(Post)colonial Books as Commodity and Anti-Commodity
Year: 2025
Type: book-chapter
Abstract: The two possibly most-sold and most-read ‘classics’ of the postcolonial canon, such as it may be, are Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899/1902) and Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958). Both have achieved bestseller status, and have been reprinted in the thousands, in iconic editions in Everyman’s, OUP’s World’s Classics, and Heinemann’s African Writers Series, not to mention Penguin. Both works have become exemplary literary commodities, extracted from their complex initial contexts of production, launched into mass-market global circulation and transformed into packaged teaching texts (often within the framework of similarly commodified anthologies) within highly normed pedagogical systems. This article takes a third mass-market paperback novel, M. J. Vassanji’s The Book of Secrets (1996), to make an argument about the ways in which postcolonial texts can also be read as anti-commodities, as auratic entities that resist commodification. As such, they give rise to affective networks within which commodities are constantly accruing social use values – thereby making them co-agents in processes of subversion and revivification.
Author: Russell West-Pavlov
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W4415178245