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.

Everybody’s America reassesses Pynchon’s literary career in order to explain the central role played by the racialization of American culture in the postmodernist deconstruction of subjectivity and literary authority and in the crisis in white liberal culture. It charts the evolution of both these cultural transformations from Pynchon’s early short stories, composed in the late 1950s, through Gravity’s Rainbow, published in 1973. This book demonstrates that Pynchon deploys techniques associated with the decentering of the linguistic sign and the fragmentation of narrative in order to work through the anxieties of white male subjects in their encounter with racial otherness. It also charts Pynchon’s attention to non-white and non-Euro-American voices and cultural forms, which imply an awareness of and interest in processes of transculturation occurring both within U.S. borders and between the U.S. and the Third World. In these ways, his novels attempt to acknowledge the implicit racism in many elements of white American culture and to grapple with the psychological and sociopolitical effects of that racism on both white and black Americans. The argument of Everybody’s America, however, also considers the limits of Pynchon’s implicit commitment to hybridity as a social ideal, identifying attitudes expressed in his work that suggest a residual attraction to the mainstream liberalism of the fifties and early sixties. Pynchon’s fiction dramatizes the conflict between the discourses and values of such liberalism and those of an emergent multiculturalist ethos that names and valorizes social difference and hybridity. In identifying the competition between residual liberalism and an emergent multiculturalism, Everybody’s America makes its contribution to the broader understanding of postmodern culture.

Signs and Cities is the first book to consider what it means to speak of a postmodern moment in African-American literature. Dubey argues that for African-American studies, postmodernity best names a period, beginning in the early 1970s, marked by acute disenchantment with the promises of urban modernity and of print literacy. Dubey shows how black novelists from the last three decades have reconsidered the modern urban legacy and thus articulated a distinctly African-American strain of postmodernism. She argues that novelists such as Octavia Butler, Samuel Delany, Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, Ishmael Reed, Sapphire, and John Edgar Wideman probe the disillusionment of urban modernity through repeated recourse to tropes of the book and scenes of reading and writing. Ultimately, she demonstrates that these writers view the book with profound ambivalence, construing it as an urban medium that cannot recapture the face-to-face communities assumed by oral and folk forms of expression.

The 'transnational' turn has transformed modernist studies, challenging Western authority over modernism and positioning race and racial theories at the very centre of how we now understand modern literature. Modernism and Race examines relationships between racial typologies and literature in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, drawing on fin de siécle versions of anthropology, sociology, political science, linguistics and biology. Collectively, these essays interrogate the anxieties and desires that are expressed in, or projected onto, racialized figures. They include new outlines of how the critical field has developed, revaluations of canonical modernist figures like James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Ford Madox Ford and Wyndham Lewis, and accounts of writers often positioned at the margins of modernism, such as Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay and the Holocaust writers Solomon Perel and Gisella Perl. This collection by leading scholars of modernism will make an important contribution to a growing field.

Challenges existing paradigms of knowledge as they relate to Asian Americans.

The slave experience was a defining one in American history, and not surprisingly, has been a significant and powerful trope in African American literature. In Re-Forming the Past, A. Timothy Spaulding examines contemporary revisions of slave narratives that use elements of the fantastic to redefine the historical and literary constructions of American slavery. In their rejection of mimetic representation and traditional historiography, postmodern slave narratives such as Ishmael Reed's Flight to Canada, Octavia Butler's Kindred, Toni Morrison's Beloved, Charles Johnson's Ox Herding Tale and Middle Passage, Jewelle Gomez's The Gilda Stories, and Samuel Delaney's Stars in My Pocket like Grains of Sand set out to counter the usual slave narrative's reliance on realism and objectivity by creating alternative histories based on subjective, fantastic, and non-realistic representations of slavery. As these texts critique traditional conceptions of history, identity, and aesthetic form, they simultaneously re-invest these concepts with a political agency that harkens back to the original project of the 19th-century slave narratives. In their rejection of mimetic representation and traditional historiography, Spaulding contextualizes postmodern slave narrative. By addressing both literary and popular African American texts, Re-Forming the Past expands discussions of both the African American literary tradition and postmodern culture.

In this innovative approach to southern literary cultures, Thadious Davis analyzes how black southern writers use their spatial location to articulate the vexed connections between society and environment, particularly under segregation and its legacies.<

The book deals with film, television, information technology, consumer products and popular literature, and assesses challenges to conceptions of the postmodern based on gender, race and religion.

A fascinating variety of writing has been produced in the period since the Second World War. Much of this can be helpfully understood by reference to postmodernism. Many important texts in the period, however, are distorted when this label is applied to them, and others are actively anti-postmodernist. Postmodern Literature accessibly defines postmodernism, compares and contrasts it with modernism, and places it in its historical context, especially in relation to crucial phenomena like Auschwitz, the clashing of ideologies, and the prevalence of propaganda and misinformation. It discusses the major theorists of postmodernism, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Fredric Jameson and Jean Baudrillard, and demonstrates how their theories illuminate the work of postmodernist writers such as John Ashbery, Walter Abish and Angela Carter. It defines the key postmodern theories of language, race and gender--poststructuralism, postcolonialism, and feminism--and explores their often fraught relationships with postmodernism in relation to important writers such as Toni Morrison, Adrienne Rich and Salman Rushdie.

What is the political value of time, and where does that value reside? Should politics place its hope in future possibility, or does that simply defer action in the present? Can the present ground a vision of change, or is it too circumscribed by the status quo? In Qualified Hope: A Postmodern Politics of Time, Mitchum Huehls contends that conventional treatments of time's relationship to politics are limited by a focus on real-world experiences of time. By contrast, the innovative literary forms developed by authors in direct response to political events such as the Cold War, globalization, the emergence of identity politics, and 9/11 offer readers uniquely literary experiences of time. And it is in these literary experiences of time that Qualified Hope identifies more complicated--and thus more productive--ways to think about the time-politics relationship. Qualified Hope challenges the conventional characterization of postmodernism as a period in which authors reject time in favor of space as the primary category for organizing experience and knowledge. And by identifying a common commitment to time at the heart of postmodern literature, Huehls suggests that the period-defining divide between multiculturalism and theory is not as stark as previously thought.