Postmodern Literature and Race (PDFDrive)

P o s t m o d e r n L i t e r at u r e a n d
R a c e
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 sec-
tion engages with the broad question of how the geographical and
political positioning of experimental writing informs its contribu-
tion to racial discourses, while later segments focus on central crit-
ical 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.
Len Pl at t 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).
Postmodern
L i t e r at u r e a n d R a c e
Edi ted by
L e n P l at t
Goldsmiths College
S a r a Up s to n e
Kingston University
32 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10013-2473, USA
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© Cambridge University Press 2015
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
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permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 2015
Printed in the United States of America
A catalog record for this publication is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication data
Postmodern literature and race / [edited by] Len Platt, Goldsmiths College;
Sara Upstone, Kingston University.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-107-04248-3 (hardback)
1. Postmodernism (Literature) 2. Race in literature. 3. Postcolonialism
in literature. I. Platt, Len, editor. II. Upstone, Sara, editor.
PN98.P67P6727 2015
809∙.9113–dc23 2014033137
ISBN 978-1-107-04248-3 Hardback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs
for external or third-party Internet Web sites referred to in this publication and does not
guarantee that any content on such Web sites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
Contents
Notes on Contributors page vii
Introduction 1
Len Platt and Sara Upstone
P art O ne Postmodern Problemati c s

1 Critical Histories: Postcolonialism, Postmodernism, and Race 13
Bill Ashcroft
2 Race and the Crisis of the Postmodern Social Novel 31
Madhu Dubey
3 Worlded Localisms: Cosmopolitics Writ Small 47
David James
P art T wo Race a nd Per f ormati vi t y

4 X-Ray Detectives: Ishmael Reed, Clarence Major
and Black Postmodern Detective Fiction 65
Bran Nicol
5 Performing Identity: Intertextuality, Race and Difference
in the South Asian Novel in English 82
Peter Morey
6 Performing Race in Caryl Phillips’s Dancing in the Dark 98
Abigail Ward
7 Appropriate Appropriation? Ishmael Reed’s Neo-HooDoo
and Flannery O’Connor’s Artificial Negroes 113
John N. Duvall
v
vi Contents
Part T h re e Nati ons and Belong i ng
8 ‘How SCOTTISH I am’: Alasdair Gray, Race and
Neo-nationalism 129
Len Platt
9 ‘Justabit-Racist’: Dubravka Ugrešić, Cosmopolitanism and
the Post-Yugoslav Condition 145
Vedrana Velickovic
10 Postmodern Prose and the Discourse of the ‘Cultural Jew’:
The Cases of Mailer and Foer 160
David Witzling
11 Race, Comedy and Tourism: The Hideous Embarrassments
of Will Self ’s The Butt 177
David Punter
Part Fo u r Revi si ng Metanarrati ve s

12 White Male Nostalgia in Don DeLillo’s Underworld 195
Tim Engles
13 Postmodern Revisions of Englishness: Rushdie, Barnes,
Ballard 211
Nick Bentley
14 The Whiteness of David Foster Wallace 228
Samuel Cohen
Part Five PostRaci al F utures?

15 After the First Decade: Revisiting the Work of Zadie Smith 247
Philip Tew
16 Racial Neoliberalism and Whiteness in Pynchon’s Gravity’s
Rainbow 264
Sue J. Kim
17 ‘Some Kind of Black’: Black British Historiographic
Metafictions and the Postmodern Politics of Race 279
Sara Upstone
Index 295
Notes on Contributors
Bill Ashcroft is Professor in the School of Arts and Media at the

University of New South Wales, Australia. He is a renowned critic and
founding theorist of postcolonial studies and coauthor of The Empire
Writes Back, the first text to examine systematically and name this
field of literary and cultural study. He is author and coauthor of six-
teen books, including four second editions, variously translated into
five languages, and more than 160 chapters and articles. He is on the
editorial boards of ten international journals. He has been awarded a
five-year Australian Professorial Fellowship beginning in 2011 to work
on a project entitled ‘Future Thinking: Utopianism in Post-colonial
Literatures’.
N i c k B e nt l ey is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Keele
University. His main research interests are in post-1945 British literature
and literary and cultural theory, especially in intersections of postmod-
ernism, postcolonialism, and contemporary fiction and culture. He is
the author of Contemporary British Fiction (2008) and Radical Fictions:
The English Novel in the 1950s (2007) and the editor of British Fiction of
the 1990s (2005). He has also published journal articles and book chap-
ters on Julian Barnes, Doris Lessing, Colin MacInnes, Zadie Smith,
Salman Rushdie, Sam Selvon, Alan Sillitoe, and the representations of
youth subcultures in British New Left writing and in 1950s fiction. He
is currently working on two books: one on Martin Amis and one on
the representation of youth subcultures in British fiction 1950–2010.
S am u e l C o h e n teaches courses in twentieth- and twenty-first-century
American literature and culture at the University of Missouri, where
he is Director of Graduate Studies. He is the author of After the End
of History: American Fiction in the 1990s (2009), coeditor (with Lee
Konstantinou) of The Legacy of David Foster Wallace (2012), and series
editor of The New American Canon: The Iowa Series in Contemporary
vii
viii Notes on Contributors
Literature and Culture. He is also author of an essay collection, 50
Essays: A Portable Anthology (2010), and coauthor of a literature anthol-
ogy, Literature: The Human Experience (2009). He is working on a new
book on contemporary American fiction, What Comes Next.
M ad h u D u b ey is a Professor in the departments of English and African
American Studies at the University of Illinois in Chicago. She has pub-
lished two books, Black Women Novelists and the Nationalist Aesthetic
(1994) and Signs and Cities: Black Literary Postmodernism (2003), and
many essays on African-American literature and culture since the 1970s.
In 2002, she edited a special issue of the journal NOVEL: A Forum on
Fiction on the topic of ‘African-American Fiction and the Politics of
Postmodernism’. Her research and teaching interests include African-
American literature and cultural studies, postmodernism, feminist
studies, and speculative fiction.
J oh n N. D uvall is the Margaret Church Distinguished Professor
of English and the editor of MFS: Modern Fiction Studies at Purdue
University. He has authored or edited ten books, including The
Identifying Fictions of Toni Morrison: Modernist Authenticity and
Postmodern Blackness (2000), Productive Postmodernism: Consuming
Histories and Cultural Studies (2002), Race and White Identity in
Southern Fiction (2008), and The Cambridge Companion to American
Fiction After 1945 (2012).
T im E ngl e s is Professor of English at Eastern Illinois University. His
scholarship has appeared in numerous journals and edited books, and
he is the coeditor of Approaches to Teaching DeLillo’s White Noise (with
John N. Duvall, 2006) and Critical Approaches to Don DeLillo (with
Hugh Ruppersburg, 2000).
D avid J am es is Lecturer in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century
Literature in the School of English at the University of Nottingham.
He is author of Contemporary British Fiction and the Artistry of Space:
Style, Landscape, Perception (2008) and Modernist Futures: Innovation
and Inheritance in the Contemporary Novel (2012). He is editor of The
Legacies of Modernism: Historicising Postwar and Contemporary Fiction
(2011) and Andrea Levy: Contemporary Critical Perspectives (2014)
and guest editor on two journal special issues: for Modernist Cultures
on ‘Musicality and Modernist Form’ (2013), and for Contemporary
Literature on ‘Post-millennial Commitments’ (2012).
Notes on Contributors ix
S u e J . Kim is Associate Professor at the University of Massachusetts,
Lowell. She is the author of On Anger: Race, Cognition, Narrative (2013).
She was recently guest editor of Decolonizing Narrative Theory, a spe-
cial issue of the Journal of Narrative Theory (2012). Her first book was
Critiquing Postmodernism in Contemporary Discourses of Race (2009),
and her essays have appeared in Modern Fiction Studies, The Journal of
Asian American Studies, Narrative, and College Literature.
P e t e r M o rey is Reader in English at the University of East London,
UK. He is Principal Investigator in an AHRC-funded international
research network entitled Framing Muslims, on representational tropes
in contemporary discourses on Muslims. His recent publications
include the critical monographs Fictions of India: Narrative and Power
(2000), Rohinton Mistry (2004), and Framing Muslims: Stereotyping and
Representation from 9/11 to 7/7 (with Amina Yaqin, 2011) and the edited
collections Alternative Indias: Writing, Nation and Communalism, coed-
ited with Alex Tickell (2006), and Culture, Diaspora, and Modernity
in Muslim Writing, coedited with Amina Yaqin and Rehana Ahmed
(2012).
B r an Nicol is Reader in Modern and Contemporary Literature at the
University of Portsmouth, UK, where he is also Director of the Centre
for Studies in Literature. His publications include Stalking (2006),
The Cambridge Introduction to Postmodern Fiction (2009), and The
Private Eye: Detectives in the Cinema (2013). He edited Postmodernism and
the Contemporary Novel: A Reader (2002), coedited the volume Crime
Culture: Figuring Criminality in Fiction and Film (2010), and is currently
working on a book project entitled The Seductions of Crime Fiction.
L en Pl at t is Professor in Modern Literatures at Goldsmiths, University
of London. His publications include Joyce and the Anglo Irish (1998);
Aristocracies of Fiction: The Idea of Aristocracy in Late-Nineteenth and
Early-Twentieth-Century Literature (2001); (with Dave Walsh) Musical
Theatre and American Culture (2003); Musical Comedy on the West End
Stage 1880–1939 (2004); Joyce, Race and Finnegans Wake (2007); the
edited collection of essays Modernism and Race (2011); and James Joyce:
Texts and Contexts (2011).
D av id Pu nt e r has taught at universities in England, Scotland, Hong
Kong, and China and is currently Professor of English at the University
of Bristol. He has published many books, on Gothic and romantic
x Notes on Contributors
writing, on modern and contemporary literature, and on theory and
psychoanalysis. He has also published Postcolonial Imaginings: Fictions
of a New World Order (2000; separately published in India) as well as
essays and articles on islands, postmodern geographies, Salman Rushdie,
Arundhati Roy, terrorism, Wilson Harris, and related matters.
Ph il ip T ew is Professor of English (Post-1900 Literature) at Brunel
University, the elected Director of the UK Network for Modern Fiction
Studies, Director of the Brunel Centre for Contemporary Writing
(BCCW), coeditor of both Critical Engagements and Symbiosis: A
Journal of Anglo-American Literary Relations, a Fellow of the Royal
Society of Arts, and a member of the Royal Society of Literature.
His monographs are B. S. Johnson: A Critical Reading (2001), The
Contemporary British Novel (2004; Serbian trans. Svetovi, 2006; rev. 2nd
edition 2007), and Jim Crace: A Critical Introduction (2006). To date he
has edited four collections in the field of contemporary British fiction:
Contemporary British Fiction, with Richard J. Lane and Rod Mengham
(2003); British Fiction Today: Critical Essays with Rod Mengham (2006);
Teaching Contemporary British Fiction [special issue of Anglistik und
Englischunterricht] with Steve Barfield, Anja Muller-Wood, and Leigh
Wilson (2007); and Re-Reading B. S. Johnson with Glyn White (2007).
Tew is also coeditor of several book series, including Palgrave’s New
British Fiction Series and the new Continuum Handbook series.
Sara U pstone is Associate Professor of English Literature at Kingston
University, London. Her publications include Spatial Politics in the
Postcolonial Novel (2009) and British Asian Fiction: Twenty-First-
Century Voices (2010) and the edited collection (with Andrew Teverson)
Postcolonial Spaces: The Politics of Place in Contemporary Culture (2011).
Ve d rana Veli ckovi c is Lecturer in English Literature at the
University of Brighton. She has research interests in black British and
Eastern European Literature, critical race theory, comparative literature,
and the representation of melancholia. She has published a number
of articles on writers including Vesna Goldsworthy and Bernardine
Evaristo.
Ab igail W ard is Senior Lecturer in Postcolonial Studies at Nottingham
Trent University, where she is also Director of the Centre for Colonial
and Postcolonial Studies. She is the author of Caryl Phillips, David
Dabydeen and Fred D’Aguiar: Representations of Slavery (2011) and has
published a number of essays on Caribbean and black British writing.
Notes on Contributors xi
In 2009, she coedited a special issue of Atlantic Studies entitled ‘Tracing
Black America in Black British culture’, and she is currently completing
an AHRC-funded book project examining Indian indenture in recent
Caribbean literature.
D av id W it z l ing is Assistant Professor of English at Manhattan
College. He is the author of Everybody’s America: Thomas Pynchon, Race,
and the Cultures of Postmodernism (2008), which interprets Pynchon’s
early fictional experiments as reflections on the challenges to white lib-
eral hegemony posed by the Civil Rights Movement and by the rise to
national prominence of African-American literature and music. He is
currently at work on a book about figurations of property rights and
free enterprise in twentieth-century US fiction, emphasising the ways
in which African-American and Jewish writers adapt the prerogatives of
‘classic’ laissez-faire economic liberalism.
Introduction
Len Platt and Sara Upstone
Western culture over the last fifty years has been powerfully shaped by
what Elazar Barkan has termed the ‘retreat from scientific racism’ – the
radical undermining of once commonplace ideas about the biological
foundations of race.1 The consequences of this dramatic shift have been
manifold and diverse, giving rise on the one hand to more fluid notions
of racial identity as strategic and malleable, on the other reinforcing the
valency of race as a primary marker of identity that is ideologically and
discursively inscribed. Notions of post-racialism exist hand in hand with
the continued existence of ethnic nationalisms and racial prejudice.
At the same time, the post-1945 period has been one of intense literary
experimentation, characterised by postmodern texts which challenge the
grand narratives on which conventional racial ideologies rely. This book
aims to address a serious gap in scholarship on postmodern aesthetics,
namely the consideration of the intricacies of the following conjunction:
how the dramatic shift in conceptions of race in the late twentieth and
early twenty-first centuries has been dealt with and informed by writers
at the cutting edge of equally dramatic transformations of literary form
in the same period. The chapters in this collection respond to Kobena
Mercer’s contention that race functions as a privileged metaphor in both
postmodern and poststructuralist discourses.2 Together they constitute an
extended discussion of the ways in which race has been appropriated by
Western theoretical interventions and simultaneously becomes a topic of
intense scrutiny and significance in the literatures of this period.
To date, attention on racial discourse in this context from the per-
spective of literary studies has tended to be limited to concern for the
relationship between postmodern and postcolonialism with the perim-
eters of debate having remaining much in place since early articulations
in the 1980s and ’90s. Kwame Anthony Appiah’s landmark essay ‘Is the
Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial?’ (1991) distinguished
between the ‘postrealism’ of postcolonial writing, and the ‘postrealism’
1
2 Len Pl at t and Sara U ps to ne
of postmodernism of Western writers such as Pynchon, which he located
in a different set of motivations, particularly in terms of the political.
Yet at the same time, high-profile synergistic readings, such as Linda
Hutcheon’s use of Salman Rushdie as an exemplar of her theory of
historiographic metafiction, illuminated how the postcolonial and post-
modern could productively coexist.3 Indeed, even for Appiah, despite the
perceived differences, the ‘post’ in both postmodernism and postcoloni-
alism represented a ‘space clearing gesture’ which challenged ‘legitimizing
narratives’ of the past.4
This collection asks what space might be cleared, by works simultane-
ously postcolonial and postmodern, for the intervention of new racial
imaginaries and the questioning of those grand, legitimising narratives of
existing racial discourses. The ethos of this collection is that postrealism is
a postmodern trait that might equally be called postcolonial. This is not to
negate the different positionings of writers conventionally seen as one or
the other, but rather to examine productively to what extent, in fact, such
distinctions are useful. How does the geographical and political position-
ing of experimental writing inform its contribution to racial discourses?
Does this offer the distinctions Appiah suggests? Or, perhaps, does it com-
plicate even further such discrete categories?
At the same time, there are writers whose focus on race falls out-
side of the postcolonial frame entirely, or whose relationship to it is at
the very least ambivalent. Although there is an argument to be made for
the reading of all American writers, and particularly African-American
writers, as postcolonial, nevertheless the neocolonial context of contem-
porary American culture makes such an understanding highly problem-
atic. There is an emerging Eastern European literature produced in the
wake of the Balkan conflicts and the break-up of the USSR which, as
Vedrana Velickovich’s chapter in this collection illustrates, has focused
on issues of racial politics and related concerns with national identity. In
the British context, a new generation of diasporic writers are responding
to questions of race in ways for which older postcolonial frameworks are
only partially relevant. All these developments reflect the acknowledged
limitations of postcolonialism as a means of explaining the complex inter-
sectional forces which shape contemporary identities.
At the same time that the place of postmodernism in ‘minority’ dis-
courses demands attention, there is a pronounced lack of discussion
regarding attitudes to race in works by white British and American writers
that employ a postmodern aesthetic, despite the fact that seminal accounts
of postmodern culture identify marginality as a core preoccupation of
Introduction 3
postmodern literature. Little has been written on the racial politics of
canonical postmodern writers and how their work potentially functions
against, outside, or alongside, postcolonial concerns with race. Such ques-
tions ask for consideration, as Toni Morrison has so powerfully suggested,
not simply of how postmodern writings represent the racial other, but also
of the role of whiteness in the literary imagination.5 Whilst Morrison has
called on literary critics to consider race not solely as a matter of marginal
identities, but also as a haunting presence in the dominant traditions of
American fiction, neither in the United States nor the United Kingdom
has this call been taken up in terms of considering how whiteness mani-
fests itself in the texts of white writers – an issue specifically addressed
in this collection in chapters on such figures as Pynchon, DeLillo and
David Foster Wallace. Nor has there been any sustained discussion of the
absence of race – as subject matter, as characterisation – in the work of
white postmodern writers. The diasporic fictions of writers such as Zadie
Smith and Diana Evans represent the contemporary metropolis as a space
of racial diversity and cultural exchange, but this same metropolis is repre-
sented in the writings of J. G. Ballard or Ian McEwan as overwhelmingly
Caucasian, with those of other ethnicities consigned to the margins. Such
starkly different racial demographics begin to prompt questions about
the construction of fictional worlds, and how they might seemingly coex-
ist. With such concerns in mind, this collection recognises the need for a
contrapuntal understanding that considers the significance of the absence
of race in much of white postmodern writing. In response to this, it offers
new readings of postmodern writers rarely – if ever – thought about in
racial terms.
As Bill Ashcroft argues in the opening chapter of Postmodern Literature
and Race, the postcolonial nevertheless remains a useful point of refer-
ence, not least because questions regarding its politics also draw attention
to wider issues surrounding the use of postmodernism in the service of
liberal or transformative racial discourses. The ambivalent politics of post-
modernism hint at both radical and profoundly conservative engagements
with race, offering potentially problematic encounters, but also the possi-
bility of a progressive literary politics in which formal experimentation acts
in the service of the deconstruction of racial hierarchies. This ambivalence
is rooted in the fact that postmodernism is in part an empty signifier – a
useful periodisation of a range of post-war and contemporary literatures
that have played with formal structures, but with no explicit ideological
unpinning. There is no ‘postmodern manifesto’ which might allow the
identification of a particular attitude to race as an inherent feature. More
broadly, there is no singular political positioning within which a particu-
lar attitude towards race might be a discernable element.
Postmodernism therefore exists most readily in the plural form –
‘postmodernisms’ which cannot be assumed to share perspectives on mat-
ters concerning race. This difference is not easily interpreted as a matter
of geographical location or temporality, but rather is an integral part of
a literary discourse that resists the notion of definition as one of its few
defining features. Nevertheless, critical attempts have been made to group
postmodern literatures according to political perspectives generally, and
more specifically in relation to postcolonialism. Most notable in this
regard are Linda Hutcheon’s attempts in various works to define a politic-
ally engaged postmodern discourse and the work of Theo D’haen which
has attempted to make more intricate distinctions between a kind of post-
modernism amenable to postcolonial concerns, and one which eschews
the representative politics on which those concerns rely.6
What these efforts draw attention to is the possible, if unlikely, reality
of a postmodern text engaging radically with a racial political agenda. The
seminal texts of postmodernism such as Steven Connor’s Postmodernist
Culture and Brian McHale’s Constructing Postmodernism place destabili-
sations of identity and authenticity at the centre of postmodern activity,
alongside a correlative questioning of grand narratives such as historical
progressivism.7 Inherent in such activity is the plausibility of a challenge
to racial prejudice and an undermining of racial ideologies entrenched in
public discourses such as science, religion and education.
At the same time, tensions between both anti-racist movements and
anti-colonialist nationalism and perceptions of a postmodernism charged
with relativism and apparent ethical disregard have led to questions as
to the political relevance of postmodern techniques, especially as against
realist representations of the world. Postmodern texts may continue to
uphold stable racial identities, either through affirmations of biological
difference, or through promoting the idea of race as a cultural distinction.
Or postmodern literature may contribute to both the erosion of these
discourses, and to the kind of ‘post-racial’ society imagined across a spec-
trum of intellectual domains. Here Paul Gilroy’s evocation of a ‘planetary
humanism’ that might reimagine universalism for the twenty-first century
joins up with Ulrich Beck’s ‘cosmopolitan vision’, Nussbaum’s ‘species
memberships’ and Christian Moraru’s ‘cosmodernism’.8
This collection of essays makes an important departure from those
studies focused narrowly on the particular racial identities of authors to
foreground instead how racial discourse is interwoven into the very fabric
Introduction 5
of writing from the late twentieth century to the present. With these con-
cerns in mind, it brings together academics specialising in postmodern,
postcolonial and diasporic literatures. It aligns through this approach a
group of eminent and emerging scholars united by their interest in how
experimental postmodern aesthetics may explicate particular concerns
with race in the modern world. In doing so, it offers new accounts of how
innovative literary practice has acted to both reinforce and redefine racial
thinking in other fields such as science, politics, religion, linguistics and
popular culture. Whilst influential sociological theories promise a world
in which race ceases to be a cultural preoccupation, these essays position
race as central to innovative literary practice and, through this, equally as
of continued relevance to identity in the modern world; they draw atten-
tion to how postmodern experimentation has been used both to reinforce
conservative racial thinking and to speculate on utopian futures.
In the context of post-9/11 cultural politics, at a moment in which
authors are once again being called to take a more ‘public’ role in soci-
ety, there has been a resurgence of attitudes which decry postmodernist
approaches for a supposed disconnection from ethical and political con-
cerns. Such criticisms align postmodern writing with a poststructuralist
discourse that is represented as obscure, textual and alienating, and in
doing so argue that postmodernism no longer resonates with the con-
temporary imagination, evading fundamental questions. In response to
such criticism, postmodernism alongside poststructuralism has been
re-evaluated here to emphasise, conversely, the inherent identity politics
implicated in its concerns. The present collection offers a timely contribu-
tion to this ongoing debate, asking how postmodern interventions into
racial discourse might speak to the continued relevance of such aesthetics
in the contemporary moment, and illuminating how postmodern experi-
mentation has both historically and in the present moment made a unique
contribution to a literary discourse with social and political significance.
Accordingly, the collection rejects any straightforward thesis which
would group contributions to the discussion in broad, generalising cat-
egories based either on the author’s nationality, geopolitical positioning
or ethnic origin. Whilst recognising that the situation of texts within
categories such as ‘African-American’, ‘diasporic’ or ‘postcolonial’ shapes
the nature of their engagement with postmodernity, these very categories
have become contentious and suggestive of conservative literary frame-
works which imprison texts on the margins of literary study. The structural
principals behind this collection engage with such specificities through
broader conceptual frameworks where texts, from diverse perspectives and
positionings, engage in shared postmodern strategies and work within
common frames of reference pertaining to the postmodern condition.
For these reasons, the book is organised precisely around such shared
sites of interaction, so as to foreground the central concern with the dia-
logue between race and postmodernism, rather than between race and
other terms of categorisation. Such an approach facilitates a productive
conversation between texts whose engagement with postmodernity is
often overlooked by their designation, for example, as ‘postcolonial’ or
‘African-American’ or, even more broadly, as a particular national litera-
ture. A major purpose of the book will be to outline how these ethnic and
geopolitical categories intersect in terms of race with postmodernism, and
the limitations of theorising texts narrowly in such terms. Thus chapters
arranged within the book’s carefully delineated sections speak instead to
more complex and original dialogues. While the reader of this book will
find much of interest in terms of British, American, postcolonial, Eastern
European, American-Jewish, and African-American approaches to race,
they will also be prompted and challenged by the book’s organisation to
consider these texts beyond these conceptual framings, with their post-
modern engagement at the foreground.
The book is organised, then, in five parts, each speaking to a spe-
cific site of postmodern literary intervention into the question of racial
discourse. Part I, ‘Postmodern Problematics’, opens the book with
three chapters that each speak to one of the main contexts of racial
discourse pursued in the other chapters in the collection, serving to
introduce the themes and tensions addressed in the rest of the book
via a range of critical perspectives. In Chapter 1, ‘Critical Histories:
Postcolonialism, Postmodernism, and Race’, Bill Ashcroft writes from
his intellectual location as a postcolonial scholar to examine some of the
central tensions between postcolonial readings and dominant versions of
postmodern theory. This is followed by Madhu Dubey’s chapter, ‘Race
and the Crisis of the Postmodern Social Novel’ which approaches this
same problematic but from the perspective of American literatures and
with a particular emphasis on raciologies embedded in ‘authoritative
periodising accounts of postmodernism’ which have linked a perceived
‘crisis in the American social novel to the breakdown of a consensual
understanding of American life’. Finally, David James in ‘Worlded
Localisms: Cosmopolitics Writ Small’ discusses how the ‘localist’ fic-
tions of figures like Jhumpa Lahiri and Zadie Smith operate in terms
of broader ‘worlded’ domains, introducing the idea of diasporic engage-
ments so prevalent in contemporary Europe literatures.
Introduction 7
The chapters in Part II, ‘Race and Performativity’, examine how racial
identities are ‘performed’ in postmodern literature, and the effects of such
performance on literature’s racial politics. These chapters help ground the
sections that follow by examining, in both African-American and post-
colonial contexts, how the postmodern can usefully serve minority racial
positions, fostering challenges to traditional notions of self and identity.
Bran Nicol, exploring the detective fiction of Ishmael Reed and Clarence
Major, employs Baudrillard’s ‘seduction’ to argue that the postmodern
can be compatible with minority agendas, in this case so that it ‘diverts
the system of (white) detective fiction from its conventional path’. This
is followed by Peter Morey’s discussion of the performance of identity in
the South Asian novel in English, tracing the complexities of racial sub-
ject positioning as it examines the relationship between Hari Kunzru’s
postmodern meditations on racial science against an earlier generation
of migrant writing. Abigail Ward’s ‘Performing Race in Caryl Phillips’s
Dancing in the Dark’ brings these two geopolitical positions together,
exploring the contradictions between postcolonial and postmodern iden-
tities as they are played out in the work of its Caribbean author. Ward
draws particular attention to the resonance of Phillips’s text against a con-
temporary context of the social ‘performance’ of postcolonial and African-
American identities. The section concludes with John Duvall’s chapter,
‘Appropriate Appropriation? Ishmael Reed’s Neo-HooDoo and Flannery
O’Connor’s Artificial Negroes’. Forming an imperfect circle with the
book’s opening chapter, Duvall uses the African-American Reed as coun-
terpoint to O’Connor – Southern, Catholic, white – arguing that it is,
quite unexpectedly, the white ‘modernist’ author who offers the more sus-
tained challenge to racial essentialism and white privilege.
Part III of the book, ‘Nations and Belonging’, examines intersec-
tions with race in one of the most deconstructed grand narratives of the
postmodern literary project – the relations between race and nation in
postmodern literature – through the varied contexts of Scotland, England,
the United States and the former Yugoslavia. In ‘“How SCOTTISH I
am”: Alasdair Gray, Race, and Neo-nationalism’, Len Platt examines the
intersection between race and nationality, arguing that familiar raciolo-
gies continue to shape Gray’s celebrated version of the postmodern, ‘albeit
in strategically inverted forms’. In Gray’s fictions, traditional antipathies
between the Scots and the English appear to flourish in the context of
new nationalisms. Linking up with the previous section, these chapters
emphasise how the racial ‘other’ in the contemporary period takes on
forms that are both new and also resurrections of historical prejudices,
with multiple and shifting registers of difference. Vedrana Velickovic
argues that post-Yugoslav writing challenges not only the racism impli-
cit in the Balkan conflicts, but also the boundaries of Euro-American
postmodernisms, to present a specifically national postmodernism. This
is followed by David Witzling’s piece, which draws attention to the ten-
sions between Jewish distinctiveness and the ‘postmodern as a mode of
mainstream Euro-American cultural authority’, implicitly connoting a
‘whiteness’ to which Jewish authors respond both directly and indirectly.
The section concludes with David Punter’s essay on the writings of Will
Self. From his unique perspective as both postcolonial and postmodern
scholar, Punter explores the racial inflections of Self ’s fiction to provide
a stark example of how race functions as an underlying preoccupation in
concerns with questions of belonging in writing of contemporary white
postmodern authors.
These chapters in Part III, on race and the nation, increasingly implicate
postmodern literature in a project that undermines the nation as a racially
homogenous space. Nation in these terms is one particular metanarra-
tive which a focus on race may interrogate. Part IV of the book addresses
this more broadly by considering how questions of gender, whiteness and
Englishness might be problematised by thinking through race in post-
modern terms. Opening this section, Tim Engles considers how DeLillo’s
fiction can be seen as an attempt to dismantle ‘ambitious, ambivalent, and
fantasised white individualism’ that is centred in particular on a male sub-
ject position. This is followed by Nick Bentley’s essay, which examines the
complex interplay of race and discourses of Englishness in three seminal
British postmodern novelists – Salman Rushdie, J. G. Ballard and Julian
Barnes – situating these writers within a tradition of post-war writing that
has drawn on postmodern techniques to critique dominant sociopoliti-
cal racial discourses. Finally, the section concludes with Samuel Cohen’s
discussion of Wallace, who he argues needs to be read as heir to an earlier
generation of white postmodern writers, attempting to speak about race as
part of a broader commitment to ending postmodern cynicism in favour
of a reworked ‘humanism’.
Cohen’s essay serves as a bridge to the book’s final section, ‘Post-Racial
Futures?’ which critically considers whether postmodern fiction might
play a role in gesturing towards a displacement of racial categories in
favour of precisely the kind of revised humanism Cohen identifies. At
the centre of this final group of chapters is the awareness that alongside
the need for representation is the possibility of a post-representational
discourse. This begins with an essay by Philip Tew, whose discussion of
Introduction 9
Zadie Smith reveals how postmodernism may be, for some contempo-
rary writers, a position to be eschewed rather than embraced precisely
because it constrains thinking within a discourse of identity politics. In
‘Racial Neoliberalism and Whiteness in Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow’,
Sue J. Kim argues that despite the limits of post-racialism as a critical dis-
course, Pynchon’s work might be seen as gesturing towards the possibility
of such a society in its rethinking of ideas surrounding whiteness. The
section concludes with Sara Upstone’s essay ‘“Some Kind of Black”:
Black British Historiographic Metafictions and the Postmodern Politics
of Race’, examining how recent reworking of the slave narrative might
attempt to optimistically address questions of racial division pertinent to
twenty-first-century culture.
Postmodern Literature and Race is concerned with how postmodern lit-
erature engages with racial discourse in the broadest terms: as political
statement, as metaphor, as postcolonial intervention and as cultural for-
mation. The volume provides a much needed contribution to the study of
postmodern literature. It deepens understanding of the complex relation-
ship between postmodern experimentation and postcolonial and diasporic
writings, and offers through its broad range of geographical concerns a
deeper appreciation of the role of literary innovation in contributing to a
complex matrix of racial discourses in twentieth- and twenty-first-century
cultures.
Notes
1 See Barkan, The Retreat of Scientific Racism: Changing Concepts of Race in
Britain and the United States between the World Wars (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1992).
2 See Kobena Mercer, Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural
Studies (London: Routledge, 1994).
3 See Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction
(London and New York: Routledge, 1988).
4 See Kenneth Kwame Appiah, ‘Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in
Postcolonialism?’ Critical Inquiry 17/2 (Winter 1991), 336–57.
5 See Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination
(Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).
6 See Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1989);
Theo D’haen, ‘“History”, (Counter-)Postmodernism, and Postcolonialism’,
European Journal of English Studies 1/2 (1997), 205–16.
7 Steven Connor, Postmodernist Culture: An Introduction to Theories of the
Contemporary (1989; Oxford: Blackwell, 1996); Brian McHale, Constructing
Postmodernism (New York: Routledge, 1993)
8 See Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imaging Political Culture Beyond the Color Line
(Cambridge, MA: Belknap, Harvard University Press, 2000); Ulrich Beck,
Cosmopolitan Vision (Cambridge: Polity, 2006); M. Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice:
Disability, Nationality, Species Membership (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2006);
Christian Moraru, Cosmodernism: American Narrative, Late Globalization, and
the New Cultural Imaginary (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011).
P a rt O n e
Postmodern Problematics
Ch apter 1
Critical Histories
Postcolonialism, Postmodernism, and Race
Bill Ashcroft
The relationship between postcolonialism and postmodernism is a

