Pain and Prejudice in the World Literary Market

Abstract:In 2008, zadie smith found two possible paths for the future of the Anglophone novel in Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland and Tom McCarthy’s Remainder. Though “one is the strong refusal of the other,” the opposed works share a “constructive frustration,” namely, “the frustrated sense of having come to the authenticity party exactly a century late!” But if what Smith calls “the authenticity baton” indeed passed on from white Oxbridge graduates “to women, to those of color, to people of different sexualities, to people from far off, war-torn places,” then it is high time to review what those supposedly timely writers produced, what futures they’ve been envisioning for the Anglophone novel. For the so-called global novel has not lacked frustrations of its own: that is, a (market) pressure to perform one’s authenticity, which is perhaps a polite way of saying the requirement that one continuously and convincingly perform one’s suffering. The authenticity baton, as it turns out, comes with implicit rules, such as the dictate that an African or Asian author continuously and ostentatiously display her ties to “far off, war-torn places” even if her country of origin has, over time, found comparative peace and affluence.