Chick Lit as a North-South and South-South ‘Frontier Migration’? A Special Focus on South African and Indian Chick Lit

In this article, my main aim is to read localized non-white chick lit as a genre moving both across the Global North/Global South divide and within each of these spaces. By discussing non-white chick lit of the Global North outside of the North American and the Anglophone zones, my readings of Aboriginal Australian and “Afro-Parisian” chick lit will offer introductory inroads into the scope of the genre and show how writers such as Anita Heiss and Léonora Miano have re-politicized chick lit with a view to, respectively, giving new visibility to marginalized communities and to South-South dynamics within these communities. In the second and main part of this article, my comparative reading of selected Indian chick lit (by Swati Kaushal, Rajashree, and Advaita Kala) and South African chick lit (by Zukiswa Wanner and Nozizwe Cynthia Jele) will participate in putting on the map texts published outside of the Global North literary market. My contention is that the macropolitics of chick lit’s North-South “frontier migration” (Myambo) is being increasingly complicated by the entanglement of the global and the local in Global South literary markets and that these Global South versions of the genre have now significantly departed from the original chick lit “global template” (Suman Gupta).