vexed mixture of contestation and imbrication. Both have had a pro-
found impact on literary study, but the distinction between modernism
and postmodernism may, in a hundred years’ time, come to seem much
less significant than will the transformation of literature in the twentieth
century with the emergence of cross-cultural writing in English. Rushdie
is, of course, the cause celebre of the meeting of postcolonial concerns
and postmodern style, but whereas the ‘post’ in literary postmodernism
may refer to a way of writing, the ‘post’ in postcolonialism refers to a
way of reading.1 It performs this reading on various levels, investigat-
ing the cultural and political impact of European conquest on colonised
societies, and the nature of those societies’ responses. ‘Postcolonialism’
refers to post-invasion and not post-independence; it identifies neither
a chronology nor a specific ontology – it is not ‘after colonialism’, nor
is it a way of being. While some authors may claim to be ‘postmodern’
writers, nobody gets up in the morning and says, ‘I think I’ll write a
postcolonial novel’.
Yet in a fairly obvious way the insurgent aspects of postmodernism
and postcolonialism are comparable. The postmodern deconstruction
of the centralised, logocentric master narratives of European culture
replicates the postcolonial project of dismantling the Centre/Margin
binarism of imperial discourse. However Lyotard’s ‘incredulity towards
metanarratives’ becomes something more than incredulity in postcolo-
nialism: it is the active resistance to the master discourse of imperial-
ism and the radical transformation of its tools.2 Nevertheless, features
such as the decentring of discourse, the focus on the significance of
language and writing in the construction of experience, the use of the
subversive strategies of mimicry, parody and irony, have regularly led
to a conflation of the two fields. No doubt much blame for this may
be placed on the shoulders of the colonial discourse theorists Homi
13
14 Bi ll Ashcrof t
Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak. But it is useful to note that texts such as
Wilson Harris’s Tradition, the Writer and Society, which offers many
conclusions of an apparently poststructuralist nature, actually precede
the writings of Derrida and Foucault.
These factors aside, postcolonial theorists have little trouble in appro-
priating postmodern approaches to subjectivity, discourse, representation,
and the general deconstruction of master narratives without abandoning
the political imperative of the field. We don’t need to propose that
‘postcolonial’ describes an ontology, or a uniform experience, or that the
concept of ‘national identity’ so important in early decolonisation strug-
gles offers the liberation it promised. We certainly don’t need to assume
that biological races exist. Neither does postcolonial theory claim to speak
for all inequalities of power. The difference lies in the ultimate refusal of
postcolonialism to dispense with the material and experiential realities of
colonial subjection, what Edward Said calls ‘worldliness’ – a sustained
attention to the imperial process in colonial and neocolonial society, and
an examination of the strategies to subvert the actual material and discur-
sive effects of that process.
At their purest, postmodernists reject all the great collective social
identities of class, of race, of nation, and of gender. This includes
Marxism and, in fact, any form of emancipatory theory the aim of which
is the total liberation of humankind. Postcolonialism, on the other hand,
is unashamedly emancipatory, its driving energy a concern with justice
and liberation. For postmodernists, the Enlightenment project of pursu-
ing a rational, scientific understanding of the natural and social world,
and of creating a universal outlook from fragmented experience, has
failed because the world is too complex and too varied to be subsumed
under a single totalising theory. Postcolonial theorists would agree with
this rejection of universalism and insist that postcolonial theory is not
a universal, a ‘grand theory of everything’ as some would like it to be.
But the rejection of universalism, of ‘human nature’ and of master dis-
courses does not obviate the ethical demand, the reality of the call for
liberation, the reality of racism. It does not, paradoxically, dispense with
ethical universals.
The 1980s were an interesting time in postmodern/postcolonial rela-
tions. Postmodernism had already begun to see the problems outlined by
postcolonial scholars, and a sea change occurred with Laclau and Mouffe’s
Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics.3 This
book ushered in what became known as a postmodernism of difference.
To reconceptualise the social sphere in a way that captures the exorbitant
Critical Histories 15
multiplicity of social subjects, Laclau and Mouffe develop key terms such
as articulation, discourse, elements and moments:
We will call articulation any practice establishing a relation among elem-
ents such that their identity is modified as a result of the articulatory prac-
tice. The structured totality resulting from the articulatory practice we will
call discourse. The differential positions, insofar as they appear articulated
within a discourse, we will call moments. By contrast, we will call element
any difference that is not discursively articulated.4
In their theory all identity is relational, and even systems of differences
cannot be fixed or stable, so the ‘articulation’ of ‘elements’ into ‘moments’
can never be complete. This instability affects every discursive identity:
there is a multiplicity of every signifier that ‘disarticulates’ the discursive
structure and makes it unclosable. The impact of Hegemony and Socialist
Strategy in postmodern theory amounted to a paradigm shift, which ush-
ered in what came to be known as ‘otherness postmodernism’.
In a robust critique of the inadequacy of otherness postmodernism for
analyses of race, Sue Kim concludes that what has become hegemonic – at
least within studies of marginality, identity and literature – is postmod-
ernism itself. In literary and cultural studies, she argues,
where many of the most dynamic theorizations of race, identity and polit-
ics take place, the predominance of otherness postmodernism has led us to
neglect the larger structures (political, economic, educational etc.) and the
possibilities for ethics, referentiality and metanarratives that are necessary
to understand what is happening in our world.5
In effect we have become afraid of the larger structures for fear of los-
ing our incredulity towards grand narratives. But more specifically, Kim
insists that difference is focused by location. The discursive, cultural or
symbolic location of difference identifies particular relations of power, and
the material conditions of their emergence.
Imperialism and Race
When it comes to race, one of the ‘larger structures’ to be considered is
imperialism, and this is where the postcolonial concern with race begins.
However imbricated with modernity and capitalism, however interpen-
etrated these larger structures may be, the imperial expansion of Europe
across the world demanded the identification of colonial subjects as
racial others. The division of human society in terms of race is inextri-
cable from the need of colonialist powers to establish dominance over
16 Bi ll Ashcrof t
subject peoples and hence justify the imperial enterprise. Racial think-
ing and colonialism are imbued with the same impetus to draw a binary
distinction between ‘civilised’ and ‘primitive’ and the same necessity for
the hierarchisation of human types. By translating the fact of colonial
oppression into a justifying theory, however spurious, European racial
thinking initiated a hierarchy of human variation that has been difficult
to dislodge. Although race is not specifically an invention of imperialism,
it quickly became one of imperialism’s most supportive ideas, because the
idea of superiority, which generated the emergence of race as a concept,
adapted easily to both impulses of the imperial mission: dominance and
enlightenment.
In this respect, ‘racism’ is not so much a product of the concept of race
as the very reason for its existence. Before European racism, black people
were not black.6 Without the underlying desire for hierarchical categori-
sation implicit in racism, ‘race’ would not exist. I am using ‘racism’ here
not simply as antipathy and discrimination but in the way that Todorov
uses the term ‘racialism’, the assumption that phenotypical characteristics
reflect mental and moral qualities.7 The need for hierarchical distinctions
is essential to both imperial domination and the civilising mission that
justified it.
The term ‘race’ had a long gestation, first used in the English language
in 1508 in a poem by William Dunbar, and through the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries remaining essentially a literary word denoting a class
of persons or things. Humans had been categorised in terms of their bio-
logical differences from the late 1600s, when Francois Bernier postulated
a number of distinctive categories, based largely on facial character and
skin colour. But Immanuel Kant’s use of the German phrase for ‘races of
mankind’ in his Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime
in 1764 was probably the first explicit use of the term in the sense of bio-
logically or physically distinctive categories of human beings. Kant here
elaborates on Hume’s 1748 essay ‘Of National Characteristics’ which
makes the familiar claim that there ‘never was a civilized nation of any
other complexion than white’. Hume averred that ‘such a uniform and
constant difference’ could not happen if it was not a fundamental fact of
nature. Clearly then, Kant’s use of the term ‘race’ was based on a deep and
pervasive chromatism, a sense that a group’s unchangeable physical char-
acteristics – its colour – could be linked in a direct, causal way to psycho-
logical nature or intellectual abilities. Kant claims that ‘so fundamental is
the difference between the races of man [. . .] it appears to be as great in
mental capacities as in colour’.8 The term ‘race’ was thus inserted by Kant
into a vocabulary of discrimination, already present in taxonomies such as
Bernier’s, which were firmly based on colour difference.
The history of racial thinking confirms one central tenet of postcolonial
thought: those with the power to define race (and everything else) inev-
itably used it to their own advantage. ‘In Nazi Germany, every positive
racial attribute was assigned to Aryans and every negative one to Jews –
with the corollary that [the Jewish philosopher] Zollschan wrote (with
obvious irony) that if that were the case, “the disappearance of the race
would be desirable.”’9 The power to define race goes hand in hand with
the greater power of European imperialism over constructions of time and
space, of justice, of rights, and over what constitutes the essential or uni-
versal characteristics of human being. Consequently the linking of race to
colour distinctions became overwhelming because the people in control of
definitions regarded themselves as white.
Reading Race
Since at least the nineteenth century, race and nation have been the most
intransigent signifiers of identity. But what are we to make of the concept
of race? On the one hand, race does not exist – biologically, genetically
or socio-historically – yet on the other, it remains the most potent cat-
egory of identification and discrimination in the world. In crude terms
we could say that race disappears under the harsh light of postmodern
analysis, but re-emerges in the postcolonial attention to the operation of
imperial power. One rendition of this dilemma says that ‘writers on race
are essentially modernists. They must presume the category “race” in order
to begin. And as they attempt to distance themselves from the charge of
being racist, they are caught in the contradiction of denying the validity
of the concept they are discussing.’10
For Anthony Kwame Appiah, invocations of racial belonging are always
false, if not dangerous, because they are grounded on an implicit biolo-
gism that is scientifically untenable.11 This leads him to a rejection of the
concept of race altogether. For Goldberg on the other hand, while race is
an ‘empty concept’ it articulates group identity for the purpose of inclu-
sion and exclusion and can overlap any number of identifying discourses.12
Goldberg insists that race must be grasped as a historically fluid concept
that signifies differently according to the historical and material interests
of the time. Nevertheless, the postcolonial reading of race sees the histor-
ical importance of race to imperialism as generating all subsequent uses
of the term, including the prominence of colour as a primary relational
18 Bi ll Ashcrof t
category. In effect, the fiction of race invented by imperialism to maintain
its global power relations becomes embedded in everybody’s minds as a
fundamental category of human distinction.
Just as racism precedes and generates the concept of race, so the experi-
ence of race is ipso facto the experience of racism. Race, like any signifier, is
a function of difference, yet this is hardly adequate to explain the human
cost of racism. Étienne Balibar suggests that we regard ‘shifts in doctrine
and race theory as relatively incidental matters’, given the fact that from
the point of view of the victims of racist practice, ‘these same old justifi-
cations simply lead to the same acts.’13 Thus, although race is neither an
ontological nor genetic category, it is a product of social relations that are
total and all consuming:
The result of racism for the racially other is not only constant attention, a
constant exclusion through overstudy and overcodification, but above all of
singularization. While the other is black, any black, a black, the black, he
is also noticed, harassed, called upon to justify himself, prove his humanity,
masculinity, prove her femininity, beauty and hence to be one who must
constantly be situated, dialogical, and therefore transcendent.14
In postcolonial studies, the question of race is represented from the per-

spective of the object of the racial gaze. In literary practice this means
that race is approachable through the representation of racial subject-
ivity. The passage above comes close to presenting the effect of social
relations on the racial other, but what is the subjective (and indeed
intersubjective) experience of race? This has proven to be most accessible
through literary and anecdotal accounts of racial subjects’ own relations
with racist power.
One of the most powerful demonstrations of the insidious power of
racist language comes in Caryl Phillips’s Cambridge, which details the
inexorable way in which Emily, the plantation owner’s daughter come to
survey their lands, is drawn into the discourse of racial abuse. Emily, a
‘lady of polite status and little talent’, who is inclined to be an Emancipist,
is inducted for the first day into the myth of the slaves’ inferiority, dirti-
ness, cannibalism and contaminating presence. While the slaves are
guilty of bad dialect, Cambridge, who has been educated in England,
is derided for the ‘lunatic precision of his language’. The experience of
race is recounted first from the perspective of Emily’s conversion to the
relentless racist discourse of the island and second from the perspective of
Cambridge’s experience of a ruthlessly unjust and racist system. Having
been freed in England, his colour allows slavers to recapture and sell him
back into slavery, back into the very embodiment of racist discourse in
the plantation economy.15
While there is no ‘experience’ of race per se, there is a very real experience
of the objectifying gaze of colonial power, which, as Cambridge discovers,
is the physically brutal experience of slavery and the appalling language
of racism that supports it. When considering the ‘fiction’ of race, it is
important to keep the very pressing experiential reality of racism in view.
‘Experience’ may itself be a questionable category, a function of discursive
relations, but this by no means challenges its efficacy. The Australian pho-
tographer William Yang did not discover his ‘Chineseness’ until taunted
at school at the age of eight. His mother’s confirmation of the ‘grim’ fact
that he was Chinese was the first time he had experienced a racial identity.
Race was the product of a racist discourse, but the discursive nature of this
experience, or indeed of ‘experience’ itself, was irrelevant to the pain of
exclusion and alienation.
This distinction between the illusion of race and the reality of racism
may be analysed through three postmodern assumptions about the fic-
tion of race: 1) that race is a grand narrative; 2) that it nurtures a relent-
less essentialism; and 3) that it dissolves inexorably into the larger fiction
of colour distinction. There are three moments in the modern history of
race that offer sites on which we may analyse these three assumptions:
the work of W. E. B. Du Bois and ‘The Conservation of Races’, Léopold
Sédar Senghor and the creation of négritude, and the moment of Frantz
Fanon’s recognition of the ‘fact of blackness’ in Black Skins, White Masks.
I choose these moments because they precede both postmodern and post-
colonial theory and offer themselves to different kinds of readings. But
more interesting is that these interventions into racist history present a
conundrum: each of them reveals the theoretical and practical instability
of race as a concept; however, each of them operates in an atmosphere of
urgent personal and political need. Race signifies differently in each case
according to the historical and political interest of the time, as Goldberg
suggests, because the biological invalidity of the concept is transcended by
the political urgency of the historical period. The question for the post-
colonial critic is: How do we resolve the imbalance between the instability
and even invalidity of the concept, and the political need for resistance
that comes out of an experience of racial discrimination? Appiah says of
Du Bois that he was concerned not just with the meaning of race but the
truth about it. Appiah’s truth at the end of ‘Illusions of Race’ is that race
doesn’t exist. But what these three historical moments indicate is that there
may be a ‘truer truth’ about race in the experience of the ‘racial subject’.16
20 Bi ll Ashcrof t
Du Bois, ‘The Conservation of Races’ and

