The Ruse of Reading: The Postcolonial Literary Marketplace and the Novels of Gina Apostol

• Main Author: Martin, Maria Gabriela
• Format: text
• Published: Archīum Ateneo 2021
• Subjects: postcolonial; literary marketplace; authorial strategy; cosmopolitanism; native informant; Modern Literature; Race, Ethnicity and Post-Colonial Studies
• Online Access: https://archium.ateneo.edu/english-faculty-pubs/158; https://archium.ateneo.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1158&context=english-faculty-pubs
• Institution: Ateneo De Manila University

This paper explores the politics of reading in the novelistic production of Gina Apostol in relation to Sarah Brouillette’s analysis of the postcolonial literary marketplace, Timothy Brennan’s critique of cosmopolitanism, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s tracking of the native informant in postcolonial discourse. In Brouillette’s work, postcolonial writers, unlike the Romantic author who disavows commercial popularity, are aware of the commodification of their work and interact with it, either through resistance or complicity. Cosmopolitanism for Brennan denotes an unequal flow of intellectual commodities between center and periphery instantiated in the consciousness of the migrant writer valorized in “international book markets because of their authentic native attachment to a specific Third World locale” (“Cosmopolitans and Celebrities” 3). Lastly, the native informant, in Spivak’s A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, is a postcolonial subject whose self-representation projects the ascendancy of liberal Western discourse while authenticating a homogenized identity for the ‘Other’.