INTRODUCTION: Forms of cultural enclosure

Abstract

This special issue, developed from papers originally presented at the “Cultural Enclosure and Literary Form” conference at the University of Oxford in September 2022, explores the phenomenon of “cultural enclosure”: the commodification of culture via tourism, ethnic marketing, cultural property patents, and other cultural industries. It does so by bringing together two distinct concepts of “enclosure”: the appropriation of the commons and the formal framing strategies that produce impressions of totality and internal coherence. Moreover, it does so with a focus on postcoloniality: that is, on how the narratives, artworks, and institutions under study are implicated in experiences of colonization and its aftermath. Given “culture's” supposed status as the “possessing possession” (Said 1991, 9) – as precisely inalienable from specific places and persons – how does culture enclosure take place and how is it imaginatively framed by its agents? What concepts of “culture” are being mobilized in cultural enclosure projects? Is it better to speak of the dispossession of culture or the alienating forced performance of culture – or both? How is cultural enclosure represented in literary texts and artworks, and how does it, in turn, shape their existence? The articles collected in this issue take up the challenge of analysing “enclosure” at multiple levels of analysis, examining how literary texts, artworks, and institutions deploy formal enclosing strategies to engage concepts of culture, and cultural enclosure, while also revealing how these engagements may contradict, for instance, the ideas of represented characters, or real-world publishers.