As Rachel Adams writes in “The Ends of America, the Ends of Postmodernism” (2007), a new wave of American writers is engaging with globalized, technological consumerism in fresh and innovative ways. Unlike some critics, most notably Fredric Jameson, Adams does not claim that postmodernism is a “cultural dominant” (Jameson 191) without end. Rather, she historicizes postmodernism as an aesthetic movement, lasting from World War II to the end of the Cold War. She considers a shift to “globalism” as a “dominant conceptual and thematic force in contemporary American fiction” (251). While she says this shift is characterized by the work of Junot Dı́az, Jhumpa Lahiri, Edwidge Danticat, and other immigrant or second-generation authors, she concentrates on Karen Tei Yamashita’s novel Tropic of Orange (1997), which she claims expresses “the more global, multiethnic perspectives of a generation that is refashioning older understandings of identity and politics” (261). While I agree that globalism and transnationalism are major trends in contemporary fiction, Adams glosses over the work of other writers, such as Gary Shteyngart, who are situated between white male high postmodernist writers and more globally identified writers such as Yamashita. Shteyngart complicates the often utopian reading of transnationalism that Adams and other critics support.

Super Sad True Melting Pot: Reimagining the Melting Pot in a Transnational World in Gary Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story

This article examines the function of dystopia in Margaret Atwood‘s The Handmaid‘s Tale(1986). The study will mainly focus of the issues of women marginalization and political corruption by approaching the dystopia qualities in the novel. On the one hand, women marginalization is going to be identified be discussing the inferior position in society as depicted in the novel. This is because women are exploited for domestic drudgery. They lose their equality since there is no opportunity allowed for them to be as independent as men. On the other hand, the issue of political corruption will be explored to sustain the study‘s concern with novel‘s dystopian world. Accordingly, both women marginalization and political corruption will be elaborated as the dystopian peculiarities which contradict Atwood‘s style that seeks utopia society and a world that seems to be utterly corrupted. Therefore, postfeminism is going to be applied as the study‘s theoretical framework, whereby women marginalization will be discussed in politically corrupted peripheries

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Women marginalization and political corruption in Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale

The 1990s, which marked the five-hundred year anniversary of Columbus’ “discovery” of the Americas, coincided with the emergence of new additions to the canon of dystopian literature. Produced by authors who are not typically associated with the genre, these novels argue that dystopia is not something
we need to imagine because it is already here. Two examples—Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead (1991) and Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange (1997)—overly equate our dystopia with the ruinous impact that colonialism and capitalism have on racialized non-white persons.

Trespassing the U.S.-Mexico Border in Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead and Karen Tei Yamashita's Tropic of Orange

Abstract:Jeremiah's body functions as a canvas in the book on which loss of patriarchal privilege due to colonization plays out. This article looks at three tropes of masculinity in the book: drunkenness, bodily markings, and gendered prophetic performance to explore how the text uses metaphoric images to represent this rhetorical strategy. The article relates these tropes to gender performances by contemporary white males who also negotiate loss of patriarchal privilege.

TaraLee

Papers

Blast, Corrupt, Dismantle, Erase: Contemporary North American Dystopian Literature