Impostors : literary hoaxes and cultural authenticity / Christopher L. Miller.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Miller, Christopher L., 1953- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Literary forgeries and mystifications.

Hoaxes.

French literature--History and criticism.

French literature.

African literature (French)--History and criticism.

African literature (French).

American literature--History and criticism.

American literature.

Genre:

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Physical Description:

x, 240 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2018.

Summary:

Writing a new page in the surprisingly long history of literary deceit, Impostors examines a series of literary hoaxes, deceptions that involved flagrant acts of cultural appropriation. This book looks at authors who posed as people they were not, in order to claim a different ethnic, class, or other identity. These writers were, in other words, literary usurpers and appropriators who trafficked in what Christopher L. Miller terms the "intercultural hoax." In the United States, such hoaxes are familiar. Forrest Carter's The Education of Little Tree and JT LeRoy's Sarah are two infamous examples. Miller's contribution is to study hoaxes beyond our borders, employing a comparative framework and bringing French and African identity hoaxes into dialogue with some of their better-known American counterparts. In France, multiculturalism is generally eschewed in favor of universalism, and there should thus be no identities (in the American sense) to steal. However, as Miller demonstrates, this too is a ruse: French universalism can only go so far and do so much. There is plenty of otherness to appropriate. This French and Francophone tradition of imposture has never received the study it deserves. Taking a novel approach to this understudied tradition, Impostors examines hoaxes in both countries, finding similar practices of deception and questions of harm.

Contents:

Part 1. The land of the free and the home of the hoax

Slave narratives and white lies

The Forrest and The Tree

Danny Santiago and the ethics of ethnicity

Go ask Amazon

"I never saw it as a hoax": JT Leroy

Margaret B. Jones, Misha Defonseca, and "stolen suffering"

Minority literature and postcolonial theory

Part 2. French and francophone, fraud and fake

What is a (French) author?

The French paradox and the francophone problem

The real, the romantic, and the fake in the nineteenth century

The single-use hoax: Diderot's La Religieuse

Merimee's Illyrical Illusions

Bakary Diallo: fausse-bonte

Elissa Rhais, literacy, and identity

Sex and temperament in postwar hoaxing: Boris Vian and Raymond Queneau

Did camara lie? two African classics between canonicity and oblivion

Gary/Ajar: the hoaxing of the Goncourt prize and the making-cute of the Immigrant

Who is Chimo? sex, lies, and death in the Banlieue

Part 3. I can't believe it's not Beur: Jack-Alain Léger, Paul Smail, and Vivre Me Tue

Before "Paul Smail"

Vivre Ne Tue (living kills me, or smile)

The popular press reads Vivre Me Tue

Smail speaks (by fax)

The Leak

Did "Hundreds" of Readers Write to Paul Smaïl?

Truth and Lies à la Léger

The Scholars Weigh In

Azouz Begag's Outrage and the Right to Write

Reading: A Choice?

The Parts He Played.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 183-232) and index.

ISBN:

9780226590950

022659095X

9780226591001

022659100X

OCLC:

1028893455