Race as a Grand Narrative
W. E. B. Du Bois’s life spanned the period from the scramble for Africa to
the post-war break up of European colonial empires. ‘The Conservation of
Races’, coming at the end of the nineteenth century (1897) is an attempt
to interpolate the scene of race in America with a statement of the con-
tribution to be made by races, and in particular the need to affirm the
dignity and contribution to humankind of the Negro race. In ‘Illusions
of Race’ (1992) Appiah provides what is essentially a postmodern reading
of this essay, revealing the predicament in which Du Bois finds himself,
which is, in effect, the predicament of race as a grand narrative riddled
with contradictions.
While eschewing the scientific or biological explanation of race in
favour of a socio-historical conception, Du Bois can never fully relinquish
the physical. While the subtle forces of racial identity ‘have generally fol-
lowed the natural cleavage of common blood, descent and physical pecu-
liarities, they have at other times swept across and ignored these.’ The
historian and the sociologist may have a better purchase on the concept
of race. ‘What, then, is a race?’ asks Du Bois: ‘It is a vast family of human
beings, generally of common blood and language, always of common his-
tory, traditions and impulses, who are both voluntarily and involuntarily
striving together for the accomplishment of certain more or less vividly
conceived ideals of life.’17
This captures the dilemma that Du Bois encounters as he begins to
advance the message of the Negro contribution to the world; he slips
straight into the myth of colour distinction, ‘the English and Teuton
represent the white variety of mankind; the Mongolian, the yellow; the
Negroes, the black. Between these are many crosses and mixtures, where
Mongolian and Teuton have blended into the Slav, and other mixtures
have produced the Romance nations and the Semites.’ However, for Du
Bois the physical differences don’t explain racial identity: ‘The deeper
differences are spiritual, psychical, differences – undoubtedly based on
the physical, but infinitely transcending them.’18 Du Bois wants to have
it both ways: the physical differences can’t be denied, but the spiritual
psychical differences greatly transcend these and determine the character
and contribution of races.
Appiah focuses on this contradiction of physical and socio-historical,
the idea that the Negro race of common blood and language has a special
message for the world. ‘On the face of it, then, Du Bois’ strategy here is
the antithesis in the classic dialectic of reaction to prejudice’,
The thesis in this dialectic – which Du Bois reports as the American Negro’s
attempt to ‘minimize race distinctions’ – is the denial of difference. Du
Bois’ antithesis is the acceptance of difference along with a claim that each
group has a part to play; that the white race and its racial Other are related
not as superior to inferior but as complementaries; that the Negro message
is, with the white one, part of the message of humankind.19
Nevertheless, despite the stated acceptance of difference, the heart of Du
Bois’s conception of race is not racial identity, but racism: the idea that
physical differences signify a moral and mental hierarchy. The definitional
problems of race for Du Bois are secondary to his need to establish the
moral equivalence of black people and the celebration of their contribu-
tion to humankind. The fact that Du Bois might feel the need to do this
speaks volumes about the position of the Negro in nineteenth-century
America. He does not attempt to transcend the biological conception of
race, for he relies on it, ‘but rather, as the dialectic requires, a revaluation
of the Negro race in the face of the sciences of racial inferiority.’20 In other
words Du Bois makes an intervention into the racist environment of the
United States in the most strategic way he can. He engages race at its very
origin, for it is not the physical evidence of difference that matters but the
very thing that motivated the invention of race in the first place – the idea
that physical differences indicated moral and intellectual differences car-
ried ‘in the blood’.
In order to combat racist thinking, that which generates ideas of race,
Du Bois must concede a combination of two spurious definitions of
race – biological and historical. For Appiah the conclusion is straightfor-
ward: the truth, he concludes,
is that there are no races: there is nothing in the world that can do all we
ask race to do for us. [. . .] For, when race works – in places where ‘gross dif-
ferences’ of morphology are correlated with ‘subtle differences’ of tempera-
ment, belief, intention – it works as an attempt at metonym for culture,
and it does so only at the price of biologizing what is culture, ideology.21
But Appiah’s rejection of race cannot account for the experience of racial
prejudice that steeled Du Bois’ resolve. How does our deconstruction of
the concept stand against the social reality of a black man in the 1880s?
Du Bois grew up in the North, but when he gained a scholarship to Fisk
College in Alabama he saw a level of discrimination he had never dreamed
22 Bi ll Ashcrof t
of. This was the society of rampant discrimination, segregation, lynch
law, of economic abuse little better than slavery. In ‘The Conservation of
Races’, Du Bois walks a tightrope between definitions of race and the need
to propose that the Negro had a contribution to make. The tone of his
essay indicates that he is determined to carve out a place in the American
psyche for the African American.
We can understand this strategy when we compare Du Bois to one of
his contemporaries, and his greatest bête noir: Booker T. Washington, the
most powerful black man in America in his day, who brokered negotia-
tions between whites and blacks and stood virtually as the undisputed
voice of black America. Unlike Du Bois, Washington argued the Black
people should temporarily forego ‘political power, insistence on civil
rights, and higher education of Negro youth. They should concentrate all
their energies on industrial education. Washington was clearly advocating
an acceptance of the inferior position in which blacks were placed by the
white population.’22 It is hard to imagine what Washington’s strategy was
designed to achieve. At what stage would blacks under this system achieve
equality? Washington acceded to the racial classification, valuation and
ordering processes central to racial construction. This ‘double conscious-
ness’, about which Du Bois wrote much, was the attitude he was begin-
ning to resist in ‘The Conservation of Races’.
The fact that race is a floating signifier is less important than the ques-
tion of how it is located in collective social relations. Appiah’s critique is
directed against the doctrine of racial belonging. For Du Bois, the contri-
bution of the ‘black race’ to humankind was ultimately more important
than its biological or historical existence despite the extent to which it
exercised him. This was because the experience of race, the experience of
exclusion and oppression, demanded a strategy grounded on the group
cohesion – on the myth of race. Understanding the historical context, and
the craven approach of Booker T. Washington, is to understand that defi-
nitions of race were secondary to the struggle against racism.
Négritude and Essentialism

The concept of Négritude is a perfect demonstration of the problem of
essentialism that dogs the grand narrative of race. But it also shows how
race may be read as a political rather than biological category. Négritude
as a movement emerged in Paris in the early 1930s, amongst African and
West Indian students under the leadership of Léopold Sédar Senghor from
Senegal, Aimé Césaire, a Martiniquan, and the Guyanese Léon Damas.
The three established a newspaper, L’Etudiant noir (The Black Student),
and the concept of Négritude appeared in the third issue. L’Étudiant noir
also contains Césaire’s first published work, ‘Negreries’, which is notable
not only for its disavowal of assimilation as a valid strategy for resist-
ance but also for its reclamation of the word ‘nègre’ as a positive term.
Césaire described négritude as ‘the simple recognition of the fact of being
black and the acceptance of this fact, of our destiny as black people, of our
history and our culture’.23
In its expression, négritude was both essentialist and romantic, and a
postmodern reading soon identifies its problems because, having experi-
enced exclusion, its proponents appear to have simply inhabited the binary
set up by white colonial control. In Derridean terms négritude reverses
the binary instead of erasing it. This is particularly obvious in the most
famously essentialist of Senghor’s statements: ‘L’émotion est nègre, comme
la raison héllène’ (‘emotion is Negro, as reason is Hellenic’).24 We might
make an analogy with the discourse of Orientalism, which the colonised
came to accept as the lens through which they saw themselves. In Africa
the binaries reason/emotion, logic/intuition, order/passion by which the
African colonial subject was characterised as part of the larger binary
civilised/primitive were taken over by négritude, so that emotion, intui-
tion, passion were seen to be celebratory characteristics of Negro identity.
The poet Léon Damas demonstrates this polemic:
The White will never be negro
for beauty is negro
and negro is wisdom
for endurance is negro
and negro is courage
for patience is negro
and negro is irony
for charm is negro
and negro is magic
for joy is negro
for peace is negro
for life is negro.25
Négritude, then, presents a classic case to the postmodernist of the essen-

tialist trap that lies hidden in the grand narrative of race. However, it also
demonstrates a fundamental postmodern assertion: that all identity is rela-
tional. Négritude, which seems to be the ultimate essentialism, is actually a
political stance that arises out of colonial relations. Race is celebrated as a
response to colonial racism. It was significant that négritude emerged from
24 Bi ll Ashcrof t
Francophone colonies, because the assimilationist claim of brotherhood
and citizenship was shown to be a cruel hoax when African and West
Indian students arrived in Paris.26 The paradox was that the very people
who were urging a return to authenticity and black renewal were the most
educated and urbane – those who had experienced the most sociocultural
ambivalence (and the most discrimination) during the period of their
Paris education.
Négritude was less a celebration of an essential blackness than it was an
act of rebellion. Négritude writers not only celebrated Africa by paying
tribute to the ‘African love of life, the African joy of love and the African
dream of death’ but also challenged the colonisers in a way that they had
never before been challenged.27
No reform was in sight and the colonizers were justifying our political and
economic dependence by the theory of the tabula rasa. [. . .] In order to
establish an effective revolution, our revolution, we had first to divest our-
selves of our borrowed attire – that of assimilation – and assert our being,
that is to say our négritude.28
The point here is that the strategic focus of négritude was not essentialist iden-
tification but resistance, and indeed survival. Certainly Négritude’s polemic
is provocatively essentialist but its rationale is political. Négritude was at its
core a recovery by black people of a humanity that had been denied them by
centuries of colonial denigration.29 In a fascinating restatement of Du Bois’s
celebration of Negro value, Senghor’s writings were an affirmation that
black people were humans, contrary to the manner in which their identity
had been problematised in colonial discourse. A key aspect of Senghor’s nég-
ritude, for which he and the entire movement have been criticised severely,
is the affirmation of racial images celebrating merely blackness. That is, any
negative trait that had been attributed to a black person is celebrated as a
positive element. But this was clearly a reaction to racist colonialism. Like
‘African identity’, négritude is the sign, not of an essence, but of a reality
coming into being, the sign of a declaration of agency.
The response to colonial oppression may, in the case of négritude, be
what Spivak terms ‘strategic essentialism’ because strategic essentialism
locates difference.30 ‘Race’ is simply that which emerges under the racist
gaze. No matter how illegitimate the concept of race, the experience of
race, that is, the experience of racism, is real and its historical generation
by Western imperialism, its continuation in centuries of colonial denigra-
tion, mean that race becomes central to postcolonial engagements with
colonial power.
Race as Colour: Fanon and ‘The Fact of Blackness’

While chromatic divisions of human types such as Francoise Bernier’s
were developed as early as the seventeenth century, the origin of the
term ‘race’ as a signifier of physical difference went hand in hand with
the prominence of colour. Kant’s statement is worth revisiting: ‘so
fundamental is the difference between the races of man [. . .] it appears to
be as great in mental capacities as in colour’. Race, racism and colour lie
there conjoined at the birth of race thinking. By the nineteenth century
colour had become the unquestioned sign of the relation between external
characteristics and inner capacities, despite its complete metaphoricity,
arbitrariness and unreliability in describing those external features.
It is in the use of colour terms that the dominance of linguistic tra-
dition over observation comes into play. For the colour terms – ‘black’,
‘white’, ‘yellow’, ‘red’ – by which racial typology was organised, bear no
relation to anything in reality. ‘Who has seen a black or red person, a
white, a yellow, or brown?’ asks Henry Louis Gates.31 Nevertheless, ‘black’
and ‘white’ have become the most powerful signifiers in the contemporary
racial landscape. This has led to a paradox: while colour terms are the
supreme signifiers of the socially constructed fiction of race, they have
become at the same time strategic nodal points in the resistance to rac-
ism and to imperial power in its various forms. While no black, red or
yellow person exists, they exist absolutely as ‘people of colour’ because
whiteness remains the invisible norm. The paradox continues in the fact
that the more we try, as Du Bois does in ‘The Conservation of Races’, to
define race in non-biological terms, the less convincing any categorisation
becomes. Despite its inheritance from European ocularcentrism, despite
its completely spurious capacity as a racial signifier, colour works because
colour (in most cases) is the principle trigger of racism.32
The colonial system was based on a social division determined by
‘the colour line’, and it was maintained by a racial ideology that defined
the black man as inferior. As Raymond Kennedy remarks: ‘The colour line,
indeed, is the foundation of the entire colonial system, for on it is built
the whole social, economic, and political structure.’33 Colour, deployed
over three centuries ago to categorise human beings, has remained the key
feature of colonial and neo-imperial subjection of the African to the status
of economic tool. The social relationship between coloniser and colonised
was thus converted, as far as the black man was concerned, into an oppo-
sition between white and black, which acquired the moral values sum-
marised by the South African, Bloke Modisane, in these words: ‘White is
26 Bi ll Ashcrof t
right, and to be black is to be despised, dehumanised, [. . .] classed among
the beasts, hounded and persecuted, discriminated against, segregated and
oppressed by government and by man’s greed. White is the positive stand-
ard, black the negative.’34
The experience of blackness arises unbidden out of the fact, according
to Fanon, that ‘Consciousness of the body is solely a negating activity. It
is a third-person consciousness. The body is surrounded by an atmosphere
of certain uncertainty’. In his famous account of ‘The Fact of Blackness’ in
Black Skins, White Masks he reveals the radical alienation from one’s own
body that is occasioned by the white gaze:
‘Look, a Negro!’ It was an external stimulus that flicked over me as I passed
by. I made a tight smile.
‘Look, a Negro!’ It was true. It amused me.
‘Look, a Negro!’ The circle was drawing a bit tighter. I made no secret of
my amusement.
‘Mama, see the Negro! I’m frightened!’ Frightened! Frightened! [. . .] My
body was given back to me sprawled out, distorted, recolored, clad in
mourning in that white winter day. The Negro is an animal, the Negro is
bad, the Negro is mean, the Negro is ugly; [. . .] Mama, the nigger’s going
to eat me up.35
Like the originators of négritude, Fanon saw that his colour was the over-
determined site of centuries of abuse, slavery, discrimination and oppres-
sion. While Gates may still legitimately ask: ‘Who has seen a black or red
person, a white, a yellow, or brown?’ the difference between the empirical
object of sight and the experience of being seen becomes a critical distinc-
tion, deeply inflected with a particular history. ‘And so it is not I who
make a meaning for myself ’, says Fanon ‘but it is the meaning that was
already there, pre-existing, waiting for me.’ The meaning of this is that
authors writing about black experience would have to ignore their his-
torical location in order to liberate themselves: ‘I will shape a torch with
which to burn down the world, but it is the torch that was already there,
waiting for the turn of history’(BSWM, 134).
The issue for Fanon is the material reality of the body. This discussion
of history continues a critique of Sartre’s suggestion that négritude was ‘an
anti-racist racism’ and that ‘the white man is a symbol of capital as the
Negro is a symbol of labour’. Fanon resists symbolism, resists history, and
affirms the reality of the black body: ‘I am not a potentiality of something,
I am wholly what I am’ (BSWM, 133, 135). But it is also, categorically, an
affirmation of the non-discursive materiality of the body. The ‘experience
of race’ inside this body is the experience of being the object of the white
gaze. At the cry, ‘Look a Negro!’:
I was responsible at the same time for my body, for my race, for my
ancestors. I subjected myself to an objective examination, I discovered my
blackness, my ethnic characteristics; and I was battered down by tom-toms,
cannibalism, intellectual deficiency, fetishism, racial defects, slave-ships,
and above all else, above all: ‘Sho’ good eatin’. (BSWM, 112)
Fanon is suggesting something here that may be akin to Butler’s con-
cept of performativity. The location of the racial subject in history
generates performative expectations that are as hard to shake off as the
performative expectations of gender. ‘The tool of history is an inven-
tion. [. . .] The black person, by dint of his or her situation, is a human
who transcends (by choices, and not factual options) racist history, and
constitutes the space where dialogue is maintained. “I am not a pris-
oner of history. I should not seek there for the meaning of my destiny”’
(BSWM, 229).
The difference is that the performative construction of gender is largely
unconscious. By contrast, the experience of race is a constant and imme-
diate awareness of the difference of the body, an awareness of colour.
Only by an enormous deployment of one’s agency can such performa-
tivity, such awareness, and its consequences, be resisted. But the struggle
of this resistance is one that moves beyond the orbit of any postmodern
reading. ‘I am my own foundation./And it is by going beyond the histor-
ical, instrumental hypothesis that I will/initiate the cycle of my freedom’
(BSWM, 229, 231).
Ultimately, Fanon claims agency, and chooses to reject race as he rejects
racism. But at what cost, under what suffering from the racist gaze does
he assert his freedom? To go beyond racial colour he cannot demand to
remain black without returning to the white racism imposed on him by
contingent history. To claim agency he must go beyond any postmodern
concept of the subject: he transcends ideology, discourse and the uncon-
scious, indeed, all the theoretical architecture of subjectivity, to reclaim
the self. ‘It is through the effort to recapture the self and to scrutinize
the self, it is through the lasting tension of their freedom that men will
be able to create the ideal conditions of existence in the human world’
(BSWM, 231).
Fanon’s final word is an affirmation of the necessity of a vision of hope
for any project of postcolonial liberation, for without the belief in free-
dom and the agency of the self, a better world is impossible. Such a world
28 Bi ll Ashcrof t
is one in which race has vanished. This might be an illusion. But such a
world once existed, and without a belief in the possibility of a different
world, the possibility of the Not-Yet, resistance against racial discrim-
ination, and indeed resistance against injustice of any kind is defeated
before it starts.
Ultimately, postmodernism and postcolonialism agree that race is rela-
tional, although the nature of that relation might vary. Whether a grand
narrative, an essentialist myth or a chromatic distortion, the reality of
race lies in the experience of the racial subject, the experience of racism.
Without racism, race would not have been invented, and the continued
power and ubiquity of this non-existent category of race lies in the per-
sistence of racism and its consequences. Postcolonial analysis, by focusing
on the experience of the racialised subject – particularly as represented in
literature – reveals that despite the ambivalence surrounding the concept
of race, the reason it remains one of the most potent categories of identity
and difference lies in the reality of that historically determined experience
of categorisation, discrimination and exclusion.
Notes
1 It is difficult to embed this definition since the chronological use of the term
is so tenacious. However, a chronological description of ‘postcolonial states’ –
those decolonized states that came to independence in the 1960s – obscures the
continuing reality of imperialism and neocolonialism.
2 Jean-Francois Lyotard, Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), xxiv.
3 See Kumkum Sangari, ‘The Politics of the Possible’, Cultural Critique 7 (1987),
157–86.
4 Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a
Radical Democratic Politics (New York: Verso, 1985), 105.
5 Sue Kim, Critiquing Postmodernism in Contemporary Discourses of Race (New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 34.
6 The African Coptic saint-warrior St Maurice, who fought in the Crusades, is
memorialized in a statue in Magdeburg Cathedral, which shows him to be an
African, even including his facial lineage cuts. But his blackness is invisible.
See Basil Davidson, The Search for Africa, History, Culture, Politics (New York:
Random House, 1994), 330.
7 See Tzvetan Todorov, On Human Diversity: Nationalism, Racism, and Exoticism
in French Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).
8 Immanuel Kant, Observations on The Feeling of The Beautiful and Sublime,
trans. John T. Goldthwait (1764; Berkeley: University of California Press,
1960), 111.
9 Adam Kirsch, ‘Whole in One’, a review of Leora Batnitzky, How Judaism
Became a Religion: An Introduction to Modern Jewish Thought,Tablet,
http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/books/86111/whole-
in-one, (December 2011).
10 Eric Mark Kramer, Postmodernism and Race (New York: Greenwood,
1997), 11.
11 See Anthony Kwame Appiah, ‘The Uncompleted Argument: Du Bois and
the Illusion of Race’, Critical Inquiry 12/1 (1985), 21–37; In My Father’s House:
Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (London: Methuen, 1992), 43–73.
12 See David Goldberg, ‘Modernity, Race, and Morality’, Cultural Critique 24
(1993), 193–227.
13 Étienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous
Identities (London, New York: Verso, 1991), 18.
14 Algis Mickunas, ‘Dialogue and Race’ in Eric Mark Kramer, Postmodernism
and Race (New York: Greenwood, 1967), 51–64 [61].
15 Caryl Phillips, Cambridge (Basingstoke: Picador, 1992), 14, 120.
16 See Appiah, In My Father’s House, 22.
17 W. E. B. Du Bois, ‘The Conservation of Races’, The American Negro Academy
Occasional Paper 2: Penn State University, 2006, 6, http://www2.hn.psu.edu/
faculty/jmanis/webdubois/DuBoisConservationRaces.pdf. Accessed October
2013.
18 Du Bois, ‘The Conservation of Races’, 7.
19 Appiah, In My Father’s House, 25.
20 In My Father’s House, 25.
21 In My Father’s House, 72.
22 See W. E. B. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of
a Race Concept (1940; New Jersey: Transaction, 1984), chap 4, ‘Science and
Empire’.
23 Abiola Irele, The African Experience in Literature and Ideology (London:
Heinemann, 1981), 87.
24 Leopold Sedar Senghor, Liberté I, Négritude et Humanisme (Paris: Seuil,
1964), 288.
25 Léon Damas, Black Label (Paris: Gallimard, 1956), 52, translated by
Gerald Moore in Seven African Writers (London: Oxford University Press,
1962), xx.
26 A member of the Free Kanaky movement in New Caledonia put this very
succinctly when I spoke to him in the 1980s: ‘The British treat us like shit.
But the French call us brothers and treat us like shit.’
27 O. R. Dathorne, Dark Ancestor: The Literature of the Black Man in the
Caribbean (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981), 59.
28 Sylvia Washington Bâ, The Concept of Négritude in the Poetry of Léopold Sédar
Senghor (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973), 12.
29 In a footnote Abiola Irele says of Cesaire: ‘As a matter of fact, Cesaire himself
prefers to regard négritude as a historical stand, as an attitude, rather than as a
comprehensive system’ (private interview with the author).
30 Bi ll Ashcrof t
30 See G. Spivak, ‘Criticism, Feminism and the Institution’, interview with
Elizabeth Gross, Thesis Eleven 10/11 (November/March 1984–5), 175–87.
31 Henry Louis Gates, ‘Writing Race’ in Race Writing and Difference (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1986), 6.
32 I allude here to the heated and unresolved argument over whether Jewish
people constitute a race. The question might be amenable to the basic premise
of this chapter: that while race doesn’t exist, the experience of racism is the
key feature of the function of race in social relations.
33 Raymond Kennedy, ‘The Colonial Crisis and the Future’ in Ralph Linton
(ed.), The Science of Man in the World Crisis (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1945), 308.
34 Bloke Modisane, ‘Why I Ran Away’ in J. Langston Hughes (ed.), An African
Treasury (New York: Crown, 1960), 26.
35 Frantz Fanon, Black Skins, White Masks, trans. Charles Markmann (New
York: Grove, 1967), 110–14. Hereafter referred to in the text as BSWM.
Ch apter 2
Race and the Crisis of the Postmodern

