Oprah's Paton, or south Africa and the Globalization of Suffering

Abstract

This article emerges from the author's work for Oprah.com: the website of Harpo Inc., Oprah Winfrey's vast multinational media corporation. From December 2003 to January 2004, Barnard served as the official “literary guide” to members of Oprah's Book Club as they made their way through Alan Paton's novel Cry, the Beloved Country. The essay meditates on this most recent chapter in this “hypercanonical” book's transnational reception. Barnard agrues that, as mediated by Oprah, Cry, the Beloved Country is no longer the problematic, urbophobic “Jim Goes to Joburg” story that South African readers (including such important figures as Esk'ia Mphahlele, Stephen Watson, Tony Morphet, and J.M. Coetzee) have often subjected to sharp critique. It is transformed into an “Oprah” product: a narrative in which “the glamour of misery,” as Eva Illouz has termed Oprah's chief stock-in-trade, generates a highly sentimental and commercialized form of global thinking and feeling. The essay closes with a series of reflections on the general implications of Oprah's Paton for future studies of literary reception. While Barnard is hesitant to entirely reject Oprah Winfrey's form of empathetic globalization (it is clearly preferable to the globalization of greed, revenge, and religious polarization sponsored by the Bush administration), it is nevertheless, in her view, inseparable from voyeurism and profit and is far too closely tied to a therapeutic feel-good mode of consumption to be ethical in any serious sense. Though a singular media event, the “Americanization” of this South African novel under the auspices of Oprah's Book Club tells us much about the instability of cultural products as they make the South-North or North-South passage across the Atlantic.