Category: 28.2 The Postcolonial Cultural Industry

Review | Splintered Visions This is a book review by Paolo de Medeiros of Sandra Ponzanesi’s (also in this issue) The Postcolonial Cultural Industry: Icons, Markets, Mythologies.

Masterclass | Framing Blackness and Appropriating Monstrosity in Blacula Abstract This article considers how the Blaxploitation horror classic Blacula (1972) frames and (re)appropriates race, blackness, and monstrosity where genres meet. An analysis of Blacula illustrates how African-American filmmakers and audiences profited from Hollywood’s shifting priorities in the late 1960s as a means to enable black… Continue reading 28.2 | Laura Isherwood

Postcoloniality and the “Cultural Turn” Abstract This essay discusses a significant theme in the field of postcolonial studies, that is, the paradox that culture as a political legitimation of identity is also subject to the violence of representation. Focusing on Kwame Anthony Appiah’s much-cited essay “Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial?” as… Continue reading 28.2 | Akin Adesokan

Postcolonial Exceptionality and the Portuguese Language: José Eduardo Agualusa’s The Book of Chameleons Abstract Language discourse attached to Portuguese national culture has been critical for the re-establishment of the imperial centre in the space of encounter between Portugal and its former colonies. The Angolan writer José Eduardo Agualusa has been problematising this centrality; both criticising… Continue reading 28.2 | Patricia Schor

Ananda Devi and Dany Laferrière: The Cultural Industry, Poverty Discourse, and Postcolonial Literatures in French Abstract In response to Sandra Ponzanesi’s call to devise better tools of analysis for understanding how postcolonial literature operates as both commodity and aesthetic, this article claims that one of the roles of the postcolonial novel in the early twenty-first… Continue reading 28.2 | Alessandra Benedicty–Kokken

The Postcolonial Cultural Industry: From Consumption to Distinction Abstract Drawing from Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s critical notion of the culture industry, this essay explores how postcolonial texts cater to cosmopolitan audiences who, according to Bourdieu’s idea of “distinction,” thrive on the consumption of global goods with local flare. Taking Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie as an… Continue reading 28.2 | Sandra Ponzanesi