Social Novel
Madhu Dubey
Postmodernism has been widely perceived, by novelists and literary critics

alike, as a force hastening the death of the American social novel. The
‘dead end of postmodernism’, Robert McLaughlin argues, resulted from
a preoccupation with self-reflexive, non-referential uses of language rather
than in ‘representing the world we all more or less share’.1 This position is
perhaps most clearly spelled out by influential literary critic John Carlos
Rowe, who claims that postmodern fiction abandoned ‘the traditional
concerns of the novel to represent social reality’, citing as support the title
of Ronald Sukenick’s Death of the Novel and Other Stories (1969) as well as
John Barth’s assertion, in a 1964 interview, that ‘reality is a nice place to
visit, but you wouldn’t like to live there’.2 Such critical accounts are rein-
forced by various remarks by prominent American novelists worrying over
a crisis in the social function of the novel, whether Philip Roth’s lament
about the contemporary writer’s ‘voluntary withdrawal’ from the ‘social
and political phenomena of our times’ or Don DeLillo’s description of
the ‘social novel’ as an ‘endangered spectacle’.3 Since the 1960s – in other
words, since the onset of postmodernism – several other American novel-
ists have emphasised the challenge posed to the literary imagination by
an increasingly fragmented social world that defies realist representation.
The referential dimension of the novel was taken (by critics and novelists
alike) to be crucial to its social function, apparent in Rowe’s discussion of
‘the postmodernists’ rebellion against literary realism and social reality’, in
Roth’s concern that the realist novelist was being stupefied and outpaced
by an American social reality so complex as to seem incredible, or in John
Barth’s hope that the ideal postmodern novel would be able to broaden
its audience and appeal by transcending ‘the quarrel between realism and
irrealism’.4
Various political, cultural and technological factors considered to be
distinctive of the postmodern period fueled this perceived crisis in the
American social novel: the difficulty of grasping, let alone representing,
31
32 Madhu Dubey
the increasingly abstract social world of global capitalism; the shrinking
audience and sphere of public influence for print literature relative to tel-
evision and other mass cultural media; and the fracturing of the American
social field wrought by the micropolitics of difference. While all these fac-
tors pose a formidable challenge to the realist novel’s mission of mapping
social totality, it is the latter – the explosion of the postmodern politics
of difference on to the American social scene during the 1960s – that is
most strongly registered as a problem by prominent American novelists
in essays published from the 1960s through the 1990s. Two of these are
worth examining in detail, for they explicitly address the ways in which
race plays into the crisis of the American social novel in the postmod-
ern period: Tom Wolfe’s ‘Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast: A Literary
Manifesto for the New Social Novel’ and Jonathan Franzen’s ‘Perchance to
Dream: In the Age of Images, a Reason to Write Novels’, both published
in Harper’s Magazine, in 1989 and 1996 respectively.
Wolfe’s point of departure is his dismay with American novelists for
giving up on the realist novel when American social life began to look
like a ‘cross section of disintegrating fragments’ by the end of the 1960s.5
Wolfe highlights the racial dimension of this scene of social fragmenta-
tion, opening his essay with a reference to the race riots that erupted in
American cities during the 1960s. To Wolfe, the racially charged social
field confronting the novelist in the decades since the 1960s presents a
problem, but also a rare opportunity. Wolfe writes that every large city in
the United States is undergoing dramatic change:
The fourth great wave of immigration – this one from Asia, North Africa,
Latin America, and the Caribbean – is now pouring in. Within ten years
political power in most major American cities will have passed to the non-
white majorities. Does that render these cities incomprehensible, frag-
mented beyond the grasp of all logic, absurd, meaningless to gaze upon in
a literary sense? Not in my opinion. It merely makes the task of the writer
more difficult.6
The difficulty, as Wolfe sees it, is two-pronged: the racial heterogene-
ity resulting from demographic changes following the Immigration and
Nationality Act of 1965 not only makes American social life seem recalci-
trant to totalised representation but also presages the displacement of the
white writer from a long-held position of social centrality.
If the ‘convulsive social change’ of the post-1960s decades has
made the American scene appear ‘all the more chaotic, random, and
discontinuous’, Wolfe takes this as an ‘open invitation to literature,
Race and the Crisis of the Postmodern Social Novel 33
especially in the form of the novel’, and more specifically the realist novel.
In a social landscape comprised of ‘fast-multiplying factions’ that are
becoming ever more insulated and balkanised, the realist novel can per-
form a uniquely integrative function: ‘the economy with which realistic
fiction can bring the many currents of a city together in a single, fairly sim-
ple story was something that I [. . .] found exhilarating’.7 Whereas Philip
Roth had lamented the fact that the realist novel’s purpose, of bringing
news of the social world, was being usurped by the media,8 Wolfe asserts
that the novel, by virtue of being fiction, can attain an omniscient social
vision through its ability to breach social barriers. Wolfe describes these
barriers, which he believes had become fortified by the 1980s, in point-
edly racial terms, noting that in 1970, members of the Black Panther Party
could and did turn up in Leonard Bernstein’s living room. By the end
of the 1980s, such unexpected interracial encounters seemed increasingly
unlikely in actuality but remained imaginable in fiction. The realist novel,
then, as Wolfe conceives it, offers a powerful medium for mapping social
totality, in that it can represent a cross- and transracial vision that seems
all but inaccessible in late-twentieth-century America.
Writing seven years later, Jonathan Franzen diagnoses the crisis of the
American social novel in terms that are remarkably similar to Wolfe’s in
some key respects, identifying the fragmentation of post-1960s American
society as the most potent threat to the realist novel. Also, like Wolfe,
Franzen focuses his account of social fragmentation on the changing racial
composition of American cities. But whereas Wolfe sought to reckon with
the demographic shifts that were transforming American cities in the dec-
ades since the 1960s, for Franzen, the city in racial transition essentially
serves as a metaphorical resource for elaborating his sense of marginalisa-
tion as a white writer:
The institution of writing and reading serious novels is like a grand old
Middle American city gutted and drained by superhighways. Ringing the
depressed inner city of serious work are prosperous clonal suburbs of mass
entertainment. [. . .] The last fifty years have seen a lot of white male flight
to the suburbs. [. . .] What remain, mostly, are ethnic and cultural enclaves.
Much of contemporary fiction’s vitality now resides in the black, Hispanic,
Asian, Native American, gay, and women’s communities, which have moved
into the structures left behind by the departing straight white male.9
In this mapping of the post-1960s literary field as analogous to an earlier
period in US urban history – the suburbanisation of the post-war decades –
Franzen elides and mystifies the processes of urban redevelopment and
34 Madhu Dubey
gentrification that were well underway at the time he published this essay,
processes that were remaking urban racial geography in a manner exactly
contrary to his account, leading to the massive displacement of racial
minority populations from inner cities. For Franzen, the inner city of an
earlier time (rather than the gentrifying inner city of the late twentieth
century) works as a metaphor for literary authenticity precisely because
it is economically depressed, and Franzen shores up his own position as
a marginalised white writer by figuratively appropriating the position of
racial minority groups displaced from the city. In a contradictory move,
Franzen inverts current racial and spatial dynamics when he refers to
racial minority groups moving into inner-city areas previously occupied
by white men, but he then goes on to convert this imagined displacement
of white male writers into a source of cultural authenticity by laying claim
to the very space from which he feels banished: ‘By 1993 I was as depressed
as the inner city of fiction.’10
Franzen uses the term ‘depressive realism’ to describe the white male
novelist’s sense of irrelevance, arising from the loss of a consensual frame of
social reference in the postmodern period. Depressive realism also attests
to the literary seriousness of the white male novelist, setting him at odds
with the ‘therapeutic optimism’ of multicultural identity politics.11 In his
effort to account for his own feeling of obsolescence, Franzen attributes
the death of the American social novel to the rise of the postmodern pol-
itics of difference, asserting that the only American novelists who exert
cultural influence in the world beyond the academy are women of colour
such as Louise Erdrich, Toni Morrison and Amy Tan. The social authority
of such novelists, according to Franzen, derives from their ‘membership
in a tribe’, and, as Franzen’s friend David Foster Wallace reminds him,
‘Tribal writers can [. . .] write to and for their subculture about how the
mainstream culture’s alienated them.’12 Lacking this tribal ethos of distinc-
tive cultural identity and shared community, white male writers find it
harder to launch critiques of the mainstream culture with which they are
identified but from which they feel profoundly alienated.
Franzen’s racialised – and gendered – mapping of the postmodern lit-
erary field is widely reproduced (in appreciative rather than depressive
tones) in recent literary criticism, which tends to dichotomise American
fiction since the 1970s between the socially purposeful fiction of women
writers of colour and the ‘politically neutered [. . .] postmodernism’ of
white male writers.13 In common with Wolfe and Franzen, authori-
tative periodising accounts of postmodernism link the crisis in the
American social novel to the breakdown of a consensual understanding
of American life. For example, in their Introduction to the Norton
Anthology of Postmodern American Fiction, editors Paula Geyh, Fred
Leebron and Andrew Levy point out that the word ‘postmodern’ entered
the American lexicon in the 1960s as part of an assault on the ideal of
a ‘unified national ethos’. The increasing political and cultural visibil-
ity of racial minority groups gave rise to a ‘dissensus culture’, which,
in the sphere of literature, took the form of an attack on traditional
(in other words, realist) narrative.14 Like Franzen, several literary critics
construed the postmodern turn in American culture, with its skepticism
about totalising metanarratives, its emphasis on identity politics, and
its revalorisation of the margins, as an immensely enabling condition
for minority writers, expanding their visibility on the literary scene and
extending their sphere of social influence. In postmodern culture, writes
John Kucich, the ‘marginal or aggrieved social position’ of a writer guar-
antees ‘political legitimacy’, a development that ‘spells political death for
the white male postmodernist’.15 To write from a position of marginality
is to engage readers in a unique form of social relationality that numer-
ous literary critics identify with the minority writer’s ability to engage a
knowable community of readers.16
In the most starkly polarised variants of this critical discourse, the
social and political function of the novel is directly linked to realist
form and, in a related move, the referential impulse of novels by racial
minority writers is contrasted to the self-reflexive experimental fiction
of white male postmodernists. The political value invested in realism
is perhaps most clearly apparent in the controversy surrounding Leslie
Marmon Silko’s critical review of Louise Erdrich’s The Beet Queen (1986).
In Silko’s opinion, the problem with Erdrich’s novel is its affinity with
an academic postmodernism interested only in the relation of words to
other words, unencumbered by ‘any historical, political or cultural con-
nections’ to Native ‘communal experience’.17 Literary critics writing in
Erdrich’s defense took Silko to task for her reductive conception of the
literary text as a mirror of reality and her corresponding equation of
formal virtuosity with postmodern alienation from tribal community.
Yet, even commentators who distanced themselves from Silko’s brand
of realism nonetheless remained committed to establishing the stronger
referential drive – and therefore the greater social veracity – of Native
fiction relative to the postmodernism of white male writers. For exam-
ple, Susan Perez Castillo, critiquing Silko’s essentialist understanding of
ethnic community for its incongruity with postmodern cultural con-
ditions, suggests that the ontological instability of novels such as The
36 Madhu Dubey
Beet Queen (a narrative element Brian McHale identifies as distinctive
of postmodern fiction) may be ‘mimetic’ of the fragmented cultural and
social landscape of contemporary Native life.18
Extending far beyond scholarly discourse on the Silko-Erdrich contro-
versy, this kind of rapprochement between postmodernism and realism
carries great critical currency, in fact marking a broad consensus about
the enhanced political function of novels by women writers of colour as
compared to canonical postmodern fiction. John Carlos Rowe, for exam-
ple, notes that, whereas the experimental stream assumed to exemplify
American postmodernism has little to say about the pressing sociopo-
litical issues of its time, feminist and minority novelists (whom Rowe
groups under the umbrella term ‘this other postmodernism’) grant the
importance of postmodern critiques of representation but subordinate
these critiques to political aims.19 Variants of this claim appear even in
the work of literary critics such as Wendy Steiner, who explicitly sets
out to challenge narrow definitions of postmodernism as equivalent to
the auto-referential, ‘high’ experimental style epitomised by white male
writers such as Thomas Pynchon or John Barth, and pitted against the
transparently realist aesthetic of what Steiner labels ‘socially demar-
cated groups’.20 Steiner argues that the experimental and the tradition-
ally mimetic strands of fiction began to merge by the late 1970s and that
this formal synthesis more truly represents the wider stream of American
postmodern fiction. To Steiner, the oppositional political impetus behind
this synthesis is best exemplified by the novels of women writers of colour
such as Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, Alice Walker and Louise Erdrich.
What is unique about this fiction, in Steiner’s view, is an aesthetic of
‘redefined realism’ in which formal innovation, never the aim in itself,
always points to ‘the current state of reality’.21 The political urgency of
novels by women of colour inheres not only in their special purchase
on referentiality, which no longer takes the form of traditional narrative
realism, but also in their ability to forge social consensus and fictively
posit a community of readers.
Complementing Steiner’s discussion of ‘redefined realism’, Robert
Rebein writes of the ‘new realism’ forged by ethnic minority novel-
ists such as Sandra Cisneros, Louise Erdrich and Amy Tan, among oth-
ers. While remaining fairly traditional in their handling of character and
milieu, these novelists absorbed the challenges to representation posed
by postmodernism, as is apparent in their self-consciousness about the
workings of language and the limits of mimesis. The work of such writers,
according to Rebein, fulfills ‘Tom Wolfe’s prediction that the immediate
future of the American novel would be in the realist mode.’22 This for-
mulation, linking the redefined or new realism of racially marked writers
to Wolfe’s treatise, obscures far more than it reveals about the workings
of form in postmodern literature by writers of colour. This literature is
marked by pervasive anxiety about the social purpose of the novel: con-
trary to critical claims about their stronger grip on the referent, minority
postmodern writers pointedly depart from realism in order to signal the
difficulty of positing a clear social function for the novel. In the specific
case of African-American literature, realism had served as the preferred
vehicle for protesting racial inequality through the long historical trajec-
tory stretching from the antebellum slave narratives to the Black Arts
Movement of the 1960s. With the attainment of formal equality at the
end of the Civil Rights Movement and the diminishing force of political
solidarity cemented by race, the move away from realism by the 1970s sig-
nalled the exhaustion of the model of social engagement that had thus far
impelled African-American fiction.
The problem of imagining what a new kind of social novel would look
like in the post–Civil Rights period fuels the formal innovations of post-
modern novelists such as John Edgar Wideman, whose failed narratives
of urban realism are peppered with metafictive reflections on the social
marginality of the contemporary novelist, or Clarence Major, Paul Beatty,
and Percival Everett, who explicitly parody the expectation that realism
guarantees the social purpose of fiction. What compounds the difficulty
of situating minority writers as the inheritors of Wolfe’s realist agenda is
the fact that virtually none of these writers aspire to, let alone achieve,
the mission Wolfe assigns to the realist novelist – to fashion a vision of
social totality from the chaotic landscape of postmodern American life.
One of the few texts to even attempt this kind of mission, Toni Cade
Bambara’s dense and experimental novel The Salt Eaters (1980), nearly
implodes from the effort of trying to fuse various axes of social and politi-
cal affiliation (including racial, feminist, labor and environmental) into a
vision of social totality – a vision intimated at the end of the novel only
through a cataclysmic disruption of narrative realism. Abruptly switching
to a supernatural register, Bambara’s novel represents the emergence of the
postmodern politics of difference as a formidable obstacle to the realist
novel’s traditional aim of mapping social totality. Yet what may be most
instructive here is not Bambara’s (or any other novelist’s) failure to revive
the realist social novel but rather the limitations of Wolfe’s understanding
of how genres signify at distinct historical conjunctures. In his 1989 mani-
festo, Wolfe noted with disappointment the absence of ‘the big realistic
38 Madhu Dubey
novels’ that he expected would emerge as the most fitting forms for por-
traying the ‘racial strife’ that ‘played such a major part’ in late-twentieth-
century American life.23 The problem here is that Wolfe assumes that the
‘new’ or ‘big’ social novel dealing with the fraught realities of race would
be realist and, as a corollary point, that a shift away from the formal tech-
niques of postmodern fiction towards greater realism would enhance the
novel’s capacity to make sense of a disorderly social reality.
The most telling evidence against the claim that a return to realism
would inaugurate a new kind of social fiction is Wolfe’s own novel, The
Bonfire of the Vanities, published in 1987. Set in New York during the finan-
cial boom of the 1980s, Bonfire delineates a polarised urban landscape of
black-white racial division, failing to confront the effects of the post-1965
immigration flows that were transforming the racial geography of the city
and exposing the inadequacy of a dualistic conception of race. Critics have
censured Wolfe’s novel for its cartoonish depictions of African-American
characters and its restriction to the insular point of view of the white bond
trader Sherman McCoy. But this very constraint might be seen as the nov-
el’s most revealing feature, for Wolfe’s portrait of McCoy as a self-styled
Master of the Universe builds up to a scathing condemnation of the spu-
rious omniscience attached to the position of white privilege. Satirising
the myopic social perspective resulting from McCoy’s fear of impending
white obsolescence, Bonfire is most powerful as a testament to the ways in
which the racial balkanisation of contemporary American life inhibits the
socially integrative ambitions of realist fiction.
The vastly different instances of Wolfe’s and Bambara’s novels both indi-
cate that the challenge of renewing the social novel in postmodern times
will not be resolved by formal means, by resuscitating narrative realism.
Regardless of the race or ethnicity of the novelist, the defining feature of
the novel in the postmodern era is its distance from the socially integrative
promise of realist fiction. This historically specific constraint – the dif-
ficulty of figuring social totality, whether through realism or other generic
choices – forms the point of departure for Jonathan Franzen’s observations
about the distinctive functions opened up for minority novelists in the
postmodern period. As noted earlier, Franzen, along with many literary
critics, claims that multiculturalism has enabled a new kind of social novel
distinguished by its tribalism or, in other words, by its vital connection
to an ethnically specific notion of community. At first glance, this view
seems to be corroborated by the resurgent emphasis on the term ‘tribe’
by Native-American, Asian-American, and African-American writers
reflecting on the genre of the novel in the postmodern period. For exam-
ple, Gerald Vizenor regards the postmodern incredulity towards totalising
metanarratives as a significant ‘overture’ for Native-American literatures:
through its shift away from the ‘representationalism’ with which such lit-
eratures have long been burdened, postmodernism serves to ‘liberate tribal
narratives’.24 But real difficulties – with Franzen’s formulation about post-
modern tribalism as well as with wider critical discourses about the link
to community affirmed in novels by racially marked writers – begin to
surface once we scrutinise more closely the meaning Vizenor and others
attach to the term ‘tribe’.
In his introduction to a special issue of Ploughshares, Native-American
novelist James Welch poses exactly this question: ‘What is our notion of
tribe and tribalism as we approach the twenty-first century?’ Invoking a
broad definition of tribe to refer to any social group bound together by
common activity, interest or occupation (including, for example, writers
of literature and homosexuals in the military), Welch observes that the
contributions he received for the special issue all evinced ‘the desire to
acknowledge the tribes of people outside the cozy confines of larger soci-
ety and their inalienable right to bang at the gates’. In the importance he
places on the tribal writer’s propensity for critiquing ‘established society’
from a position on its fringes, Welch apparently concurs with Franzen’s
(and David Foster Wallace’s) understanding of postmodern literary trib-
alism as a unique ability to write to and from a marginalised subculture
about its alienation from the American mainstream. But the privilege
attached to this marginal position seems to erode as Welch turns from
‘tribe’ defined as subculture to the more narrow meaning of ‘tribe’ as eth-
nos. Ethnic and racial minority writers, in Welch’s view, are engaged in
the very different enterprise of describing ‘their own cultures, with an
underlying realization and sadness that they are being swallowed up by
the dominant culture’. In the works of such writers, Welch finds no trace
of ‘rah-rah tribalism’, in marked contrast to Franzen’s impressions about
the ‘therapeutic optimism’ rampant in postmodern multiculturalism.25
Welch’s observation that the tribe, defined as an ethnos with a dis-
tinct culture, is at risk of absorption into the American mainstream helps
clarify the sense in which critical discourses about the ethnic writer’s spe-
cial purchase on the social novel rest on a fundamental misrecognition
of the workings of race in the postmodern period. Due to a variety of
political and cultural factors – including Civil Rights legislation and the
1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which lifted formal barriers to
40 Madhu Dubey
national inclusion for African Americans and Asian Americans, as well as
an expansive commodity capitalism powered by fetishistic appropriation
rather than exclusion of racial and ethnic cultural differences – cohesive
racial communities forged by histories of marginalisation appeared to be
as endangered in the post-1960s decades as did ideals of a unified national
ethos. A keen sense of the newly vulnerable situation of the tribe suffuses
the work of novelists such as Louise Erdrich, Maxine Hong Kingston and
Toni Morrison, who are most often cited to support critical claims about
the communal orientation of minority postmodern fiction. Far from
accruing social relevance by virtue of membership in a tribe, as Franzen
suggests, Morrison defines the function of the novel in terms of its irrevo-
cable distance from ‘a time when an artist could be genuinely representa-
tive of the tribe and in it’.26 A similarly ambivalent view of the tribe as an
intense – because imperiled – object of desire is voiced by Kingston, who
asserts that her work, like that of Morrison or Leslie Marmon Silko, dif-
fers from the mainstream of postmodern American fiction in that it draws
its urgency from a sense of ‘connection with people who have a commu-
nity and a tribe’.27 Yet, Kingston also laments the fact that the cultures and
communities of ‘minority people’ are ‘on the brink of disappearing’.28
This understanding of the tribe, as a legitimising yet precarious entity,
crucially determines the task of the new social novel. Morrison’s essay,
‘Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation’ (1984), theorises this task in
especially revealing ways, taking as its point of departure the novelist’s
separation from the ‘tribal or racial sensibility’ expressed in folk culture.29
Morrison associates this organic relationship between artist and tribe with
oral traditions that served valuable functions for black communities in
the rural south. In Morrison’s account, the historical emergence and social
value of the novel are contingent on the dilution of oral tradition that
resulted from its extension beyond the arena of folk racial community
into a national and (indeed international) sphere of commodity circula-
tion. At the very moment that black culture, whether folk or print, could
no longer presuppose a tribal sensibility, the form of the novel became
‘needed by African-Americans’ to ‘accomplish certain very strong func-
tions’ previously fulfilled by oral tradition. As she tries to explain how the
novel might replace the oral traditions whose use value is compromised
once their audience ceases to be ‘exclusively’ black, Morrison displaces the
problem of audience to the level of form. The novel cannot assume or
address an organic racial community, but it can aesthetically salvage the
communal folk culture that is on the verge of extinction. Rescuing certain
elements of this culture (such as oralised narrative voice or blending of
supernatural and mundane registers), Morrison aims to ‘incorporate, into
that traditional genre the novel, unorthodox novelistic characteristics –
so that it is, in my view, Black’. At the end of ‘Rootedness’, Morrison
asserts that if her fiction ‘isn’t about the village or the community or
about you, then it’s not about anything [. . .] which is to say yes, the work
must be political’.30 The ‘you’ Morrison addresses here is equivalent to the
tribe that the novel, by her own definition, cannot address, and in this
sense Morrison’s articulation of the novel’s political purpose rests on a
contradiction. The novel’s value lies in its ability to restore organic racial
community as a fictive construct that is historically unavailable. In this
respect, the politically useful novel both buries and resurrects the tribe,
thereby stylistically compensating for the contemporary writer’s loss of a
clearly delimited and legitimising sphere of social influence.
The historical endangerment of the tribe constitutes a remarkably gen-
erative condition of aesthetic possibility for a wide range of minority nov-
elists, who variously adapt oral traditions and deploy magical or fabulist
elements to recapture racially and ethnically specific cultures. Deviating
from traditional social realism, these generic choices have breathed new life
into the novel, enabling it to preserve and commemorate an ethnos felt to
be at risk of dissolution. The formal innovations that distinguish the nov-
els of Erdrich, Kingston and Morrison, among others, derive from their
contradictory relations to (and perceptions of ) the tribe. As Morrison’s
‘Rootedness’ suggests and as Jace Weaver explicitly points out with refer-
ence to Native-American fiction, to write a novel or ‘to put one’s authorial
signature on a text is to immediately put oneself outside the oral tradition
and community’. Yet Weaver goes on to insist that the Native-American
novelist can perform the critical social function of sustaining tribal culture
via aesthetic remembrance,31 a view echoed by Louise Erdrich who writes
that contemporary Native writers confront ‘a task quite different from
that of other writers’ – of ‘protecting and celebrating’ a ‘tribal view of the
world’ in the face of ‘enormous loss’ and ‘catastrophe’.32
The erosion of tribal culture and community carries specific historical
resonance for a writer such as Erdrich, referring to the gradual expropria-
tion of Chippewa tribal lands resulting from federal allotment acts and
treaties dating back to the early nineteenth century. In Erdrich’s celebrated
novel Tracks (1988), the Chippewa elder Nanapush reflects on the threat
posed to the tribe by its reification as an object of state legislation and
bureaucratic regulation: ‘I began to see what we were becoming and the
years have borne me out: a tribe of cabinets and triplicates, a tribe of sin-
gle-space documents, directives, policy. A tribe of pressed trees. A tribe
42 Madhu Dubey
of chicken-scratch that can be scattered by a wind, diminished to ashes
by one struck match.’33 Erdrich renders the residual tribal world view,
grounded in communal ownership of land, through the oralised and fabu-
list register of Nanapush’s narrative voice, which alternates with the mark-
edly written and largely realist narrative of Pauline, a figure of alienation
from Chippewa cultural traditions. In Tracks, disparate constructs of the
tribe (whether a bureaucratic entity defined in terms of blood quantum
levels or a land-based communal ethos) jostle each other, just as the nar-
rative voices of Nanapush and Pauline remain disjunctive and ultimately
irreconcilable – a formal as well as thematic undecidability that is often
