In Stereotype: South Asia in the Global Literary Imaginary by Mrinalini Chakravorty (review)

We all think we know what a stereotype is: it is a pejorative term denoting simplistic and biased assumptions that get attached to various individuals and groups. In this sense, to dismiss something as a “stereotype” is to deem it unworthy of further analysis. However Mrinalini Chakravorty’s brilliant new book, In Stereotype: South Asia in the Global Literary Imaginary, makes us reconsider the stereotype as a mobile and productive concept. Identifying persistent stereotypes that adhere to South Asia and South Asianness—crowds and overpopulation, hunger and slums, violence and death, labor and migrancy, and terror and outsourcing—Chakravorty argues that excavating the workings of stereotypes illuminates the larger ethical stakes of global literature.

In Stereotype begins by investigating the stereotype as a modern technology for transmitting ideas about “other” worlds and cultures. Indeed, as the introduction explains, the stereotype is rooted in the technologies of print culture; the very word refers to the use of a mold of fixed type to facilitate ease and speed in printing. As a representational form, however, stereotypes are given to shape shifting. Rarely is only one stereotype being evoked at one time, and even the most commonplace of stereotypes are capable of morphing into something else. Despite their reputation as being flat and unconsidered commonplaces, on second glance stereotypes are never quite what they seem.

Chakravorty’s clear and compelling glosses of different theoretical takes on the stereotype convinced this reader, at least, of the importance of considering the stereotype. But what is most stunning about In Stereotype is how it brings to the fore the politics of reading stereotypes and of the affective responses they evoke. That is, it is not enough simply to critique and dismiss stereotypes, rather we must also consider our intimate relationship to them as readers. In other words, as Chakravorty persuasively argues, “this book is ultimately an attempt to conceive the stereotype anew as a site of an ethical demand that calls forth our complicity in stereotypes with which we entangle, and in the ways in which these stereotypes signify the histories we witness through them” (36).

The book begins with a number of “provocations” about the workings of stereotypes. These are then elaborated over a series of chapters on specific stereotypes in relation to a text or a constellation of texts. The second chapter turns to Salman Rushdie’s canonical work, Midnight’s Children, to think through how it mobilizes and disrupts (in some salutary ways and some less so) stereotypes of overpopulation. Its careful consideration of the multitude as both the horizon and problem of political possibility builds beautifully to a third chapter on the stereotype of the slum. Contemplating the hit film Slumdog Millionaire and Aravind Adiga’s Booker Prize winning novel, White Tiger, this chapter unpacks representations of slums as at once training grounds for successful neoliberal subjectivity and holding pens for globalization’s victims. What follows in chapter four, which focuses on representations of violence and death in Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost, is one of the most breathtaking analyses in the book. Here Chakravorty argues that because the novel insists that “the articulation of rights on the basis of an individual death is thwarted in places mired with the deaths of many” (147), Anil’s Ghost forces readers to rethink a human rights framework. The next chapter moves us from the subcontinent to the UK, taking up at once how stereotypes migrate and the stereotype of migrancy in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane. In this, the very movement of stereotypes along with people puts under crisis the definition of Britishness itself. Finally the last chapter looks at the linked stereotypes of outsourcing and terror in the transnational moment. It considers Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist alongside popular representations of outsourcings to unpack how all of these works join and hold in tension ideas of terror and labor. The book concludes with a larger consideration of the debates around...