In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • The Typographic Imagination
  • Priya Joshi (bio)
Mrinalini Chakravorty, In Stereotype: South Asia in the Global Literary Imaginary. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. 336 pp. $50.00.

Around 1800, a French printer developed a new technology to speed up the reprinting of popular titles. Rather than having to reset type each time a work needed to be reprinted, Firmin Didot found a way to cast type from the original plates of a work. The new technology, called stereotype (or cliché), was hailed for its accuracy, since the stereotype plate did not introduce errors into the reprinting process. So far so good. The printer could swiftly reprint a title without incurring the expense of resetting type for each new edition. With the popularity of the novel and the increased demand for reprints in the nineteenth century, the new technology prospered. However, the stereotype, once lauded for its ability to reproduce text without error, came to be condemned by mid-century precisely for these virtues. By 1850 or thereabouts, the word “stereotype” emerged to connote monotony, then conformity. “Stereotype” today denotes an erroneous or inaccurate oversimplification of something or someone rather than a reliable copy. Mechanical reproduction, it seems, is not so attractive in a world where change, speed, and mutation have come to be valued for renewing the social order. The more the industrial world “mechanizes,” the less the social one welcomes mechanization. Or that at least is one story embedded in the technology that brought the terms “stereotype” and “cliché” from typography to mentalités. [End Page 521]

Mrinalini Chakravorty tracks the double life of stereotype as a concept that mutates dramatically from its origins in print into a cultural practice that typecasts difference. Though newer technologies of reproduction have replaced the typographic stereotype in the centuries since Firmin introduced it, the term today has nevertheless become established in speech and culture. As Chakravorty shows in In Stereotype: South Asia in the Global Literary Imaginary, the practice of stereotyping is especially present in the novel, the form that once prospered from the print practice of stereotyping and that today is itself a keen purveyor of cultural stereotypes.

Chakravorty probes the seductions of stereotypes for claiming to reveal the Other. In her reading, the global novel is an especially diligent Sherpa in the cultural traffic of stereotypes. Using South Asia as her case study, Chakravorty observes the persistent portrayal of hunger, slums, migrancy, and labor in novels of the subcontinent and asks what work these stereotypes do for the transnational circulation of the form.

“Stereotypes in global fictions . . . have a volatile relationship to reality and fantasy,” Chakravorty avers (214). To uncover the worlds that stereotypes mask and mobilize, Chakravorty urges what she names an “ethics” for reading texts and subtexts conjured in Salman Rushdie and Monica Ali, Slumdog Millionaire and White Tiger, Mohsin Hamid’s reluctant fundamentalist, and Chetan Bhagat’s recalcitrant call-center worker. The practice that emerges is not so much a set of readings but a way of reading. If the stereotype modifies and even refabricates the “original,” Chakravorty’s “ethical” reading mode exposes the dissemblance and prepares the reader to resist it.

Chakravorty’s work participates in an important conversation about the novel as a commodity that claims market stature because of its traffic in cultural stereotypes. In “World Lite,” a now-fabled essay of 2013, the editors of the magazine n + 1 partially explain why a particular form of the novel travels so well today:

In the new millennium, literature has taken a Jason Bourne–like tour through the emerging financial capitals of what used to be the third world: big books about Mumbai and Beijing, Nairobi and Sa˜o Paulo, have joined books about London and New York in a glittering constellation rotating across the night sky. In the new economic era of northern slowdown [End Page 522] and southern catch-up, the exemplary novelists have seemed to be those, like Orhan Pamuk, Ma Jian, and Haruki Murakami, who successfully transcend their homelands and emerge into a planetary system where their work can acquire a universal relevance.1

The center of gravity in n +1’s argument is very evidently the global North: confronting its...

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