Postmodern Literature and Race

Description

Postmodernism 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 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.

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).