Reading in the Global Literary Marketplace: Material and Textual Affects

Materialist scholarship on postcolonial literature’s relationship with global publishing industries has radically altered the ways in which we conceive of writers’ and texts’ postcolonial agency. Its interest in the foreclosures of the marketplace has made it difficult to identify texts and practices of reading alike as postcolonial, as textualist traditions have long done so. Yet, even if somewhat devalued by materialist postcolonialisms, reading remains valuable, particularly because it presents opportunities for self-reconstitution and political self-recognition. Indeed, it is precisely because reading is not material or textual, but hybrid, that it holds such ethical and political potential. This essay departs from materialist and textualist postcolonial scholars’ tendency to prescribe strategies of reading, instead concerning itself with describing reading as it actually takes place. Drawing on Wolfgang Iser’s reader-response theory, in conjunction with affect theory and theories of the ethics and politics of reading, the essay develops an innovative model of reading, which understands readers as comprising a reading self and a self-in-the-world. This model of reading reasserts postcolonial literatures’ agencies at the site of consumption as well as democratizes reading by undermining prescriptions of reading and meaning.