Re-evaluating the Postcolonial Exotic

Abstract

This essay explores some of the effects recent developments have had on my earlier notions in The Postcolonial Exotic (2001). I will refer to two postcolonial writers, both of Sikh-Punjabi origin, who have come to prominence recently: the British-based poet Daljit Nagra and the Canadian-based poet Rupi Kaur. Both writers, Kaur especially, owe their popularity in large part to the skilful management of their self-image on social media. Both have attained a form of minor celebrity that they also comment on in their writing, whether this is articulated through an ironic politics of cultural branding (Nagra) or a self-empowering form of strategic exoticism that plays to an international (mainly female) audience while also reaching out to a more specific readership (transnational women of colour) with whose shared experiences of separation and suffering it identifies, and whose intersectional connections to histories of exploitation and marginalization it seeks collectively to represent (Kaur). Both writers are controversial, still one of the defining markers of celebrity; and both are clearly aware of, and indeed have sought to profit from, the mixed reception of their work. Both are attuned, finally, to the country-specific debates that surrounded the late twentieth-century incorporation of “multicultural” and/or “diasporic” writers into a postcolonial canon. More recently, similar debates have informed the emergence of world literature as a locally inflected global project. This exercise also tends to assume the translatability of the one into the other, and the easy digestibility of both cultural knowledge and literary form.