choice but to consume, ironically, the exotic imaginary displayed for their benefit. According to Huggan, this puts Roy’s work, like Rushdie’s, in the category of ‘strategic exoticism’, as well as ‘meta-exoticism’, in other words, writing which lays bare its devices in order to reveal the link between the exotic and the metropolitan marketing of Indian literature in English in the West. Of course the paradoxical relationship the book enjoys with a Western audience contains a further irony: the fact that such readers actually expect and even positively revel in the ironies of their status as voyeuristic consumers whose awareness of that status will absolve them from charges of intellectual exploitation, or so it is to be hoped.

15It is worth noting that the exotic elements which made the novel so attractive to Westerners in search of excitement, both literary and otherwise, were largely ignored by Roy’s fellow-countrymen who read the book not as an exercise in sub-Rushdiean experiment, a Keralan Midnight’s Children for the end of the millennium, but for its realistic portrayal of inter-caste relationships and political corruption.

16Roy is a particularly telling example of a fashionable tendency. Yet, as already suggested, success and lasting renown are not systematic or guaranteed for all merely because of apparent suitability to the market. Although a definite predilection for exoticism is paramount in the publishing world, partly because it is perceived as a means of infusing new blood into an ossified and parochial literary scene (particularly in the United Kingdom), and although writers of mixed or non-white Anglo origin appear to be the natural purveyors of such a product, these factors are obviously not sufficient in themselves to account for the phenomenon of World Literature. The lack of objective critical distance when dealing with such writers, the tendency to a celebratory rhetoric of difference, hybridity etc. and the desire to lump together disparate writing practices and styles merely under the pretext that they belong to an exotic (for the West) ethnic category is clearly at the root of the endless problems of literary definition and confusion experienced by critics in the postcolonial age.

17At the present moment the state of World Literature is far from an harmonious, integrated and easily identifiable whole and appears, on the contrary, a prey to a multitude of fads and fashions. ist excessive commodification as part of the global alterity industry means that it is in danger of becoming a mere by-product of a fashionable boutique multiculturalism, the literary equivalent of the token exoticism of the now ubiquitous, watered down, Marks and Spencer-style ‘Chicken Tikka Masala’ which greets the restaurant-goer at every turn in the British Isles.

Boutique Multiculturalism and Marketing Masala: Are We the World?

18Stanley Fish defines ‘boutique multiculturalism’ in the following terms: ‘Boutique multiculturalism is the multiculturalism of ethnic restaurants, weekend festivals, and high profile flirtations with the other in the manner satirized by Tom Wolfe under the rubric of ‘radical chic’. Boutique multiculturalism is characterized by its superficial or cosmetic relationship to the objects of its affection’ (Fish 378). This no-nonsense judgement should be extended in my view to all cultural artefacts which do not inscribe within their poetics a self-reflexive, self-critical dimension and thus challenge as well as pander to their audience. To return to the ever-popular Seth, his, A Suitable Boy, qualifies effortlessly for hybridity and exoticism while at the same time working satisfyingly within the recognisable European literary paradigms of the historical novel, the domestic melodrama and the romance. Despite the author’s impeccable international pedigree, born in India, educated in England, California and China, and now resident in the States, his bestseller lacks the dimension of ludic self-awareness which would encourage its deconstruction as a product for a certain audience. Thus it contains the perfect ingredients for success on the world market, but not, in my view, for entry into the canon of world literature.

19For Fish the very notion of multiculturalism is in itself profoundly compromised because of its inescapable links to the corporate world of business: ‘For the business world, it’s multiculturalism or die’ (Fish 386). If Simon During is to be believed, we are all now consumers of a blend of capitalism and humanism which he dubs the ‘global popular’. This is a state which allows us to feel good about instant cultural appropriation in a world which is increasingly flattened for the convenience of transnational capital: ‘Eating a Big Mac, being amazed by the way Michael Jackson moves his body, reaching for a Coke, or, given more middlebrow tastes, dancing to the Mahotella Queens, grooving along to Bob Marley or even U2—these all contain that little ‘family of man’ or ‘we are the world’ charge. It seems as if almost everyone, almost everywhere, loves the global popular and sometimes consumes it: it produces a mood in which exoticism, normality and transworld sharedness combine, and in which consumption warmly glows’ (During 342). Champions of this ‘flat earth’, such as the American commentator and columnist on The New York Times, Thomas Friedman, believe that ‘global is good’ but are seemingly blind to the neo-imperialistic implications of their version of globalisation: ‘The Golden Arches Theory stipulated that when a country reached the level of economic development where it had a middle class big enough to support a network of McDonald’s, it became a McDonald’s country. And people in McDonald’s countries don’t like to fight wars any more. They preferred to wait in line for burgers’ (Friedman 4). The equation of junk food with the acme of civilisation and humanism is surely another sign of the cultural indigence which is allowed to flourish in the global marketplace. Terry Eagleton puts us on our guard against trumpeting too glibly the benefits of cultural diversity which may conceal a more sinister agenda: ‘[postmodernism] puts its trust in pluralism—in a social order which is as diverse and inclusive as possible [. . .]. Most of the time, at least, it is eager to mix together as many diverse cultures as possible, so that it can peddle its commodities to them all’ (Eagleton 18–19). To return to fiction, both The God of Small Things and A Suitable Boy earned large sums in advances around the world, indicating that it is the market’s confidence in a product as much as its intrinsic artistic worth which artificially determines its success in advance.

