Brouillette has noted how literary texts by postcolonial writers often sit alongside the paratexts of authorial marketing, such as press interviews and media features (and in Hamid’s case journalistic forays) in a process of “authorial branding.” Taken together, these texts and paratexts emphasize commodification, whereas “the figure of the author becomes … a way of concealing mass production in individualism.” The emphasis on the supposedly authentic postcolonial writer is a response to perceived niche markets, and the public persona of the writer is, to that extent, a sign of the historical “convergence between the market position of postcolonial literatures and the market function of signatured authorship.” Far from writers being passive in this process, we can detect what Brouillette calls a “trope of self-authorization through awareness of the political uses or appropriations of one’s works.”

DEFINE: Clarifies Brouillette's concept of 'authorial branding' — the process by which a writer's public persona and paratexts (interviews, media features) emphasize commodification while concealing mass production in a figure of individual authorship.

Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, loc. 463