Neele Meyer, M.A.

Neele Meyer was a PhD Candidate at the Research Training Group from 2013 to 2016. 

Dissertation Abstract

Glocalizing Genre Fiction in the Global South: Indian and Latin American Post-Millennial Crime Fiction

The PhD project looks into how processes of globalization shape local publishing markets and literary production in the Global South, examines why authors often draw back on globally circulating genre fiction formats such as crime fiction and analyzes how these writers employ or alter the genre. India and Latin America (more specifically Chile and Argentina) are taken as case studies here. Notwithstanding the scarcity of direct literary relations, both regions share a similar process of appropriation of the genre. Both are often misrepresented on the 'Global Literary Market' by few canonized writers and though India and Latin America are often regarded as 'emerging book markets,' their current literary production and publishing industries are hardly ever studied.
The project looks into the circulation and reception of genre fiction and its connections to social, political and economic changes in both regions, in particular recent changes in the respective publishing industries, which are at least partly related to the regions' integration into the global capitalist market in the last decades. These processes are discussed from a diachronic and a synchronic perspective to examine how writers from both regions have 'glocalized' (Robertson) the genre in India and Latin America since its emergence at the end of the 19th century.
To address these questions, I use contributions to genre theory and the field of literature and globalization, research on Indian and Latin American genre literature as well as book market reports and interviews with publishers from the respective regions. In the analytical part, a variety of post-millennial crime fiction novels by Indian (English), Argentinean and Chilean writers like Kishwar Desai, Vikram Chandra, Claudia Piñero, Sergio Olguín, Elizabeth Supercasseaux or Mario Valdivia will be analyzed to examine whether and how genre conventions are altered and if similar strategies can be identified for writers from both regions.
The project aims to contribute to the research on the alteration of literary forms in the face of global circulation as well as the heterogeneous effects of processes of globalization on literary markets and production. Post-millennial Indian and Latin America crime fiction novels, it can be argued, are highly 'glocal' products that draw back on a local setting and are used as social commentaries which offer a space to negotiate competing identity constructions and lifestyles which have emerged because of/in opposition to economic, social or cultural transformations.