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"Postmodern Literature 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 Grey, Jhumpa Lahiri, Andrea Levy, and Don DeLillo, this volume makes an important contribution to our understanding of the politics and aesthetics of contemporary writing"--
List of contents
1. Critical histories: postcolonialism, postmodernism and race Bill Ashcroft; 2. Race and the crisis of the postmodern social novel Madhu Dubey; 3. Worlded localisms: cosmopolitics writ small David James; 4. Yellows, blacks, blues: the seductions of (black) postmodern detective fiction Bran Nicol; 5. Performing identity: intertextuality, race and difference in the South Asian novel in English Peter Morey; 6. Performing race in Caryl Phillips's Dancing in the Dark Abigail Ward; 7. Appropriate appropriation?: Ishmael Reed's hoodoo and Flannery O'Connor's artificial negroes John N. Duvall; 8. 'How Scottish I am': Alasdair Gray, race and neo-nationalism Len Platt; 9. 'Justabit fascist': Dubravka Ugreši¿, cosmopolitanism and the post-Yugoslav condition Vedrana Velickovic; 10. Postmodern prose and the discourse of the 'cultural Jew': the cases of Mailer and Foer David Witzling; 11. Race, comedy and tourism: the hideous embarrassments of Will Self's The Butt David Punter; 12. White male nostalgia in Don DeLillo's Underworld Tim Engles; 13. Postmodern revisions of Englishness: Rushdie, Barnes, Ballard Nick Bentley; 14. The whiteness of David Foster Wallace Samuel Cohen; 15. After the first decade: revisiting the work of Zadie Smith Philip Tew; 16. Racial neoliberalism and whiteness in Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow Sue J. Kim; 17. 'Some kind of black': black British historiographic metafictions and the postmodern politics of race Sara Upstone.
About the author
Len Platt is Professor of Modern Literatures at Goldsmiths, University of London. His publications include Aristocracies of Fiction: The Idea of Aristocracy in Late-Nineteenth-Century and Early-Twentieth-Century Literature; Musical Theater and American Culture (with David Walsh); Musical Comedy on the West End Stage, 1880–1939; Joyce, Race and Finnegans Wake; and the edited collection Modernism and Race.Sara Upstone is Associate Professor of English Literature at Kingston University, London. Her publications include Spatial Politics in the Postcolonial Novel; British Asian Fiction: Twenty-First-Century Voices; and the edited collection Postcolonial Spaces: The Politics of Place in Contemporary Culture (with Andrew Teverson).