marshalled as the clearest evidence of Erdrich’s postmodern aesthetic.34
The category of the tribe features just as centrally and is thematised
in equally indeterminate ways in Maxine Hong Kingston’s Tripmaster
Monkey: His Fake Book (1989). The novel’s formal innovations are inspired
by the same impulse to preserve a dissipating tribal sensibility that drives
Morrison’s and Erdrich’s fiction. Concerned that ‘the ethnos is degenerat-
ing’, Kingston’s protagonist Wittman Ah Sing wants to ‘remember words
spoken by the people of his brief and dying culture’.35 The terms ‘ethnos’
and ‘tribe’ are attached to various social groups in the novel, sometimes
referring specifically to Chinese Americans and sometimes applying
more broadly to all immigrant groups that have not fully assimilated into
American society. From an educational film screened at an unemployment
office, Wittman learns that the newly arrived immigrant must leave the
tribe behind in order to become ‘a successful American’, characterised as
‘alienated, tribeless, individual’. In common with James Welch or Toni
Morrison, Kingston, at least in this passage, situates the tribe in contra-
distinction to mainstream American culture, but as elaborated over the
course of the novel the term ‘tribe’ bears a rather different valence than
it does in the context of African-American or American-Indian culture.
Wittman asks, ‘So what do we have in the way of a culture besides Chinese
hand laundries? [. . .] Where’s our jazz? Where’s our blues?’ pointing to
the highly visible and indispensable presence of African-American culture
in the national mainstream, a point also made about Native Americans
through a description of a well-attended multimedia event called ‘America
Needs Indians’.36 In contrast to these groups, whose culture has exerted a
shaping force on American identity, Asian Americans are seen as foreign,
as lacking a distinctive ethnic idiom, and in this respect are still grappling
with the problem of exclusion from national culture instead of the threat
of absorption into the mainstream that writers such as James Welch and
Toni Morrison caution against.
Accordingly, the most pressing mission of the Asian-American social
novel, as elaborated in Tripmaster Monkey, is to lay claim to ‘Americanness’,
a mission that powerfully inflects Wittman’s as well as Kingston’s mus-
ings on the tribe. The novel affirms a national culture that is revitalised
by the clamoring presence of multiple tribes, even as it extends the term
‘tribe’ so as to ‘include everyone and everything’. Wittman aspires to be
‘the reader of the tribe’, yet his audiences, when he reads aloud on a bus or
on stage, model a type of community – made up of ‘coincidental people’
and ‘whoever crosses your path’ – that is far removed from tribe defined
as organic community or ethnos. Wishing to establish a distinctively
Chinese-American cultural ethos yet also to claim all of America as ‘his
province’, Wittman develops an exuberantly motley style meant to speak
for the entirety of a polyglot and multiethnic American culture.37 Through
the elasticity of its definition of tribe and its reimagining of America as a
dynamic culture of dissensus, Tripmaster Monkey perfectly emblematises
the pluralist promise of the postmodern politics of difference.
Kingston conceives of the novel as a ‘fake book’ that disavows racial
authenticity and naïve referentiality, as a formally sophisticated artifact
that invokes the culture of the tribe yet necessarily supersedes it by vir-
tue of its status as a book. As the label ‘fake book’ further implies, the
tribe is a fictive construct, a product of aesthetic reinvention rather than
a determinate racial community that represents the actual readership of
novelists such as Kingston, Erdrich and Morrison. Construed in this way,
as a rich aesthetic repository, the tribe does not and cannot supply these
novelists an assured social purpose or sphere of influence. In fact, the aes-
theticised notions of tribe that circulate widely in postmodern literature
and culture have provoked censure from literary critics invested in imput-
ing political value to novels by minority writers. Novelists that are seen as
quintessentially postmodern, such as Gerald Vizenor and Louise Erdrich,
have been pointedly critiqued for embracing expansive conceptions of the
tribe as a repertoire of aesthetic strategies rather than an integral racial
community.38 Remarking on the Native-American literary renaissance of
the late twentieth century, Craig Womack wonders why fictional narra-
tives about reconnection to tribal culture draw much broader audiences
than historical and political analyses of tribal land claims or sovereignty.
Does the greater popular appeal of fiction, asks Womack, play into the
notion of the Vanishing Indian ‘by allowing Native people to be fictional
but not real’?39 Womack’s provocative question indirectly reveals the blind
spot of literary-critical discourses affirming the indubitable difference of
postmodern fiction by racial minority writers, for such discourses both
44 Madhu Dubey
reflect and feed into a postmodern cultural climate marked by aestheti-
cised appreciation of racial and ethnic differences. Instead of asserting its
special purchase on referentiality or community, we might better grasp the
distinctive power of this fiction by linking its deformation of realism to
the difficulty of investing racialised cultural differences with contestatory
political value in the postmodern period.
Notes
1 Robert McLaughlin, ‘Post-Postmodern Discontent: Contemporary Fiction
and the Social World’, symploke 12/1–2 (2004), 54, 65–6.
2 John Carlos Rowe, ‘Postmodernist Studies’ in Stephen Greenblatt and Giles
Gunn (eds.), Redrawing the Boundaries: The Transformation of English and
American Literary Studies (New York: MLA, 1992), 180–1.
3 Philip Roth, ‘Writing American Fiction’, Commentary (March 1961), 227;
Don DeLillo, cited in Jonathan Franzen, ‘Perchance to Dream: In the Age of
Images, A Reason to Write Novels’, Harper’s Magazine (April 1996), 54. For
an extended discussion of American postmodern novelists’ anxieties about the
social role of fiction, see Jeremy Green, Late Postmodernism: American Fiction
at the Millennium (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).
4 Rowe, ‘Postmodernist Studies’, 181; Roth, ‘Writing American Fiction’, 224;
John Barth, ‘The Literature of Replenishment’ (1980) reprinted in The Friday
Book: Essays and Other Non-Fiction (London: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1984), 203.
5 Tom Wolfe, ‘Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast: A Literary Manifesto for the
New Social Novel’, Harper’s Magazine (November 1989), 47.
6 Wolfe, ‘Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast’, 52.
7 ‘Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast’, 56.
8 See Roth, ‘Writing American Fiction’, 225.
9 Franzen, ‘Perchance to Dream’, 39.
10 ‘Perchance to Dream’, 39.
11 ‘Perchance to Dream’, 44, 47.
12 ‘Perchance to Dream’, 47, 51.
13 John Kucich, ‘Postmodern Politics: Don DeLillo and the Plight of the White
Male Writer’, Michigan Quarterly Review 27/2 (1988), 329.
14 Paula Geyh, Fred Leebron and Andrew Levy, Postmodern American Fiction
(New York: Norton, 1998), xii–xiii.
15 Kucich, ‘Postmodern Politics’, 333.
16 For example, see Jay Clayton, ‘The Narrative Turn in Recent Minority Fiction’,
American Literary History 2/3 (1990), 388–89; Carolyn Rody, ‘Impossible
Voices: Ethnic Postmodern Narration in Toni Morrison’s Jazz and Karen Tei
Yamashita’s Through the Arc of the Rain Forest’, Contemporary Literature 41/4
(2000), 633.
17 Leslie Marmon Silko, ‘Here’s an Odd Artifact for the Fairy-Tale Shelf ’, review
of The Beet Queen, by Louise Erdrich, Studies in American Indian Literature 10
(1986), 180.
18 Susan Perez Castillo, ‘Postmodernism, Native American Literature, and the
Real: The Silko-Erdrich Controversy’, The Massachusetts Review 32/2 (1991),
288–9. Nancy Peterson, in ‘History, Postmodernism, and Louise Erdrich’s
Tracks’, PMLA 109/5 (1994), similarly claims that Erdrich’s fiction, insofar as it
‘neither relinquishes nor oversimplifies its referential debt’, is uniquely suited
to a postmodern climate that precludes a return to naïve realism [990].
19 Rowe, ‘Postmodernist Studies’, 197–8.
20 Wendy Steiner, ‘Postmodern Fictions, 1960–1990’ in Sacvan Bercovitch (ed.),
The Cambridge History of American Literature, 7 (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1999), 530.
21 Steiner, ‘Postmodern Fictions’, 499, 526–7.
22 Robert Rebein, Hicks, Tribes, and Dirty Realists: American Fiction after
Postmodernism (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001), 19.
23 Wolfe, ‘Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast’, 46.
24 Gerald Vizenor, ‘A Postmodern Introduction’ in Gerald Vizenor (ed.),
Narrative Chance: Postmodern Discourse on Native American Indian Literatures
(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993), 4–5.
25 James Welch, Introduction, Ploughshares 20/1 (1994), 5.
26 Toni Morrison, ‘Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation’ in Mari Evans
(ed.), Black Women Writers (1950–1980) (New York: Anchor, 1984), 339.
27 Paula Rabinowitz, ‘Eccentric Memories: A Conversation with Maxine Hong
Kingston’, Michigan Quarterly Review 26/1 (1987), 184.
28 Shelley Fisher Fishkin, ‘Interview with Maxine Hong Kingston’, American
Literary History 3/4 (Winter 1991), 786.
29 Morrison, ‘Rootedness’, 339.
30 ‘Rootedness’, 340–4.
31 Jace Weaver, That the People Might Live: Native American Literatures and Native
American Community (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 42–3.
32 Louise Erdrich, ‘Where I Ought to Be: A Writer’s Sense of Place’, The New
York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/1985/07/28/books/where-i-ought-to-be-
a-writer-s-sense-of-place.html (28 July 1985). Accessed 1 March 2012.
33 Louise Erdrich, Tracks (New York: Henry Holt, 1988), 225.
34 For example, Steven Scott, in The Gamefulness of American Postmodernism:
John Barth and Louise Erdrich (New York: Peter Lang, 2000), characterises
Tracks as ‘an English novel self-reflexively posing as a Chippewa story, or else
a Chippewa story, trapped inside the body of an English novel, or else both’
(117).
35 Maxine Hong Kingston, Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (New York:
Vintage, 1990), 255, 6.
36 Kingston, Tripmaster Monkey, 246, 27, 152.
37 Tripmaster Monkey, 277, 247, 223, 41.
46 Madhu Dubey
38 For example, Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, in Why I Can’t Read Wallace Stegner
and Other Essays (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), critiques
Erdrich for dismissing ‘the reality of race memory’ (82) and Vizenor for sug-
gesting that ‘whoever wants to be tribal can join the tribe’ (85). Objections
to postmodern notions of the tribe as a fictive, aesthetic construct resonate
especially strongly in Native-American literary studies, not surprisingly, given
the obvious fact that Native tribes exist as legal and demographic categories in
the actual world beyond the literary text.
39 Craig Womack, Red on Red: Native American Literary Separatism (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 11.
Ch apter 3
Worlded Localisms
Cosmopolitics Writ Small
David James
When the novelist Philip Hensher recently suggested that ‘fiction asks us
to examine the scale of our own compassion and interest’, he captured
the essence of what is both a dilemma and point of departure for con-
temporary literature’s cosmopolitan imagination.1 At once perspectival
and spacious, regional and unruly, narrative fiction seems well suited to
engage this question of how to render worldly experiences of racial dis-
enfranchisement or cultural displacement while expanding its readers’
affective ‘scale’ of compassion. Yet among a certain generation of postmil-
lennial writers, this process of rescaling has been as much about mode as
about the reader’s edification. Calibrating the personal, familial and social
dynamics of racial identity, these figures have reworked the kind of fic-
tion whose geographical and characterological coordinates seem deliber-
ately compressed; whose diegetic reach is often confined, contingent on
quotidian circumstances; and whose vision may appear contracted, if not
provincialized – put simply, fiction of local life.
Such a contraction in scale and focus might seem like a pointed depart-
ure from the audacious epics that defined high postmodernism. But the
localist fiction I have in mind participates in that ‘dialogical relation’, in
Ramón Saldívar’s phrase, ‘between postmodern aesthetics and the prac-
tices of a broad cohort of contemporary minority writers’.2 While Saldívar
concentrates on Colson Whitehead, one could also consider among this
group Teju Cole’s Open City (2011), Junot Díaz’s This Is How You Lose Her
(2012) and Taiye Selasi’s Ghana Must Go (2013), along with the work of
Jhumpa Lahiri and Zadie Smith, both of whom will become my focus
here. While such writers converse with the legacies of postmodernism in
chronicling new racial imaginaries, they have nonetheless moved away
from the signature techniques of postmodernist fiction – suggesting that
formal alternatives are already being sought and tested. Identifying an
emergent ‘postrace aesthetic’ among these responses to postmodern innov-
ation, Saldívar argues that ‘minority writers’, ‘with a few exceptions’, have
47
48 Davi d Ja mes
‘found postmodernism such an inhospitable domain for their representa-
tions of contemporary social conditions’.3 Why the domain Lahiri and
Smith find more genial is at the same time more regional will be the ques-
tion I pursue here. Although they contrast each other in register, geog-
raphy and form, Lahiri and Smith find common ground in addressing
profound questions of racial difference, cultural displacement and assimi-
lation through narrative actions confined to specific domestic spheres or
urban precincts. These preoccupations can be seen as part of a broader
paradigm shift. For whereas ‘Pynchon and DeLillo’, as David Marcus puts
it, ‘emphasized the unseen networks of government agents and advertis-
ing executives that limited our everyday lives, the new group’ – which
for Marcus includes, David Foster Wallace, Dave Eggers and Smith her-
self – have ‘tried to map out more local, more empowering connections:
to mine the present for those rare, fragile moments of contact’.4 As we
shall see, this localist aesthetic by no means shies away from the inter-
racial dynamics of cultural conviviality or from the ethically unpredictable
demands of cosmopolitan accommodation.5 On the contrary, Lahiri and
Smith dramatize the ‘tension between the local and the global’ in imagin-
ing forms of social being, a tension that as Dominic Head points out has
been captured by ‘opposed perspectives on cosmopolitanism’ itself, even as
critics try to retrain ‘the potential of the concept in the historical moment
of globalization’. More significantly, these productive frictions and dia-
logues arising from ‘the interaction between national and transnational
impulses’ signal parallels between critical and creative discourses, as the
fraught global-local dialectic in theory also ‘pinpoints the current cross-
roads of the novel’ in practice.6
Lahiri and Smith each operate at these crossroads – which denote too,
of course, the crossroads of form. Yet the issue of what forms are most
appropriate to evoking systemic and ideological aspects of racial injust-
ice and disenfranchisement, or to representing the evolving agendas of
minority positions, is by no means clear-cut. On the one hand, precon-
ceptions about the self-absorbed ventures of postmodern experimentalism
can reinforce the assumption that fiction fixated on self-referential inven-
tion is hard-pressed to gain purchase on the material actualities of dis-
crimination and marginalization. On the other hand, social realism offers
no easy solutions either, especially when ‘we see that postcolonial studies’,
as Susan Andrade argues, ‘has a history of anxiety about having to defend
its literature from being treated as ethnography’. As a predicate for this
defence, modernism is often perceived to be ‘better suited than realism
to elucidating the complexities and relations of power under colonialism,
Worlded Localisms 49
and, therefore, that it also articulates the challenges of the postcolonial
condition’.7 These formal alternatives for the novel – shot-through, as
Andrade suggests, by competing critical sympathies about the kinds of
political valencies we associate with different narrative modes – are com-
plicated still further in our own time, as writers process the artistic rever-
berations of postmodernism. Emerging innovators are moving so fluidly
between styles as to challenge the currency and accuracy of many generic
distinctions, making modal boundaries more permeable than ever, and
sharing something of Smith’s determination to ‘shake the novel out of its
present complacency’.8
Correlations between conceptions of race and the craft of their articu-
lation thus remain all the more necessary to discern. In an effort to do
so, I take a cue from scholars like Saldívar, Coleen Lye, and Rebecca L.
Walkowitz, who remind us of the need to mobilize ‘the continuing import-
ance of race as a category of analysis’ not only beyond the potentially
reductive premises of authorial nationality, ethnic origin or affiliation, but
also beyond the thematic horizons of ideology-critique, to address instead
‘newly racialized ethnicities’ in ‘terms that can then be related to the form
and language of the literary text’.9 If Smith is right to worry that even
though fiction today can ‘cut multiple roads’, a ‘breed of lyrical realism
has had the freedom of the highway for some time now, with most other
exits blocked’, then one of my intentions here is to chart how writers have
pursued alternative routes to seemingly localized destinations yet without
sacrificing their engagement with worldly concerns.10
For novelist Patrick Flanery, ‘more and more of what we call American
literature looks outward’.11 Among his examples of this extraterritorial
imperative is Jhumpa Lahiri, the London-born daughter of Bengali immi-
grants who now lives in Rome but whose ‘New England regionalism’, as
Urmila Seshagiri terms it, is perhaps her most ‘significant achievement’ –
despite her fiction’s apparently limited scale, it ‘contains the conscious-
ness of a nation’. Where Seshagiri praises Lahiri’s writing for ‘giving us a
portrait of an entire nation through its evocation of a single region’,12 so
Flanery sees that her work is ‘a natural response to the present moment
in the evolution of the American literary canon’, since there’s a ‘feeling
not that American subjects have been exhausted but that there is both
challenge and possibility in turning to other countries as setting and sub-
ject of “American” novels’.13 In a way, these two reactions are mutually
complementary, each gesturing at how Lahiri uses the most singular of
settings as optics for scrutinizing the quotidian textures of first- and sec-
ond-generation Indian immigrant life, registering experiences within and
50 Davi d Ja mes
beyond North America by tracing the emotional trials and compromises
for families moving between original and adopted nations.
Lahiri’s acclaimed collection, Unaccustomed Earth (2008), exhibits this
movement between the regional and the global, devoted as several of the
narratives are to characters who either literally or spiritually are ‘living
antipodal lives under the same roof ’.14 In the title story, a widowed father
becomes in retirement the unlikely transnational subject while visiting his
daughter, Ruma. She accepts her conspicuous cultural and racial isolation
in the Seattle suburbs, where although ‘she was growing familiar with the
roads, with the exits and the mountains and the quality of the light, she
felt no connection to any of it, or to anyone’. Despite the fact that ‘her
mother’s example – moving to a foreign place for the sake of marriage, car-
ing exclusively for children and a household – has served as a warning, a
path to avoid’, ‘this was Ruma’s life now’. In turn, whereas ‘in India, there
would have been no question of his not moving in with her’ (UE, 34, 11,
6), Ruma’s father makes travel plans to spend time in Europe with a new
companion, confident in the knowledge that ‘[h]e did not want to live in
the margins of his daughter’s life, in the shadow of her marriage’ (UE, 53).
Different generations behaving towards each other, or for themselves, in
anticipated and uncustomary ways serves as one of Lahiri’s strategies for
localising the tumult of ethnic unbelonging within the familial sphere.
Concerned less with the overt ‘clash of culture, religion, or race’, Lahiri
foregrounds the ‘paradox’, as Seshagiri describes it, that a ‘nation founded
on the notion of hospitable soil can only enrich that soil through a tran-
sient, uprooted citizenry’.15 Elsewhere in Unaccustomed Earth, though,
Lahiri fulfils more directly the kind of prediction Flanery makes about the
‘worlding’ of American fiction’s purview. For while Lahiri’s New England
settings do take on ‘planetary breadth’ – achieving for that region ‘a liter-
ary vividness equal to what Joyce achieved for Dublin, allowing readers to
feel at home in places that alienate and discomfort her readers’ – ‘Going
Ashore’ brings to a tragic close a miniature trilogy of narratives that com-
prise the collection’s second part.16 The first two offer a backstory, through
childhood, for the growing relationship between Hema and Kaushik,
whose brief, all-consuming romance occupies the concluding story. ‘Once
in a Lifetime’ opens the trio and is narrated by Hema, recounting the
period where her parents opened their home to Kaushik’s family when
they return from Bombay to Massachusetts: ‘victims of jetlag’, Hema
recalls, ‘you belonged elsewhere’. Hema’s parents are ‘perplexed by the
ways in which they had changed’, as though ‘Bombay had made them
more American than Cambridge had’. Kaushik himself complicates this
perception in the following story, ‘Year’s End’, reflecting that ‘I’d made
that journey from India to Massachusetts, too old not to experience the
shock of it, too young to have a say in the matter’ (UE, 236, 235, 272). By
the time we reencounter the couple in Rome in ‘Going Ashore’, Hema
is on the verge of a wedding that’s more determined than desired – ‘she
refused to think of it as an arranged marriage, but knew in her heart that
that was what it was’ (UE, 297) – and Kaushik is an ambitious, itinerant
photographer who ‘wanted to believe that he was different, that in ten
minutes he could be on his way to anywhere in the world’. Rome seems
to make both characters acknowledge that ‘it was impossible [. . .] not
to form attachments’, however much their stay is temporary or fleeting
in purpose, and regardless of the way that ‘in Rome, in all of Europe’,
Kaushik ‘was always regarded as an Indian first’. For Hema, however,
associations develop in spite of racial difference, as ‘[c]ertain elements of
Rome reminded her of Calcutta: the grand weathered buildings, the palm
trees, the impossibility of crossing main streets’. Much like the Calcutta
Hema ‘visited throughout childhood, Rome was a city she knew on the
one hand intimately and on the other hand not at all – a place that fully
absorbed her and also kept her at bay’ (UE, 309, 310, 299).
Against the backdrop of this liminal environment, at once reminiscent
and distancing, Lahiri emphasizes the precariousness and poignant transi-
ence of racial identification through the intimacy between two characters
sharing comparable stories of immigration and integration. ‘Indianness’
in this context ‘is incidental’, as Seshagiri points out, ‘its language and
customs no more empowered to secure identity than [. . .] the condition
of parenthood or the experience of grief ’.17 And towards the denoue-
ment, it is a highly particularized landscape that itself seems suffused with
this grief, when the couple travel north ‘to Volterra, a town founded by
Etruscans’. In this ‘austere, forbidding, solitary place [. . .] they spent their
remaining days together’ (UE, 318), the locale capturing the foreboding
conclusiveness of their visit:
They went in Kaushik’s car, up the coast into Tuscany, then cutting through
the misted blue Maremma and the white chalk hills of the Cecina Valley,
climbing and descending a thin slip of road. Volterra appeared in the dis-
tance, perched on a cliff high above the open countryside like an island sur-
rounded by land. The rough, restrained architecture, the coats of arms and
the hard dark walls, were something new for Hema. The medieval buildings
were more recent than the Forum, yet Volterra felt more remote, impervi-
ous to tourists and time. Rome had hidden them, enabled them, their affair
one of thousands, but here she felt singled out, exposed. She also sensed
52 Davi d Ja mes
an indifference; they were among a handful of people who seemed not to
belong to Volterra, and she felt that the people who lived there were wait-
ing for them, politely but firmly, to pass on. (UE, 318)
While race may have been ‘incidental’ in Rome, in Volterra they regis-
ter their difference once more through ‘indifference’, visibly marked as
a touring minority who ‘seemed not to belong’. This provincial setting
makes nomads of them both, its isolated beauty reaffirming the exposure
Hema now senses afresh. Indeed, Lahiri’s style encapsulates as it contracts
something of this contrast between environment and affect, between the
‘impervious’ elegance of sienna stone buildings and the brute reality of
the couple’s impermanence. Pictorially vivid renditions of the journey
through ‘misted blue’ and ‘white chalk’ regions give way to the tightened,
more decisive syntax of Hema’s intimations that the affair, like them, will
‘pass on’.
Composed, unadorned, often frugal – Lahiri’s prose is an unlikely
heir to the verbal exuberance and transgressions in genre typically associ-
ated with postmodern writing. But even if the affinity here isn’t exactly
formal, then it’s more legitimately thematic, as Lahiri zeroes in on the
very ontology of transnational experience. Engaging with the most inti
mate repercussions of postmodern mobility, she tracks migrant lives into
localised situations so as then to perform a ‘worlding’ of actions and deci-
sions that coalesce there. ‘Minor affairs’, to borrow Hensher’s phrase, ‘take
on an unexpected sort of scale’, and it’s precisely this prismatic refraction
of prosaic events that also takes centre stage in the recent work of Zadie
Smith.18 Despite her reputation as emblematic of a new wave of multicul-
tural British fiction, Smith’s work has in other respects felt distinctly sec-
toral, fascinated by the quotidian dramas of suburban districts. While set
on opposite sides of the pond, White Teeth (2000) and On Beauty (2005)
both work from ordinary, domestic spheres outward. Such is Smith’s ‘mili-
tant particularism’, as David Harvey might label it, an interest in local
places as sites for the struggle towards an unromanticized, yet – for that
reason – potentially durable cosmopolitan vision.19 This emphasis on the
regionally specific, microsociology of the everyday city continues in NW
(2012). Even the cover to the cloth edition was intended, according to its
designer Jon Gray, ‘to look very English and be particularly representative
of London’. But if NW ’s jazzy jacket is ‘bold, simple and eye-catching’, as
Gray hoped, the first pages give a taste of a narrative that certainly catches
the eye, but is not always simple to follow.20 The plot opens in what might
at first look like an uneventful street scene, as the volatile Shar pleads for
help at the Willesden doorstep of the thirty-something, Leah Hanwell.
The emergency (a quick cash loan for Shar to catch a taxi to see her sup-
posedly hospitalized mother) turns out to be a scam, costing Leah £30 but
entwining the two women for the rest of the novel.
In a following section, we move through Soho to chart the fate of an
endearing recovering addict, the Caribbean Felix Cooper, as he bids a
final farewell to a former lover. After reprimanding two black youths on
the Underground for failing to give up their seat for a white pregnant
woman, Felix is briefly taunted and fatally stabbed, becoming a victim
of violence that’s not racial but fiercely casual. We then switch perspec-
tives again to what is the novel’s longest part, ‘Host’, whose numbered
and thematized subsections implicitly salute Joyce’s ‘Aeolus’ chapter. These
vignettes recount the experiences of Leah’s Jamaican friend Natalie (for-
merly named Keisha), all the way from borrowing her first Walkman to
her present habit of indulging in anonymous Internet sex. Like something
of an epilogue, the final section, ‘Visitation’, ties these threads together in
a closing scene of reunion: Leah is reconciled with her French-Algerian
partner Michel, while rejoining Natalie to untangle the chain of criminal
deceptions.
Such summaries, however necessary, aren’t really helpful in approaching
Smith’s ‘worlded’ localisms. Beneath their verbal razzmatazz, her fictions
offer quotidian domains of unexpected profundity, where the seemingly
pedestrian movement from one action to the next is of secondary impor
tance to the perspectival narration of significant sensory or spatial details
along the way. NW ’s reader is compelled to find interest less in the con-
nective sinew between diegetic events than in the punctilious yet oblique
manner of their description. The ethical implications of this obliquity,
however, are not of the Jamesian kind, generated by the partial cognitions
and limited lability of a central focalizing consciousness. They have more
to do with Smith’s accretive presentation of scenes that unfold through
her curious way of combining direct speech (cued only by the Joycean
dash in the opening section), interior thoughts conveyed by free indirect
style and the sudden intrusion of a gnomic narratorial voice, stepping in
to extract maxims from the mundane. Consider Leah’s hurried farewell to
Shar, oblivious of her ruse, as Michel arrives home from work too late to
correct Leah’s naïveté:
– Who that?
– Michel, my husband.
– Girl’s name?
54 Davi d Ja mes
– French.
– Nice-looking, innit – nice looking babies!
Shar winks: a grotesque compression of one side of her face.
Shar drops her cigarette and gets in the car, leaving the door open. The
money remains in Leah’s hand.
– He local? Seen him about.
– He works in the hairdressers, by the station? From Marseilles – he’s
French. Been here forever.
– African, though.
– Originally. Look – do you want me to come with you?
Shar says nothing for a moment. Then she steps out of the car and reaches
up to Leah’s face with both hands.
– You’re a really good person. I was meant to come to your door. Seriously!
You’re a spiritual person. There’s something spiritual inside you.
Leah grips Shar’s little hand tight and submits to a kiss. Shar’s mouth is
slightly open on Leah’s cheek for thank and now closes with you. In reply,
Leah says something she has never said in her life: God bless you. They
part – Shar backs away awkwardly, and turns toward the car, almost gone.
Leah presses the money into Shar’s hand with defiance. But already the
grandeur of experience threatens to flatten into the conventional, into
anecdote: only thirty pounds, only an ill mother, neither a murder, nor a
rape. Nothing survives its telling.21
This sequence exemplifies the two-tiered fashion in which Smith moves

