Postmodern Literature and RaceLen Platt, Sara Upstone Postmodernism and Race explores the question of how dramatic shifts in conceptions of race in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have been addressed by writers at the cutting edge of equally dramatic transformations of literary form. An opening section engages with the broad question of how the geographical and political positioning of experimental writing informs its contribution to racial discourses, while later segments focus on central critical domains within this field: race and performativity, race and the contemporary nation, and postracial futures. With essays on a wide range of contemporary writers, including Bernadine Evaristo, Alasdair Gray, Jhumpa Lahiri, Andrea Levy, and Don DeLillo, this volume makes an important contribution to our understanding of the politics and aesthetics of contemporary writing. |
Contents
Postcolonialism Postmodernism and Race | 13 |
Race and the Crisis of the Postmodern Social Novel | 31 |
Cosmopolitics Writ Small | 47 |
and Black Postmodern Detective Fiction | 65 |
Intertextuality Race and Difference | 82 |
Performing Race in Caryl Phillipss Dancing in the Dark | 98 |
Appropriate Appropriation? Ishmael Reeds NeoHooDoo | 113 |
Alasdair Gray Race | 129 |
The Hideous Embarrassments | 177 |
White Male Nostalgia in Don DeLillos Underworld | 195 |
Rushdie Barnes | 211 |
The Whiteness of David Foster Wallace | 228 |
Revisiting the Work of Zadie Smith | 247 |
Racial Neoliberalism and Whiteness in Pynchons Gravitys | 264 |
Black British Historiographic | 279 |
| 295 | |
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aesthetic African African-American Alasdair Gray Alex’s American argues Ballard’s becomes blackface body British butt Caryl Phillips characters Clarence Major colonial colour concept construction contemporary context critical critique cultural David Foster Wallace DeLillo detective fiction discourse Dubravka Ugrešić England English essay ethnic European experience fantasy father Foer Gravity’s Rainbow Gray’s historiographic metafiction ideological imagination imperial intertextuality Jewish Jonathan kind literary literature London Mailer metafiction minstrel minstrelsy modern Morrison narrative narrator national identity négritude Negro Nick Nick’s novelists O’Connor’s one’s performance political position postcolonial postmod postmodern literature postmodernist Pran privilege question race racial identity racialised racism reader realism reality Reed Reed’s Reflex and Bone representation Routledge Rushdie Rushdie’s Salman Rushdie Scottish sense Signifying Signifying Rappers Slothrop stereotypes structures suggests textual theory Thomas’s tion Toni Morrison tradition tribe Ugrešić University Press voice Wallace’s white male Williams’s writing York Zadie Smith