ABSTRACT
Focusing on the western-based music industry, this chapter puts forward a reading of the novel The Ground Beneath Her Feet that demonstrates the potential of critical theory to address the entanglement of postcolonialism and postcoloniality in Rushdie’s literary and critical writings. An update of Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s 1940s concept of culture industry, the “brown culture industry” is suggested as a variation of Ellis Cashmore’s notion of a “black culture industry” (1997) that accounted for the surfacing of a black culture industry in the North American context. After tracing the “Koolisation” of South Asian-influenced popular culture and analysing the tangled web of commodification of brown difference in the first section of this chapter, in the second section Rushdie’s novel The Ground Beneath Her Feet is examined in its connection with the idea of a brown culture industry.
