A critique of postcolonial reason: Toward a history of the vanishing present

Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison provides a personal inquiry into the significance of African-American literary imagination. Her goal, she states at the outset, is to \"put forth an argument for extending the study of American literature\". Author of \"Beloved\", \"The Bluest Eye\", \"Song of Solomon\", and other vivid portrayals of black American experience, Morrison ponders the effect that living in a historically racialized society has had on American writing in the 19th and 20th centuries. She argues that race has become a metaphor, a way of referring to forces, events, and forms of social decay, economic division, and human panic. Her argument is that the central characteristics of American literature - individualism, masculinity, the insistence upon innocence coupled to an obsession with figurations of death and hell - are responses to a dark and abiding Africanist presence.

Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination.

Science in Fiction

The Black Album

Politics of the possible.

Drawing on whiteness studies and psychoanalytical theory, this article explores representations of interracial relationships as a means to claim and/or contest the ideal of whiteness in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist. In Hamid’s novel, the 9/11 attacks trigger a crisis in self-identification for model-minority Pakistani protagonist Changez, which proves illuminating in terms of the invisible racial subjugation exerted so far upon him by Jim, Changez’s passport into the corporate world, and by Erica, his (white) lifeline to exclusive Manhattan. The article focuses on the ways in which Hamid uses the post-9/11 context to reveal the racial melancholia surreptitiously informing today’s “new” versions of the American Dream, which is apparent in Changez’s and Erica’s relationship as well as in their parallel impossible mourning of the broken mirror of “white” Am/Erica. Emphasizing the extent to which whiteness and racial melancholia permeate the discourse of assimilation, Hamid’s book rewrites the ...

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Possessed by whiteness: Interracial affiliations and racial melancholia in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist

Indo-Caribbean feminism has emerged as a compelling and exciting area of scholarship in the past thirty years or so, although its distinctive achievements have suffered from lack of visibility. Thi...

Indo-Caribbean feminist thought: genealogies, theories, enactments

It is now widely acknowledged that the field of postcolonial studies has been by and large averse to exploring aesthetic matters (see Boehmer 2010; Hiddleston 2011; Hitchcock 2003), save for discus...

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/17449855.2017.1419840

“Minor” genres in postcolonial literatures: New webs of meaning

In Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace (2007), Sarah Brouillette expands on Graham Huggan’s exploration of the current entanglement between “the language of resistance” inherent...

“Tell it slant”: Postcoloniality and the fiction of biographical authenticity in Hanif Kureishi’s My Ear at His Heart: Reading My Father:

This essay looks at two recent Asian American texts written in the first-person plural – namely Julie Otsuka’s The Buddha in the attic (2011) and Chang-rae Lee’s On such a full sea (2014). Its main goal is to show that the ambiguities and tensions here generated by we narration prove particularly apt when it comes to calling into question essentialist views concerning the anatomy of community-building. But my contention is that these two we texts are particularly interesting at a theoretical level, too, in that they help us challenge the orthodoxies of traditional narrative theory – among which Gerard Genette’s all-too-rigid distinction between the homo- and heterodiegetic levels in a text, or the generalized assumption, which has been notably challenged by Mieke Bal, that every act of story-telling is necessarily indebted to ‘a’ narrator, and a narrator of anthropomorphic standards at that.

/pdf/we-narration-in-chang-rae-lee-s-on-such-a-full-sea-and-julie-24ggalco21.pdf

Delphine Munos

Papers

Possessed by whiteness: Interracial affiliations and racial melancholia in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist

Indo-Caribbean feminist thought: genealogies, theories, enactments

“Minor” genres in postcolonial literatures: New webs of meaning

“Tell it slant”: Postcoloniality and the fiction of biographical authenticity in Hanif Kureishi’s My Ear at His Heart: Reading My Father:

We narration in Chang-rae Lee’s On such a full sea and Julie Otsuka’s The Buddha in the attic: “Unnaturally” Asian American?