The Postcolonial Cultural Industry: Icons, Markets, Mythologies

ISBN-13: 9781137272584 / Angielski / Twarda / 2014 / 272 str.

Sandra Ponzanesi

Opis

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.

Recenzje

'In the many 'scattered speculations' on a robust global marketplace for cultural exotica, repeatedly the stress has fallen on the appropriation, reification, and commodification of postcolonial artworks. Sandra Ponzanesi's The Postcolonial Cultural Industry offers a refreshingly new take on the contemporary scene. Even as she investigates precisely how culture industries (film studios to presses) capitalize on all things postcolonial, Ponzanesi highlights those artworks that routinely escape commodification through their canny renegotiation of the culture games. A must read for scholars of cultural globalization, The Postcolonial Cultural Industry is a critically astute and intellectually lively book on the political economy of postcolonial studies.' - Bishnupriya Ghosh, University of California, USA

O autorze

Sandra Ponzanesi is Professor of Gender and Postcolonial Studies, Department of Media and Culture Studies, Utrecht University, the Netherlands. Among her main publications are: Paradoxes of Postcolonial Culture (2004), Postcolonial Cinema Studies (2012), Deconstructing Europe (2012), Gender, Globalization and Violence (2014), Postcolonial Transitions in Europe (2016).