20However, it is not only publishing houses and captains of industry who are engaged in energetically marketing the margins. Although undoubtedly well-intentioned, the sort of fröhliche postcolonialism, twin of fröhliche postmodernism, practised by a Western academy dreaming of a unified world order may be an important contributing factor in preparing ‘otherness’ as a palatable dish for mass consumption. Much of the enthusiasm surrounding a mediocre novel such as Monica Ali’s Brick Lane (2003), a conventionally written and unconvincing love story set in the East End of London, involving an older married Bangladeshi woman and a young British-born Muslim committed to the cause of Islamic Fundamentalism, is the result of Fish’s ‘strong multiculturalism’, the championing of difference for its own sake in a climate where a high cultural value is placed on otherness, and marginality has become an economically and intellectually viable institution. Such politically correct slumming on the part of Western and Westernized intellectuals, contributes unwittingly to emasculating difference by its undiscerning and unconditional support, as Fish explains: ‘The strong multiculturalist takes difference so seriously as a general principle that he cannot take any particular difference seriously, cannot allow its imperatives their full realization in a political program, for their full realization would inevitably involve the suppression of difference’ (Fish 384). In other words, some of us may have a vested interest in maintaining the minor in minority. However purely cerebral our original motives, as champions of multiculturalism and connoisseurs of difference, we may find ourselves enmeshed in a process of commodification, reinforcing the very status quo which we originally set out to resist. This may turn out to be one-way cultural traffic, only another of ‘the covert ways in which the West continues to speak for others while only speaking to itself’ (Huggan 24). Unfortunately this threatens to make of postcolonial writers and thinkers the privileged purveyors of ethnicity for the mass market, ‘culture brokers mediating the global trade in exotic, culturally ‘othered’ goods’ (Huggan 26).

21If his penultimate novel is anything to go by, no-one is more aware of the compromised status of cultural production within this new empire of consumption than J.M. Coetzee. The cover blurb of Elizabeth Costello (Secker and Warburg 2003) encourages the reader to draw an ironic parallel between the author and his disillusioned heroine, an international literary icon hailing from the margins: ‘Elizabeth Costello is an Australian writer of international renown: she is fêted, studied, honoured. Famous principally for an early novel that established her reputation and from which, it seems, she will never escape, she has reached the stage, late in life, where her remaining function is to be venerated and applauded’. With tired sarcasm the Nobel Prize-winning novelist paints a scathing portrait of the globe-trotting artist as commodity: ‘One of a new breed of intellectual nomads, her life has become a series of engagements in sterile conference rooms throughout the world—a private consciousness obliged to reveal itself to a curious public’.

22Although far from an easy or satisfying read, Coetzee’s novel is remarkable for its sustained awareness of its compromised status as ‘literary theme park’ (Coetzee 208) where the writer is stuck in a ‘purgatory of clichés’ (Coetzee 206). It is a pellucid account of the inequalities inherent in the very notion of ‘world fiction’ in the age of global capitalism, as the following quote shows. The speaker is a Nigerian author friend of the eponymous heroine: ‘Of course you will find publishers in Africa, one here, one there, who will support local writers even if they will never make any money. But in the broad picture, storytelling provides a livelihood neither for publishers nor for writers’ (Coetzee 41). Coetzee is as aware as the next writer that ‘the products of knowledge are distributed unequally’ across the globe (Altbach 226 and Kumar).

23The fragmented nature of the novel which resists location much more energetically than its distinctly South-African predecessor, Disgrace, and makes a mockery of the supposedly liberatory ethos of the flattened world, also rejects the metonymic fallacy whereby single literary works or literary figures are taken as representative of a nation’s literature as a whole. Thus Elizabeth Costello is not an Australian writer first and foremost. Indeed her surname seems designed to confuse and her global mobility is synonymous with existential emptiness rather than with artistic fulfilment. Coetzee obviously refuses to subscribe to the ‘media myth of a global ‘happy family’ of roving cosmopolitan writers’ (Huggan 79) which plays into the hands of the homogenisation of individual experience.

24Although the reader may at times be disappointed by the random rather than sustained intensity of this challenging but digressive novel, Coetzee does seem to be proposing an alternative to the fashionable myth of the mobile global village and the celebratory poetics of the ‘diaspora’. Fashionable nomadic lifestyle options and the illusion of weightless global simultaneity created by new cultural technologies allowing visual communication to triumph over spatial distance may indeed contribute to the drive and vitality of contemporary fiction, but the new polycultural order also threatens to decontextualise and depoliticise literature as writers seem to operate increasingly in a new post-national and post-real universe.