from direct speech (sparely presented in reportorial fashion) to third-per-
son reflections of a more conspicuously abstract kind. A certain duality lies
behind her aim, on the one hand, to simulate quick-fire conversations in
all their unadorned immediacy, and, on the other, to linger over the mini-
ature profundities that such conversations reveal. It’s not that Smith tries
to make too much of the nascent ethical potential of such moments of
interracial encounter, or what Marcus called ‘those rare, fragile moments
of contact’ we find in a new generation of writers, who ‘seek to render not
only the cognitive disorder of postmodern experience but also the social
and psychological disorders of postmodern – that is, post-welfare state –
capitalism’.22 Neither does Smith sentimentalise these encounters: as with
the frugality of Lahiri’s narration, so here the tautness of Smith’s syntax
offers a kind of grammatical correlative to the self-restraint she exercises
in emotive episodes across NW, episodes that could have easily been rhe-
torically embellished to emphasize their poignancy. Nonetheless, Smith
has no hesitation in departing from Leah’s perspective to intrude as an
observer of delicate gravities. Leah will not have been ruminating on how
the ‘grandeur of experience threatens to flatten into the conventional’ or
on the extent to which this unforeseen moment of reciprocity is prone to
‘anecdote’. We might be reminded of Middlemarch’s sometimes-teacherly
commentator, a narrator who ensures that in socially awkward exchanges
the underlying ethical subtleties are rarely lost on Eliot’s readers even if
they’re missed by the characters involved. As for Eliot so for Smith: there’s
nothing immoral about speaking for one’s fictional agents. But it’s reveal-
ing that Smith still wants license to riff on the implications of how ten-
derness between persons across racial and socioeconomic divides can be
fleetingly glimpsed; how that tenderness can be replaced just as fleetingly
with disappointment; and ultimately to show how even the most earnest
individuals, like Leah, must watch out for their own tendency to regard
inconsequential moments as microcosms of virtue.
Smith has spent a number of years, of course, pondering the challenge
of retooling the ethical efficacy of fiction in an age after postmodernism.
Thus the complicated connection in the scene above between showing
and telling, between impartially rendering and conspicuously imposing,
between contriving a scenario of contact across race and class and then
signposting that scenario’s ethical lessons – these complications show
how alert Smith is, in Dorothy Hale’s terms, to how ‘the perspectivalism
that grounds the aesthetics of alterity also causes problems for its perfect
realization’.23 Smith deliberately foregrounds for her readers that process of
realisation, making no attempt to muffle an intrusive and instructive het-
erodigetic voice, yet without detracting from the essential ethical dilem-
mas that are themselves dramatically foregrounded for her characters in
this brief encounter.
Smith’s cosmopolitical imaginary, then, is at once unsentimental and
vigilant. To that extent, NW suggests that what’s ‘more significant than
the overt staging of cosmopolitanism’, as Janet Lyon observes, ‘is the
role that cosmopolitan fragility plays in the conditional sense of worldly
engagement’.24 That unpredictable terrain of social and ethnic conviviality
is reciprocated on a more individualised level in NW ’ s penultimate sec-
tion, ‘Crossing’, where a desperate and forlorn Natalie walks to Hornsey
Lane Bridge, a site infamous for suicides. She takes in the elevated pros
pect of London’s financial heart. Though lofty, the perspective isn’t sub-
limely panoramic: instead of encompassing all she surveys, her view of the
city is splintered at eye level by the bridge’s intricate iron lattices. At this
point Smith is careful not to offer, as she might have done earlier in her
career, an aphoristic gloss on the way Natalie’s proliferating images of the
56 Davi d Ja mes
topography below link by analogy to the capital’s irrepressible diversity.25
We are instead privy to what Natalie sees in a jumbled and unsynthe-
sised manner. In turn, Smith initially refuses the luxury of imposing as
the wise sage with a proverb to hand, one that would help to reassemble
the worldlier implications of a scene currently scattered by a ‘view’ that’s
‘cross-hatched’:
St. Paul’s in one box. The Gherkin in another. Half a tree. Half a car.
Cupolas, spires. Squares, rectangles, half moons, stars. It was impossible
to get any sense of the whole. From up here the bus lane was a red gash
through the city. The tower blocks were the only thing she could see that
made any sense, separated from each other, yet communicating. From this
distance they had a logic, stone posts driven into an ancient field, waiting
for something to be laid on top of them, a statue, perhaps, or a platform.
A man and a woman walked over and stood next to Natalie at the railing.
Beautiful view, said the woman. She had a French accent. She didn’t sound
at all convinced by what she’d said. After a minute the couple walked back
down the hill.26
The catalogue of trees, cars, spires, and squares firmly lines up the dis-
course with Natalie’s perspective. In turn the language responds to this
characterological alignment, as Smith’s choppy syntax bluntly eschews
the impulse to spread a sweet lyrical glaze over sightings of ordinary sites.
Eschewed as well are those aphoristic asides, those pathos-hungry elabora-
tions and qualifications the Zadie Smith of On Beauty would have surely
employed to make much of Natalie’s incapacity ‘to get any sense of the
whole’. As such, the scene is allowed to stand in its own right, to signify
on its own potentially profound and potentially inconsequential terms:
this is something of a new ethical manoeuvre, one that not only affirms
‘the perspectivism upon which the aesthetics of alterity rests’, but also
highlights how Smith’s deliberate quelling of authorial evaluation might
itself be ethically motivated.27
If Smith opts for a more depersonalized voice in NW, this degree of
impersonality seems all the more virtuous for being so purposive. Still, her
mark as the director of an allegory of cosmopolitan fragility is nonetheless
detectable, as though irrepressible. In the passage above, for instance, that
the ‘tower blocks’ can be seen as tacitly ‘communicating’ with each other
is an insight supposedly grasped by a woman contemplating suicide –
or at least contemplating her proximity to the tragic history of suicides
the bridge memorializes. It’s not that this insight isn’t entirely credible
so much as its provenance feels subtly divided, as though the narrator
is assisting Natalie with the job of defamiliarizing a multicultural realm
that appears opaque, pointing the way towards some redeeming ‘logic’
hidden behind the impersonal façade of urban sprawl. More evidence of
Smith’s orchestration quickly follows, when the ambivalently ‘Beautiful
view’ is confirmed by a French woman who, like the high-rises, appears
both separate from Natalie yet in communication with her – we cannot
tell whether she is speaking suddenly out of nowhere to Natalie or simply
to her partner. Who cares about such miniscule ambiguities within such
a localised scene? Zadie Smith does, and she wants us to care too. For
the worldly ramifications of her confined forms of attention become plain
in these scenes, where Smith creates a web of reverberating images and
sentiments that enlace – like the ‘cross-hatched’ metal latticework of that
bridge – to create an existential ‘logic’ that’s not merely suggestive but (as
it turns out for Natalie) life-saving.
In her most recent work, Smith is striving harder to encapsulate ordi-
nary moments such as these, recuperative moments of self-recuperation
that carry a broader social symbolism and that were presented with greater
ease in On Beauty where racially and ‘socially diverse characters are filled
with aesthetic experience’.28 This is hardly a flippant change of heart; it’s
a strident turn towards a grittier aesthetic, a flintier mode of observing
different aspects of ethnic affiliation and intersubjectivity on the verge.
The result in NW is a narrative economy in which the narrator no longer
relies on the convenience of stylish aphorisms to reassure us that fig-
ures like Natalie will survive their personal and familial crises. Whatever
beauty exists here is woven into the fabric of tragedy, as tender and exqui-
sitely delineated snapshots of the physical world recur in situations of
calamity. Some of these situations are merely hypothetical, as they are for
Natalie, who refuses the ‘prospect’ of self-annihilation, though it remains
always ‘possible’.29 But elsewhere, in the case of Felix, murdered by those
whose racial background he shares, the threat turns out to be grimly
actual. In both instances, the menace is modulated – or even, like in
Lahirir’s fiction, counterpointed – by the grace of Smith’s language: the
‘wind’ which ‘shook the trees’ and accompanied Natalie’s step back from
the bridge railings recalls a gust blowing through that scene of assault sec-
onds before Felix is knifed, when a ‘breeze passed over the three of them,
filling their hoods and sending a cloud of sycamore leaves spinning to the
pavement’ (NW, 282, 148). In these comparable episodes, we can see that
Smith is still capable of the kind of lyrical realism she has both praised and
criticized in the past.30 Yet that lyricism has a fiercer edge now, momentary
elegance surfacing in localised scenarios charged with fatality. Expressive
though they undoubtedly are, such fleeting descriptions punctuate rather
58 Davi d Ja mes
than transform fraught events, relinquishing any inclination ‘to comfort
us, to assure us of our beautiful plenitude’.31
With many of her so-called ‘new sincerity’ contemporaries in the United
States – Dave Eggers, Jennifer Egan, Jeffrey Eugenides – NW shares the
goal of steering contemporary fiction away from the brand of explicit self-
display that made postmodern metafiction, in Smith’s words, a somewhat
‘fascinating failure, intellectual brinkmanship that lacked heart’.32 Far more
than an experiment in self-referentiality, NW has been applauded for its
ragged genius: manifold architecture, protean focalization and inconsist-
ent register are celebrated in their own right as the essence of the novel’s
roomy embrace of social and racial diversity. Less convinced reviewers
detected a combination of irresolution and over-ambitiousness, judging
the narrative’s divided sections as a series of aborted attempts to make
things new.33 That latter estimation is, however, unfair, if we consider that
to tidy up NW would be to mar what is a carefully choreographed unruli-
ness that matches in form the local territory it surveys. Smith deliberately
forgoes the very aesthetic cohesion she executed so elegantly in On Beauty,
refuting the very mode of lyrical realism with which she had aligned by
the middle of the last decade. NW thus represents a break with her earlier
sensibilities: gone is On Beauty’s pellucid and poised use of free indirect
style, the controlled perspectivism that solicited from readers a feeling of
counterintuitive sympathy towards the jaded adulterer Howard Belsey;
gone is the upbeat multicultural backdrop of White Teeth, painting in
the wake of happy hybridity a graver portrait of London’s divisions; gone
are the descriptive ingredients that ‘assure us of our beautiful plenitude’,
the ingredients Smith can master well enough when she wants to. That
NW is so undaunted in avoiding these traits makes it clear that Smith’s
mission is to slip the noose of classification and assume a temperament of
her own making. What was beautiful about On Beauty’s social vision has
been translated here into something more rugged yet just as composition-
ally beguiling, rougher in conception but fiercely devoted to socio-ethnic
particularisms. A determination to flout what she calls ‘the image of what
we have been taught to value in fiction’ grants Smith the facility to offer
her most uncompromising vision yet of race in contemporary Britain.34
‘Surely there is something to be said for drawing a circle around our
attention and remaining within that circle. But how large should this
circle be?’35 Such is the question I have been exploring here in relation to
fictions that are at once confined in location but capacious in implica-
tion, circumscribed in incident yet global in ambit. It’s the question Smith
entertains in her latest work to date, The Embassy of Cambodia (2013).
Located again in Willesden, this miniaturist story centres on the fortunes
of Fatou, who has journeyed from the Ivory Coast to Ghana, Libya and
Italy, before working in England as a domestic servant in the wealthy
Derawal household. Treated like a skivvy by the family, Fatou finds res-
pite in visits to the neighbourhood swimming pool, a routine that takes
her past the Embassy of Cambodia and the visiting women there who
intrigue her: ‘No doubt there are those who will be critical of the nar-
row essentially local scope of Fatou’s interest in the Cambodian woman
from the Embassy of Cambodia’, remarks Smith’s chorus-like narrator,
‘but we, the people of Willesden, have some sympathy with her attitude’.
Raising the issue of accountability in the most quotidian terms, Smith
assesses what it means to engage across racial difference while at the same
time acknowledging that ‘if we followed the history of every little country
in this world – in its dramatic as well as quiet times – we would have no
space left in which to live our own lives or to apply ourselves to our neces-
sary tasks, never mind indulge in occasional pleasures, like swimming’.36
Hence Smith’s investment in the scale of recognition, in finding the right
circle of attention – despite the prejudicial inhibitions that seem normal-
ised in the community: ‘We are from Willesden. Our minds tend toward
the prosaic. I doubt there is a man or woman among us, for example,
who – upon passing the Embassy of Cambodia for the first time – did not
immediately think: “genocide.”’37
How to go about ‘drawing that circle’ of awareness, responsibility and
reciprocity is also an interpretive question, of course, posed not only
to Smith’s west Londoners but also to her readers. Following Fatou’s
diurnal patterns of reflection and obligation, as she subsists with lim-
ited resources and endures few vocational opportunities, Smith compels
us to reflect on the range of our sympathetic involvement. Meanwhile,
this story’s localism is itself deceptive, for ‘[i]n Willesden’, as the narra-
tor notes, ‘we are almost all New People, though some of us, like Fatou,
were, until quite recently, Old People, working the land in our various
countries of origin’.38 For Smith, as for Lahiri, the challenge is not only
to see how regional outlooks and cosmopolitan behaviours might practi-
cally coincide, but also to articulate what it means for people to have a
‘right to a local history’, as Smith herself has put it, ‘even if many of us
arrived here only recently and from every corner of the globe’.39 Even as
they operate at opposite ends of the stylistic spectrum, these writers move
on a more comparable affective spectrum between cultural dislocation
and vulnerable hospitality, committed to localised arenas for identity that
are far from inconsequential.
60 Davi d Ja mes
Notes
1 Philip Hensher, ‘Small but Global’, Guardian, Review, Saturday 2 November
2013, 2.
2 Ramón Saldívar, ‘The Second Elevation of the Novel: Race, Form, and
the Postrace Aesthetic in Contemporary Narrative’, Narrative (21 January
2013), 4.
3 Saldívar, ‘The Second Elevation of the Novel’.
4 David Marcus, ‘Post-Hysterics: Zadie Smith and the Fiction of Austerity’,
Dissent (Spring 2013), http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/post-hysterics-
zadie-smith-and-the-fiction-of-austerity. Accessed 1 November 2013.
5 A somewhat different concern with the convergence of cosmopolitics and
localism (thematic and linguistic) in contemporary fiction can be seen in
Bishnupriya Ghosh’s work on the global circulation of South Asian narratives
in English. ‘In committing to the local’, she argues, ‘all cosmopolitan writing
does not steer clear of the fetishistic localisms that underpin the new world
order’ (When Borne Across: Literary Cosmopolitics in the Contemporary Indian
Novel [New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2004], 61).
6 Dominic Head, The State of the Novel: Britain and Beyond (Oxford: Wiley-
Blackwell, 2008), 147
7 Susan Z. Andrade, ‘Representing Slums and Home: Chris Abani’s GraceLand’
in David James (ed.), The Legacies of Modernism: Historicizing Postwar and
Contemporary Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 225.
8 Zadie Smith, ‘Two Directions for the Novel’ in Changing My Mind: Occasional
Essays (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2009), 93.
9 Saldívar, ‘The Second Elevation of the Novel’, 2. See also Coleen Lye, ‘Racial
Form’, Representations 104 (Fall 2008), 92–101; and Rebecca L. Walkowitz,
Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation (New York: Columbia
10 Smith, ‘Two Directions for the Novel’, 71.
11 Christopher Holmes, ‘An Interview with Patrick Flanery’, Contemporary
Literature, 54/3 (Winter 2013), 454.
12 Urmila Seshagiri, ‘Jhumpa Lahiri’s Real America: On The Lowland’, L.A.
Review of Books, 9 October 2013, http://lareviewofbooks.org/review/jhumpa-
lahiris-real-america-on-the-lowland. Accessed 12 December 2013.
13 Holmes, ‘An Interview with Patrick Flanery’, 454.
14 Jhumpa Lahiri, ‘Once in a Lifetime’, Unaccustomed Earth (London: Random
House, 2008), 236. Hereafter referred in the text as UE.
15 Seshagiri, ‘Jhumpa Lahiri’s Real America: On The Lowland ’.
16 ‘Jhumpa Lahiri’s Real America: On The Lowland ’.
17 ‘Jhumpa Lahiri’s Real America: On The Lowland ’.
18 Hensher, ‘Small but Global’, 17. Material reworked for this section originally
appeared in a different form in the review, ‘Wounded Realism’, Contemporary
Literature 54/1 (Spring 2013), 204–14 © by the Board of Regents of the
University of Wisconsin System. Reproduced courtesy of the University of
Wisconsin Press.
19 David Harvey, Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference (Cambridge,
MA: Blackwell, 1996), 19–45.
20 Jon Gray, ‘Book Designer’, The Observer, The New Review, Sunday 30
December 2012, 11.
21 Zadie Smith, NW (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2012), 13.
22 Marcus, ‘Post-Hysterics’.
23 Dorothy J. Hale, ‘On Beauty as Beautiful? The Problem of Novelistic Aesthetics
by Way of Zadie Smith’, Contemporary Literature 53/4 (Winter 2012), 818.
24 Janet Lyon, ‘Cosmopolitanism and Modernism’ in Mark Wollaeger (ed.),
with Matt Eatoug, The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2012), 397.
25 Compare Hale’s observation that On Beauty is replete with aphorisms that
‘usually offer generalizations about human nature suggestive of lived experi-
ence’ (‘On Beauty as Beautiful?’, 839).
26 Smith, NW, 281–2.
27 Hale, ‘On Beauty as Beautiful?’, 820.
28 ‘On Beauty as Beautiful?’, 815.
29 Smith, NW, 182.
30 Voicing her reservations about the lyricism of Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland
(2008), Smith observes that ‘I have written in this tradition myself and cau-
tiously hope for its survival, but if it’s to survive, lyrical realists will have to
push a little harder on their subject’ (‘Two Directions for the Novel’, 80).
31 Smith, ‘Two Directions for the Novel’, 80–1.
32 ‘Two Directions for the Novel’, 73.
33 Compare, for instance, Adam Mars-Jones’s unconvinced review for The
Guardian, 31 August 2012, http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/aug/31/
nw-zadie-smith-review, in which he argues that NW ‘is oddly divided between
confidence and indecision’ and Christian Lorentzen’s ‘Why Am I So Fucked
Up?’, London Review of Books 34/21 (November 2012).
35 Zadie Smith, The Embassy of Cambodia (London: Hamish Hamilton,
2013), 24.
36 Smith, The Embassy of Cambodia, 23.
37 The Embassy of Cambodia, 6.
38 The Embassy of Cambodia, 40.
39 Zadie Smith, ‘The North West London Blues’, New York Review of Books Blog,
2 June 2012, http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2012/jun/02/north-
west-london-blues/. Accessed 1 November 2013.
P a rt T wo
Race and Performativity

