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p r o lo g u e 9
What vision of the global south prevails in our encounters with art— specifically narrative art—that turns on cultural stereotypes? This is the main question that motivates the substance of In Stereotype. As the example of the festival shows, stereotypes of uneven global development circulate freely in global literary texts and contexts alike. They provoke disputes that stem from well-known narratives about civilizational backwardness and progress, about the world divided into dangerous and safe zones. The prevalence of such stereotypes in contemporary literary texts, however, also reflects the vexed position of readers caught in their thickness. They compel consumers of the global novel to confront a set of ethical questions: How does my presence as a reader involve me in these storied images of suffering elsewhere in the world? What attention do these novels call to us as voyeurs into life-worlds mediated by stereotypes? How do representations about the lives of others conjoin phantasmic ideas about cultural otherness with life as it is lived by real people, in real places? Moreover, what kind of an ethical web do portraits of ruptured communities and disavowed lives construct in which we find ourselves so tangled? For as readers must often admit, repelled as they may be with narrative stereotypes, they are often oddly moved by them. It is why global novels about other worlds continue to endure and allure. The encounters between readers and texts, however, always remain singular. Each act of scrutiny remands viewers as individual, meaning-producing witnesses called on to relate to shifting yet set representations influenced by their own singularly differing subjectivities, their sense of self as affective and social beings, their racial, cultural, and gender identifications. This is to say, the most salient understanding about narrative stereotypes may well be that while they seem to project certitudes about the lives of others, they are actually equally about us. These texts offer insight about how stereotypes circulate to mediate the enigma of relations between “self ” and “other,” to gesture to ways in which our ideas of otherness are ultimately reflections of how we see ourselves.27 Hence, our encounters with stereotypes of otherness, this book suggests, is very much about an apprehension of how we see ourselves placed in the world. The debates about literary culture that swirl around Jaipur, and contemporary fictions about South Asia require that we read these fictions with an insertion of ourselves between the frames. As millennial readers