Flutterby™! : Pandering to Western Audiences

Worth reading on a lot of fronts. Via Mary Anne Mohanraj: Why Am I Brown? South Asian Fiction and Pandering to Western Audiences by Jabeen Akhtar, on how stereotypes are promulgated by publishing mechanisms:

In fact, South Asian diaspora novels expose little about the flesh-and-blood people they are trying to portray and everything about the hypocrisy of the publishing enterprise: South Asian authors characterizing immigrant life with clichés and co-opting third-world problems for insta-tragedies; White Guilt readers who feel that they are doing something about third-world problems by proxy just by reading novels about them; and the Western publishing elite who think they’re multi-culti because they make their own hummus and wear earrings from World Market when they are, in reality, only comfortable seeing foreigners behave within the confines of their stereotypes.