Ch apter 4
X-Ray Detectives
Ishmael Reed, Clarence Major and Black
Postmodern Detective Fiction
Bran Nicol
Postmodernism and the Metaphysical Detective Story

One of the most recognisable features of literary postmodernism is its
tendency to draw on tropes and conventions of detective fiction – lin-
ear, teleological narrative, investigative procedure and the symbolic par-
allel between detective-work and reading. This tendency was first noted
in the late 1960s, and became a factor in the earliest efforts by critics to
provide overall definitions of postmodern writing in the 1970s. Two essays
at the beginning of that decade were particularly important, each attempt-
ing to identify a new ‘postmodern’ tradition being formed by writers in
the French existentialist tradition, the nouveau roman, and the American
avant-garde. Their parodic detective fictions functioned as critiques of
characteristic modernist emphases on positivism, totalisation and ‘final
solutions’, and its complementary faith in myth and psychology. In the
first of these essays, ‘Whodunit and Other Questions: Metaphysical
Detective Stories in Post-War Fiction’ (1971), Michael Holquist defined
‘the metaphysical detective story’ which:
instead of familiarity . . . gives strangeness, a strangeness which more often
than not is the result of jumbling the well known patterns of classical detect-
ive stories. Instead of reassuring, they disturb. They are not an escape, but
an attack. By exploiting the conventions of the detective story such men
as Borges and Robbe-Grillet have fought against the Modernist attempt to
fill the void of the world with rediscovered mythical symbols. Rather, they
dramatize the void. If, in the detective story, death must be solved, in the
new metaphysical detective story it is life which must be solved.1
A year later, in his essay ‘The Detective and the Boundary: Some Notes on
the Postmodern Literary Imagination’, William Spanos coined an alter-
native label for the same development, contending that ‘the paradigmatic
65
66 Bran Ni col
archetype of the postmodern literary imagination is the anti-detective story
(and its anti-psychoanalytical analogue), the formal purpose of which is
to evoke the impulse to “detect” and/or psychoanalyze in order to vio-
lently frustrate it by refusing to solve the crime (or find the cause of the
neurosis)’ [my emphasis].2 Spanos argues that anti-detective fiction com-
plements the critique of Enlightenment philosophy developed in post-
modern thought by refusing the satisfactory closure of the conventional
detective novel and thereby rejecting the modernist faith in teleology.
Many critics have noted the significance of the metaphysical or anti-
detective story in postmodern writing since these two landmark essays. In
their introduction to the Detecting Texts (1999) collection, Patrick Merivale
and Elizabeth Sweeney cement the claims made by both Holquist and
Spanos about the ‘philosophical’ tenor of the tradition by arguing that the
writers of metaphysical detective fiction ‘have used Poe’s ratiocinative pro-
cess to address unfathomable epistemological and ontological questions:
What, if anything, can we know? What, if anything, is real?’3 Similarly,
Brian McHale has described detective fiction as the most representative
modernist form because it triggers in the minds of its readers distinctively
‘epistemological’ questions:
How can I interpret this world of which I am a part? And what am I in it?
[. . .] What is there to be known?; Who knows it?; How do they know it,
and with what degree of certainty?; How is knowledge transmitted from
one knower to another, and with what degree of reliability? How does the
object of knowledge change as it passes from knower to knower?; What are
the limits of the knowledge?4
Rather than dispense with the epistemological method, the postmod-

ern detective story retains it, only to frustrate the process of questioning
rather than reward it. Or, as Holquist puts it, the postmodern detect-
ive story retains the ‘method’ of the modernist form but not its ‘telos’.5
The inevitable by-product of the investigative quest is what Dana Brand
once termed ‘epistemological anxiety’.6
Brand uses the term in a reading of Poe’s enigmatic 1840 story ‘The
Man of the Crowd’, in which a prototypical detective pursues a mysteri-
ous old man for twenty-four hours through the thronging London streets
because he is unable to fathom what kind of man he is, thinks he has
glimpsed a diamond and a dagger beneath his coat, and therefore becomes
convinced he is associated with ‘deep crime’ and is seeking refuge in the
city crowd.7 As an enigmatic crime story without any crime or satisfactory
resolution, Patricia Merivale has plausibly linked Poe’s story to the advent
X-Ray Detectives 67
of the metaphysical detective story, arguing that it is a forerunner of Paul
Auster’s City of Glass, in particular. But equally interesting here is Walter
Benjamin’s famous description of ‘The Man of the Crowd’ as an ‘X-ray
picture of a detective story’.8 Benjamin’s idea is that the story gives us a
basic generic skeleton – crime, pursuit, crowd, unknown man – which
came to be fleshed out by subsequent writers (including Poe himself, in
his Dupin stories) until we arrived at the detective story ‘proper’. However,
it might also be considered an ‘X-ray’ story in that it ‘sees through’ the
detective structure, right down to its bare bones.9 And what drives it is not
any crime, even murder, but epistemological anxiety. Postmodern detec-
tive fiction suggests this is what is really interesting about detective fiction,
and explores further the philosophical possibilities of the epistemological
quest, and the symbolic value of other crime-fiction staples such as the
missing person case, secret texts or the labyrinthine journey.
‘Gumbo’ Style: Ishmael Reed and the

‘Black Anti-Detective’ Novel
While the authors of postmodern detective fiction tend – like the key fig-
ures in 1960s and 1970s American postmodernism – to be white, there
are two notable exceptions in Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo (1972) and
Clarence Major’s Reflex and Bone Structure (1975). So significant are their
achievements, Stephen Soitos has suggested that they constitute a wor-
thy subcategory of postmodern detective fiction, ‘the black anti-detective
novel’. What is distinctive about the pairing is that they expose detective
fiction as ‘a Euro-Americentric convention that in itself deserves satiri-
cal or parodic treatment’.10 In his book, The Blues Detective: A Study of
African American Detective Fiction, Soitos shows that African-American
crime writing has always had a distanced relationship to the classic detec-
tive novel. It is marked by what he calls ‘double-consciousness’, a con-
cept he dates back to W. E. B. Du Bois’s book The Souls of Black Folk. As
a result of American racism, the African American is forced ‘to see the
world filtered through two levels of consciousness. First and foremost,
they are forced to see themselves as second-class citizens by reason of
their African ancestry, both biological and cultural. Then and only then
are they allowed the privilege of seeing themselves as American citizens.’
This means ‘that blacks share a sociopolitical consciousness or worldview
that carries forth into their cultural creations’. In black detective fiction,
double-consciousness is exhibited in the repeated tropes of masking, veil-
ing and disguise found in the genre – especially in relation to the detective
68 Bran Ni col
figure himself, who, Soitos argues, tends often to be a trickster figure. The
black anti-detective novel, as represented by Reed and Major, ‘amplifies’
the ‘double-conscious detective theme’ at work in black detective fiction
and exemplifies especially productively the kind of ‘doubleness’ Linda
Hutcheon regards as a defining characteristic of postmodernism: at ease
with contradictions, double-coded, adhering to a logic of ‘both . . . and . . .’
rather than ‘either . . . or . . .’.11
In each case this amounts to a specific treatment of epistemological
desire which is somewhat different from other examples of postmodern
detective fiction. Neither Reed’s nor Major’s detective-figures resembles
the lone figure in the grip of existential crisis which we find in ‘white’
postmodern detective fiction, and neither engage in anything like the
conventional investigative quest which is its expression. With appropriate
self-consciousness, Mumbo Jumbo’s detective PaPa LaBas styles himself as
‘a jack-legged detective of the metaphysical’ and is largely uninterested
in solving mystery through scientific reasoning or the gathering of evi-
dence.12 LaBas has been enlisted by the white authorities to help them deal
with the outbreak of a mysterious but all-powerful plague called ‘jes grew’,
which is spreading through the United States. The authorities are wor-
ried about its carnivalesque energy, which is causing people to irresistibly
tap their feet and dance. As LaBas discovers, the spread of Jes Grew is no
accident, but the result of the plague moving from the American South to
‘cohabit’ with its ‘text’ in New York.13
LaBas’s task is to discover its source and to get to the Jes Grew text
before it can. But the story is a pretext for Reed to construct an allegory
about the spread of black culture throughout America in the twentieth
century – especially black music, in the form of musical styles such as jazz,
blues and hip hop. The historical trigger for the story is the advent of the
‘Jazz Age’ in 1920s America. The plague’s strange name can be explained
by one of the novel’s epigraphs, a statement by the black writer James
Weldon Johnson in the book The Book of American Negro Poetry: ‘The
earliest Ragtime songs, like Topsy, “jes’ grew”’. Topsy, the little girl in
Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), has never known her parents, and when
asked (in stage versions of the novel popular in the early 1850s) if she knew
who made her, she replies, ‘I jes’ grew!’
LaBas’s investigative prowess does lead him to trace the explosion of
Jes Grew back to an ancient Egyptian dance craze which had taken New
Orleans by storm in the 1890s. In fact, Jes Grew turns out to be a com-
bination of three African traditions: African dance, the Egyptian myth
X-Ray Detectives 69
of Osiris and Haitian voodoo. Its genealogy suggests that, of course, the
Jes Grew ‘text’ (which is actually called the ‘Book of Thoth’, named after
another Egyptian God) symbolises more than simply the spirit of the
Jazz Age but nothing less than what Henry Louis Gates Jr terms ‘the
text of blackness’ itself.14 In other words, Jes Grew is a manifestation of
the very essence of African-American culture, the vitality which makes
it so influential on and subversive to white American society. Jes Grew
is really nothing other than blackness, a force signifying freedom of lan-
guage, body and thought which counters the repressive, ordered value-
systems of ‘whiteness’. Mumbo Jumbo thus sets the carnivalesque energy
of blackness against the Euro-American epistemological quest. And
although he uncovers the roots of the plague, LaBas’s approach is more
concerned with revelling in mystery rather than dissolving it. At the
beginning of the novel, he nails his colours to the mast, stating approv-
ingly that ‘before this century is out, men will turn once more to mystery,
to wonderment’.15 Rather than an angst-ridden epistemological quest,
LaBas’s approach is actually itself determined by blackness. His status as
private eye working for the good of the nation is a disguise motivated by
his ‘double consciousness’.
More precisely, his ‘method’ is inspired by the system he calls
‘Neo-HooDoo’, a revitalised form of the ancient art of ‘hoodoo’ (or
‘conjure’). The aim of Neo-HooDoo, as practiced both by LaBas (whose
name is taken from the African deity Legba and his Haitian incarna-
tion PaPa Legba, a trickster figure who mediates between the spirit-
ual and material worlds and his creator, Ishmael Reed) is to provide a
counter-history of African-American people that shows the link between
contemporary black existence and its ancestry in Africa.16 Rather than
a philosophy or even a system, Neo-HooDoo is best considered an aes-
thetic strategy, one that is quite in tune with the preference for bricolage
which so defines postmodernism. In the context of African-American
writing, Reed’s postmodernism can be regarded as an alternative to the
‘middle-class, racial uplift, Christian narrative’ represented by ‘canonical’
texts by black writers such as Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, Langston
Hughes, Booker T. Washington and Ralph Ellison.17 Mumbo Jumbo is a
striking example of postmodern ‘collage’ form: as Soitos describes it, it is
a veritable ‘popular culture compendium’ blending together effects from
the visual and the literary arts, history, music, mass merchandising, etc.
However, the African-American context suggests that a more appropri-
ate metaphor than collage would be ‘jazz’, or, better still, the term Reed
70 Bran Ni col
himself prefers, ‘gumbo’, in reference to the ‘exquisite and delicious com-
binations’ used in Creole cookery:
You take the Knight Templars, an idea from Western history and New
Orleans jazz and painting and music and all these things put together into
a gumbo. I think one of the things I have going for me is synthesizing and
synchronizing. Synthesizing by combining elements like making a gumbo.
Synchronizing by putting disparate elements into the same time, making
them run in the same time, together. Like using a contemporary photo-
graph to illuminate a text which has something to do with the past and at
the same time making them exist in the same space.18
Reed’s description of ‘gumbo’ style works as a description of his novel.
The Jes Grew narrative is punctuated by photographs which document
moments in African-American history, such as protest marches or women
dancing, extracts from other texts (e.g. a newspaper article headlined
‘Musclewhite Bags Coon’, Witchcraft by Pennethorne Hughes and The
History of Witchcraft and Demonology by Montague Summers), as well as
insertions of posters advertising jazz concerts or protest events, cartoons
and artwork relating to black American culture or African folk practices,
and pseudo-supporting material such as a graph detailing ‘U.S. Bombing
Tonnage in Three Wars’.19 This is all accompanied by pseudo-academic
footnotes and a lengthy bibliography of works of history and philoso-
phy. The effect is to replace Spanos’s ‘existential critique of the traditional
Western view of man in the world’ with a more particular, less abstractly
‘philosophical’, imaginative depiction of the black man in the twentieth-
century American world. The epistemological anxiety which is a typical
feature of ‘white’ postmodern detective stories is uplifted from the world
created by the novel to the world of the novel’s readers who must try to
assemble a coherent narrative from the gumbo. As Soitos suggests, ‘The
nature of Reed’s Neo-HooDoo aesthetic is one, if not the primary, mys-
tery to be solved in this postmodern anti-detective novel.’20
The Missing Body and Reflex and Bone Structure

