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Impostors

Literary Hoaxes and Cultural Authenticity

By: Christopher L. Miller

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Paperback | 10 December 2018 | Edition Number 1

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Paperback
272 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
2.28 x 1.56 x 0.16

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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.

Industry Reviews

"Impostors is another brilliant intervention by Miller on representation and difference. Applying his astonishing erudition and sharp comparative eye to a variety of cases, Miller elaborates a generative theory of 'intercultural hoaxes, ' inviting us to take seriously their consequences as contentious literary events."--Lydie E. Moudileno, Marion Frances Chevalier Professor of French, University of Southern California
"Miller is an accomplished author and scholar, a pioneer of Francophone literature in the American academy, and his work is a touchstone for Francophone Studies more globally. There is no existing book like this one, in its particular comparative approach, in its attention to the complexities of the hoax, and what it entails for our reading praxes. In its genre, Impostors is without a doubt an original work of scholarship."-- "Lia Brozgal, University of California, Los Angeles"

"Miller's elegant book makes one feel for the dupes who praised a work's authenticity. He shows that many found what they wanted to hear in these impostures. . . . Impostors ultimately becomes a study of the nature of authorship and the act of reading."

--Rohan McWilliam "Times Higher Education"

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