Going International: The Ethics of the Intercultural

25It will be remembered that Georg Lukács proposes realism as the most effective literary tool for fostering social change, and indeed the majority of non-celebrity writers situated within postcolonial societies such as Africa, India or the Caribbean have made the most of the potential of realist writing strategies for the expression of an emerging, if problematic, nationalism. However, these concerns no longer seem relevant to those who have come unstuck from their homelands to paraphrase Rushdie, or those described by Ondaatje as ‘international bastards’ (qtd. in Iyer 46). As already hinted, the celebration of migrancy as empowerment under the pen of Rushdie and others, the unproblematic cultivation of the dislocation of culture, does not always take into account the inequality of opportunity which is as much a feature of our supposedly post-national world as its much-trumpeted lack of frontiers. The idea of uprootedness as strength, and mobility as cultural freedom, instead of poverty and exile, can be pernicious, as Terry Eagleton points out: ‘The postmodern cult of the migrant, which sometimes succeeds in making migrants sound even more enviable than rock stars, is a good deal too supercilious [. . .]. It is a hangover from the modernist cult of the exile, the satanic artist who scorns the suburban masses and plucks an elitist virtue out of his enforced dispossession’ (Eagleton 21). How then can contemporary writers ‘go international’ without selling out to the market myth of one big happy family of consumers? How can they ride on the back of the marketing masala and transform it into intercultural haute cuisine? Can those who are free to travel without let and hindrance within the new global empire configure world literature as resistance from within and use their fiction not to endorse standard values but to challenge them?

26It is at this point that Deleuze and Guattari’s exploration of minor literature converges with our analysis and can help to suggest a way forward. According to their theory, minor literature is always couched in a major language but produced by a minority within that language community and this gives it three principal characteristics: a) language becomes what they call ‘deterritorialised’, b) everything is political and c) everything has a collective value (see Deleuze and Guattari 29–31). If novelists can adhere to the first of these demands and one of the other two, it seems to me that they are on their way to becoming valuable contributors to the much-needed universal debate on the place of fiction in the existing world order, while at the same time remaining within the domain of aesthetics rather than that of mere reportage.

27The linguistic component is essential in the struggle for ethics and aesthetics. According to Deleuze and Guattari, it is only by developing a patois, by speaking in tongues, by becoming nomads, immigrants, gypsies in their own language that writers of ‘minor’ literature can develop its revolutionary potential within the context of the major. This idea of becoming a stranger in one’s own language leads us back to the concept of defamiliarisation mentioned at the beginning. It is more important, it would seem, to travel through language than to travel through space and to give readers access to maps of the mind which can ceaselessly configure the dilemmas contingent on the straddling of several different worlds at once, whether they be metaphorical or actual.

28Deleuze and Guattari’s example of the writer of ‘minor’ literature par excellence is Kafka, for his universe is peopled by anti-heroes moving from a position on the margins to confront a central abusive imperial authority with their own form of abuse, both of language and of the imaginary. Thus does the minor insidiously become the major by invading its space and effecting a form of colonisation in reverse. I should like to finish with Rushdie’s Fury, an exercise in formal and linguistic defamiliarisation which reaches right into the heart of the new empire, the epicentre of global capitalism, New York, and makes it bleed.

29In many ways it is a sad and depressing tale, showing the desperate submission of the hero to the dominant global McCulture in relation to which he is constantly defining himself and his art. However, the post-real, post-national melting pot of New York is as repellent as it is fascinating and it is the hero’s painful engagement with this tempting but threatening centrality which provides the novel with its creative impetus and finally contests the empire from within, proving that its triumph contains the seeds of its own destruction. ist aggressive version of the world as endless self-obsessed reproduction is rejected for the originality of a quixotic romanticism which tries, in desperation, to put love back at the centre. The voice behind Fury resembles that of the disembodied narrator of Jazz, it is a voice from within, speaking against. This can make of Rushdie and Morrison, and even Coetzee and Ishiguro the ‘eloquent orators’ of our time (see Huggan), those with first-hand knowledge of the empire’s workings who use that inside knowledge to reinterpret the empire to itself, while undermining it at the same time.

30Rather than becoming the celebrated members of a clique or club of shallow cosmopolitan culture brokers, earning their living as the ventriloquist dolls of the global multiculture-machine, world writers must face the challenge of politicising aesthetics as well as aestheticising politics. They must weave an international web of ideas which has resonance for the present world order without being unduly complicit with its neo-imperialist strategies. Their best hope is in a critical and self-conscious attitude, a form of artistic contestation which does not only address those belonging to what Timothy Brennan terms ‘the great conformist family of European and North American man’ (Brennan 309), but which is also relevant to a much wider community. If they can contribute to sharing out more equally the forces of intellectual resistance within the dominant paradigm and democratising knowledge, a different kind of globalisation with a varied and human, rather than a homogenised and multinational, face, may come to the fore and transform the global village into a cooperative commonwealth. Otherwise world literature is destined to become an increasingly hollow sales tag which allows its producers and its consumers to safely forget the moral responsibilities and aesthetic ambitions which alone can raise them above cultural cannibalism.