Its combination of historiography and ‘gumbo’ style makes Mumbo Jumbo
a postmodern detective story overlapping with several traditions within
postmodern writing – the philosophical-academic, but also the popu-
lar culture ‘collage’ text less usually associated with the detective story.
We could say the same about Major’s Reflex and Bone Structure, though
this novel is strikingly different in style and theme from Reed’s. Mumbo
Jumbo’s ‘HooDoo’ aesthetic brings together extracts from previously
X-Ray Detectives 71
published texts and images. Major’s novel, however, is a collection of pas-
sages created by the author, resulting in a bewildering assemblage of frag-
ments and reimaginings of the same scenes, bits and pieces of plot which
sometimes fit together and sometimes contradict each other, a range of
different voices, and metafictional ‘interventions’ by ‘the author’ on the
nature of fiction and the composition of the novel itself.
Major once said that his novel was composed according to ‘what I like
to think of as dream logic’. Its purpose was to challenge ‘the traditional
assumption that experience itself be – in literature – totalised. Added up
to make some sort of systematic meaning out of it’.21 Again, ‘jazz’ would
be an appropriate analogy for Major’s method, given the novel’s concern
with African-American culture, and the fact that jazz and blues singers
are continually name-checked throughout the novel (e.g. Buck Clayton,
Thelonious Monk, Benny Carter, Chico Hamilton).22 Yet, as in the case of
Mumbo Jumbo, jazz is not in fact the most apposite comparison. As Larry
McCaffrey notes, Major’s ‘writing has probably been even more deeply
influenced by the visual’, and the novel has been described as ‘blocks of
prose’ which resemble some of Major’s own paintings, which are ‘done as
blocks of color’.23
The effect of Major’s collage version of detective fiction, like Reed’s,
is to ‘uplift’ the epistemological anxiety of the form from detective to
reader, as it is the reader’s not the detective’s imperative to try to piece
together something coherent and meaningful from the fragments he
or she is presented with. Reflex and Bone Structure bears out especially
well Holquist’s statement about the effect of ‘strangeness’ created by the
postmodern detective story, that it comes from a strategy of ‘jumbling
the well known patterns of classical detective stories’.24 Featuring in the
dream-like assemblage of scenes are: a central protagonist (the narrator/
author), the seductive Cora and two mysterious men, Dale and Canada,
each of whom are involved with Cora, and may be friends or rivals of
the narrator. We know that Cora and Dale are killed, but the cause of
death is unclear, as is whether or not it is actually a crime. The deaths
could be the result of a bomb explosion, a car crash in south-eastern
Connecticut, a crash involving a speeding taxi driven by the narrator,
suicide or a fight. We cannot be sure who the perpetrators are. It appears
that Canada and the narrator himself are suspects, yet they willingly
assist the police at the crime scene. The police are in fact no help. There
is no logic to their investigation, which seems randomly directed and
disinterested. At one point, the narrator suspects the ‘law enforcement
officer of murdering Cora’.25
72 Bran Ni col
At every turn the novel short-circuits any efforts on the part of the
reader to piece together the fragments into coherency. There is no start-
ing point or end point to the narrative, no stable facts about its world or
geographical location. Events may be taking place in Cuba, New York,
Arizona, North Dakota, Maryland, south-eastern Connecticut, a fishing
village in an unnamed foreign country, even on stage or on screen: the
characters repeatedly watch TV and films and the fictional worlds estab-
lished by each, and entered by the characters as they watch, are juxta-
posed against the reality of the story. The text is divided into two sections
with apparently randomly generated titles, ‘A Bad Connection’ and ‘Body
Heat’, neither of which provide any clue as to their content.
The problem, as Keith Byerman has noted, is that the detective-
figure in the text steadfastly ‘refuses to detect, by which is meant that he
rejects the logical processes by which the solution might be found’.26 The
narrator/author does not provide a reliable, ‘usable’ map of the world
of the novel for readers to use to orient themselves in the narrative – an
essential part of classic crime fiction. He admits he is making up clues
as he goes along, and feeds the reader with useless information such as
accounts of the devices the police fail to use in their investigation. Reflex
and Bone Structure might therefore be considered an ‘anti-detective’ story
in the purest sense, i.e. a detective story that resists the principle of inves-
tigation entirely. Nevertheless, the narrator does claim to be a detective,
and is quick to clarify what this might mean in such a novel – or rather,
what it does not mean: ‘I’m a detective trying to solve a murder. No, not
a murder. It’s a life. Who hired me? I can’t face the question. I’m tailing
Cora and Canada and Dale’ (RBS, 32).
This points to the familiar literary-intellectual dimension of postmod-
ern detective fiction. Detective-work figures as a metaphor for Major’s
exploration of the mystery of his own imagination and writing. This is
the prime function of the self-reflexive interventions which punctuate the
narrative scenes. Some of these refer to the author’s ‘relationship’ with the
characters he is creating, or ‘tailing’: ‘Get to this: Cora isn’t based on any-
body. Dale isn’t anything. I am only an act of my own imagination. I can-
not even hear my own voice the way they hear it.’ Others focus on the act
of writing and his motivations: ‘I want this book to be anything it wants to
be. A penal camp. A bad check. A criminal organization. . . . This book can
be anything it has a mind to be’ (RBS, 81, 59). The impetus in postmod-
ern detective stories tends to be towards exploring the mystery of reading.
Reading has always been central to the detective tradition, with the reader
imagined as a kind of surrogate detective, engaged in a similar quest to
X-Ray Detectives 73
the sleuth, decoding signs and constructing a narrative. By contrast, the
author figures as a kind of criminal, disguising the real story, but laying
down the clues for it to be discovered at the right time. Tzvetan Todorov
famously summed these equivalences up via a neat homology: ‘author:
reader = criminal: detective’.27 Yet there is a current within postmodern
detective fiction whereby detective-work is conceived of as a problem of
writing rather than reading. The task of authorship is compared to the
detective’s predicament of being faced with a potentially vast and uncon-
nected world of signs, and needing to plot a course through it, producing
something aesthetically meaningful.28
Reflex and Bone Structure suggests that there is an added dilemma for
the African-American writer: how to use a traditional Euro-Americentric
form to explore the identities of characters who are normally either left out
of the tradition or fixed within it in subordinate positions. W. Lawrence
Hogue has pointed to the value of the novel’s postmodern approach to
character in this respect, its portrayal of virtual, plural, decentred char-
acters, who constantly change with each brief scene (e.g. they meta-
morphose into movie stars, even into animals), and, at a more structural
level, the continual blurring of the roles of author, narrator, protagonist,
and detective. A preference for multiple narratives and subjectivities, he
argues, can redress the balance in the depictions of African Americans in
American literature, who are normally under-represented, and portrayed
‘as inferior, as victim, as deviant, as the same, or as devalued Other’ in con-
trast to the Eurocentric definition of the white ‘as normative and super-
ior’. Reflex and Bone Structure presents the reader with ‘a different kind
of (African American) subject, one that escapes the violence and repres-
sion of rational, linear, Eurocentric Enlightenment reason’ – effectively
the postmodern subject, ‘a chaining movement of signifiers, a network of
contextual, partial, contradictory, and shifting identifications’.29
Reed’s narrator’s admission that he is a detective trying to solve ‘a life’
explains the task that confronts him in the novel. The life he is surely
referring to is not his own, but Cora’s. Although the novel is partly
‘autobiographical’, it is really the story of Cora and her mystery: Who
was she? What happened to her? The complication here is the fact that –
as Hogue acknowledges – despite its determination to challenge assump-
tions about racial normativity and superiority, Reflex and Bone Structure
in fact perpetuates one norm: the woman’s sexualised body as constructed
through the male gaze. The obsession with Cora is indissociable from an
obsession with her body. It seems impossible for the narrator to describe a
scene in which she appears – and this means most of them – without the
74 Bran Ni col
description containing an explicit reference to her body or an account of
some sexual activity in which she is involved or which she prompts: ‘Cora
is naked, sitting in the sand. . . . Cora’s nipples are erect, sand is stuck to
her belly. Like jackals, a group of old men stand nearby watching her. . . .
Cora is in bed reading a bestseller and casually playing with her cunt.’
Even if a scene is not obviously sexual or physical, it can quickly become
so. The beginning of one episode, for example, has Cora, ‘light-stepping
on her toes, go[ing] outside and stand[ing] at the side of her doorway,
looking away into nothing’. The narrator seems to be at pains to show
that Cora is not simply to be defined by her gender nor her sexuality, but
even these negations seem to contain their opposite: ‘Cora is aware that
she has many other sides. She is not simply a creative whose mission in life
is to receive her man’s orgasm or ejaculation.’ As shifting as her identities
are (as a result of the episodic form of the novel) there are also consist-
ent aspects to her: her intelligence, her good nature, her desirability. But
everything always seems to come down to her body: ‘[Cora] is soft texture
and quivering flesh, and she is a person too’ (RBS, 114, 41, 37).
So relentless and considered is the preoccupation with Cora’s body
that it would seem that Major’s concern with the mystery of writing is in
fact secondary – or perhaps even more mysteriously related – to another
mystery, which is the real subject of Reflex and Bone Structure, and this is
Cora’s body. In some passages the two mysteries merge, when the narrator
presents himself as simultaneously diegetic and extra-diegetic, pondering
the connections between being and writing:
I am standing behind Cora. She is wearing a thin black nightgown. The

backs of her legs are lovely. I love her. The word standing allows me to
watch like this. The word nightgown is what she is wearing. The night-
gown itself is in her drawer with her panties. The word Cora is wearing
the word nightgown. I watch the sentence: The backs of her legs are lovely.
(RBS, 70)
The fascination is not that of the epistemological quest, typical of the

investigation which drives detective fiction. It is more like a related activ-
ity, which Freud termed epistemophilia. Epistemophilia is the drive to
know, and as such – twinned with the drive to see, scopophilia, which
services it – is a ‘normal’ part of subjectivity. The epistemophilic impulse
might be seen as a kind of parallel to the Oedipus complex: it is the birth
of the investigative impulse and of independent thinking about the ori-
gins of the subject. The child’s drive to know sets in motion a pattern of
seeking out knowledge that operates throughout life. But Freud’s writings
X-Ray Detectives 75
show how, in adult life, this impulse can be pathologised, as in the case of
the ‘Rat Man’, who becomes prey to an ‘obsession for understanding’, and
‘which made him a curse to all his companions’.30
Where the classic detective story utilises an Oedipal structure,
founded on the desire to find the truth, detective-work in postmod-
ern detective fiction, characterised by ‘epistemological anxiety’, works
according to the logic of epistemophilia. In psychoanalytic terms, where
desire involves the chain of signification which resembles the pattern of
suspense and revelation which operates in classic detective fiction, the
drive circles around its object, never ‘alighting’ on it, never achieving
satisfaction, but instead deriving a mindless pleasure (jouissance) from
the act of circling. Postmodern detectives remain for long periods, some-
times forever, stuck in a repetitive cycle in their investigation. Major’s
‘writer-detective’ conforms to this pattern, even though his particular
drive to know does not revolve around a crime or a complex mystery,
but Cora’s body.
Peter Brooks argues that the body (especially that of the mother, as
Melanie Klein argued, and especially the breast) ‘provides the original
object of symbolisation, and the field of exploration for the child’s devel-
oping “epistemophilic impulse”, the urge to know’. But he points to a
paradoxical relationship between the body and language, in this sense.
On the one hand, the body is the foundation for all symbolisation, as
‘[b]odily parts, sensations, and perceptions (including the notorious rec-
ognition of the anatomical distinction between the sexes) are the first
building blocks in the construction of a symbolic order’. Yet on the other,
symbolisation leads us away from the body (like all systems of significa-
tion). The body thus remains curiously ‘other’, external to the process of
symbolisation. This paradox is the foundation for Brooks’s theory of ‘nar-
rative desire’, which he expounds in his book, Body Work. Narrative desire
is about ‘embodying’ meaning through producing and decoding narrative,
something that emerges naturally out of epistemophilia and is at work in
a number of modern works of fiction ‘in which a body becomes a central
preoccupation’. ‘In modern narrative literature’, he argues, ‘a protagonist
often desires a body (most often another’s, but sometimes his or her own)
and that body comes to represent for the protagonist an apparent ultimate
good, since it appears to hold within itself – as itself – the key to satis-
faction, power and meaning. On the plane of reading, desire for knowl-
edge of that body and its secrets becomes the desire to master the text’s
symbolic system, its key to knowledge, pleasure and the very creation of
significance.’31
76 Bran Ni col
Reflex and Bone Structure details its writer-detective’s desire for Cora’s
body and its promise of ‘satisfaction and meaning’. But narrative desire
operates most of all here on the plane of writing. The reader becomes an
observer of the author’s epistemophilic conviction that if he can know
Cora, he can make sense of the crime, but also the mystery of why and
how he writes. But this knowledge is not forthcoming – how can one
‘know’ a body, for its mystery always eludes symbolisation? In hard-boiled
detective fiction, the sexualised female body usually figures as a distraction
for the detective, as the ‘femme fatale’ seduces him away from his true
path. We might argue that a variation on this theme underpins Major’s
novel (especially as Cora’s name recalls one of the classic femme fatales,
in James M. Cain’s noir novel The Postman Always Rings Twice, 1934).
Knowing and possessing Cora seem both to be what drives the author’s
detective-work (that is, solving the mystery of writing) and what prevents
him from doing so:
Even now [after her death] I still possess Cora. In a way she can’t be taken
away. But I’m too possessive. Yet I try desperately not to be; realizing that I
not only cannot own her, but also I cannot even begin to own myself. My
own movements belong to someone else. These words even, are not mine.
(RBS, 96)
Gill Plain has argued that ‘[m]urder is literally “written on the body” and
bodies are never neutral. They inevitably bear the inscriptions of their cul-
tural production – socially determined markers of gender, race, sexual-
ity and class that profoundly influence the ways in which they are read
by witnesses, police, detectives and readers.’32 The crucial point about
Major’s Cora is that not only is she female, and sexualised, but that her
body represents the racialised female body. This is actually conveyed quite
subtly in the novel, which tends to keep its ‘African American-ness’ in the
background. We may surmise that Canada is black because his surname
is Jackson, he listens to ‘jazz – black music’, and, on one occasion, refers
to a community suspicion that the police planted a bomb ‘to make it look
like a black militant plot’ (RBS, 78, 85). Dale’s and the writer-detective’s
racial identities are less clear. According to Lawrence Hogue, this lack of
directness is because of the importance the novel places on normalising
black people, turning them from ‘other’ into ‘same’. Once again, however,
the exception is Cora.
Throughout the novel she is associated with markers of blackness.
Sometimes her racial identity is conveyed implicitly, for example, when
it is noted that she ‘has fled Soul Food. No more pigtails, neckbones,
X-Ray Detectives 77
chitterlings, no more greens and cornbread’, or when she is on Eighth
Street in New York and a ‘young white woman, selling communist newspa-
pers, attacks her’. If she were white too there would be no need to identify
the colour of her assailant. In other places it is more explicit. A newspaper
reports her death as that of ‘A promising young black Greenwich Village
stage actress’ (RBS, 63, 59, 76). When her father tells her ‘the history of
black people’, she asks when he’s finished, ‘Am I more than black?’ As
the character who most clearly embodies blackness, Cora is, appropri-
ately enough, the one who studies it. She reads about the ‘Competitive
Exclusion Principle’, and she spends a week becoming ‘overly concerned
with racial differences and classification of human types. And searching
her own name, Hull, and ancestry’. As a result of this interest in her race,
she has a number of peculiar items on display in her home: framed and
hanging on her living room wall: ‘Cora has an X-ray of her own brain,
one of her heart, one of her vagina. I mean her womb; she also has a set of
X-rays showing her bone structure. She has these things framed and they
hang in the living room’ (RBS, 127, 119, 99). This is the only direct clue
the novel provides to its title – or at least its second part, ‘bone structure’.
(The ‘reflex’ remains oblique, but would seem to relate to the spontaneity
of the work’s composition, how it is the product of its author responding
to his sense impressions, and perhaps even to the self-reflexivity of the
text.) Bone structure, and what this might be seen to reveal, has of course
long been notoriously central to determining racial origin, and figures as a
kind of essence of the body, its deep structure.
The essence of Cora’s body is on display in Reflex and Bone Structure,
as openly as the X-rays on her wall, but this does not mean it yields its
mystery. Towards the end of the novel the author/narrator/protagonist/
detective uses a new term to describe his identity: ‘I’m the undertaker’
(RBS, 120, 137). Though he doesn’t elaborate on this role, it does seem
that his primary function has been to transport the body of Cora to her
grave, to put her to rest – but also to carry her to a significance beyond
her death through his words. The task he has undertaken is to present the
reader with a character who is at once defined by her racial body, but is
also unfixed and mysterious. As Hogue argues, the great achievement of
Reflex and Bone Structure is that it depicts African-American subjectivity
‘in the form of the mystery, which encompasses everything in life that is
still unknown to us, or in the form of the open that is always out of reach.
It is a subjectivity that is incomplete, that is processes [sic in process],
that is always becoming’.33 Although this runs the risk of perpetuating a
normative male perspective on the female body, it also tackles prevailing
78 Bran Ni col
ideological assumptions about black criminality and black sexual excess by
showing the black body as dynamic, mysterious and irreducible to a single
image.
‘Cutting the Philosophy Bullshit’

Both Mumbo Jumbo and Reflex and Bone Structure are notable additions to
the canon of postmodern detective fiction. Their use of jazz – or ‘gumbo’,
or collage – structure results in some of the most experimental and non-
linear narrative in the tradition, and their foregrounding of the theme of
African-American racial identity provides a new departure for the form.
But it is perhaps Reflex and Bone Structure’s concern with body matters
that amounts to the most notable contribution to a subgenre of detective
fiction which has placed an emphasis on the cerebral and the intellectual
as opposed to the body – in other words, the ‘metaphysical’ instead of the
physical – and a view of literature as a philosophical discourse, something
that performs critiques, which acts on the mind, rather than something
which is felt and experienced.
It is one of the paradoxes of classic detective fiction that it is at once all
about the body (i.e. discovering a criminal by the traces of his own body
and those he leaves on the bodies of his victims) but strangely reluctant to
deal with real bodies. The depiction of the corpses in Doyle and Agatha
Christie, for example, are curiously sanitised and ‘clean’. Gill Plain has even
suggested that what defines the genre in its classic guise, what its struc-
ture and elaborate patterns are geared towards, is the need to keep certain
kinds of ‘otherness’ – such as the ‘criminal and desiring female body’ – out
of the fiction. Only recently, with the advent of variations on the classic
crime thriller, such as lesbian crime fiction and serial killer fiction, comes
an excessive concentration on ‘variously dismembered, decomposed, dis-
played and eroticised bodies’.34 For all the challenges it poses to its ‘parent
genre’, postmodern detective fiction has been uninterested in providing a
parallel alternative to the rule Plain identifies. Even though Mumbo Jumbo
is concerned, to a degree, with the racialised body (the white authorities
are troubled by the effect Jes Grew has on the body, at one point issuing
an edict forbidding people to ‘wriggle the shoulders [. . .], shake the hips
[. . .] flounce the elbows [. . .] pump the arms’ etc.), it is chiefly a carefully
considered critique of American history, society and culture. This is why it
has been lauded for reaching ‘a new level of social and political awareness
of African American culture’.35
X-Ray Detectives 79
Reflex and Bone Structure may be ‘self-conscious’ in terms of metafic-
tion, that is, self-reflexive writing which functions as if the text is a rational
critic. Yet, unlike Mumbo Jumbo, it is not written in full knowledge of
what it is doing. Major once described the novel as ‘a mock detective
novel or a kind of murder mystery [. . .] and that’s all I had in my mind,
that I was going to do this very, very strange murder mystery. But I never
knew from day to day where it was going. I would just sit there and say
“OK, typewriter, here I am” and that’s the way I took it from day to day.’36
He also very deliberately resisted the urge to philosophise. In a letter to
Ronald Sukenick about the publication of the novel, Major noted that he
had ‘cleaned up REFLEX, cut the philosophy bullshit, really cleaned it
up’.37 Cutting the philosophy is in fact one of Reflex and Bone Structure’s
most radical contributions to the form of the postmodern detective story.
Its dream-like structure means it replaces the epistemological quest with a
kind of epistemophilia evidenced in its mesmeric focus on Cora’s body.
Hogue’s point that the novel ‘uncritically reproduces the masculine gaze
of the feminine’ is undeniable.38 Yet, placed in the context of the post-
modern detective story, a heavily philosophical, Eurocentric form, the
novel’s emphasis on the body is innovative. Considered from a different
perspective, it seems significant, inevitable perhaps, that it would take an
African-American writer to bring the real body into such a dry intellectual
form. Attitudes to the black body have been instrumental in the ‘othering’
of the African American in American history. In forcing its reader to con-
sider the black body as mystery, Major offers a valuable critique not just
of postmodern detective fiction but the detective tradition as a whole. Just
as Poe’s ‘The Man of the Crowd’ might be considered an ‘X-ray detect-
ive’ story, penetrating down to the epistemological drive at the heart of
the genre, so Major’s novel exposes the ‘bone structure’ beneath the meta-
physics of the postmodern detective story.
Notes
1 Michael Holquist, ‘Whodunit and Other Questions: Metaphysical Detective
Stories in Post-War Fiction’, New Literary History 3/1 (Autumn 1971), 135–56
[155].
2 William Spanos, ‘The Detective and the Boundary’, boundary 2, 1/1 (Autumn
1972), 147–68 [154].
3 Patricia Merivale and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney (eds.), Detecting Texts: The
Metaphysical Detective Story from Poe to Postmodernism (Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 4.
4 Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (London: Routledge, 1987), 16, 9.
80 Bran Ni col
5 Holquist, ‘Whodunit and Other Questions’, 153.
6 Dana Brand, The Spectator and the City: Fantasies of Urban Legibility in
Nineteenth Century England and America (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1991), 79–105 [88].
7 Edgar Allen Poe, ‘The Man of the Crowd’ [1840], The Fall of the House of
Usher and Other Stories (London: Penguin, 1986), 131–40 [140].
8 Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism,
trans. Harry Zohn (1935; London and New York: Verso, 1983), 48.
9 See Bran Nicol, ‘Reading and Not Reading “The Man of the Crowd”: Poe,
the City and the Gothic Text’, Philological Quarterly 91/3 (Summer 2012),
465–93.
10 Stephen F. Soitos, The Blues Detective: A Study of African American Detective
Fiction (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996), 180–1.
11 Soitos, The Blues Detective, 33–34, 180; Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of
Postmodernism (London and New York: Routledge, 1988), 34.
12 Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo (New York: Atheneum, 1972), 212.
13 Reed, Mumbo Jumbo, 6.
14 Henry Louis Gates Jr, Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the Racial Self (Cary,
NC: Oxford University Press, 1989), 272.
16 Richard Swope, ‘Crossing Western Space, or the HooDoo Detective on the
Boundary in Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo’, African American Review 36/4
(Winter 2002), 611–28 [612].
17 W. Lawrence Hogue, Postmodernism, Traditional Cultural Forms, and African
American Narratives (New York: SUNY Press, 2013), 12.
18 Ishmael Reed, Conversations with Ishmael Reed (Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi, 1995), 53–4.
20 Soitos, The Blues Detective, 196.
21 Nancy L. Bunge (ed.), Conversations with Clarence Major (Jackson: University
Press of Mississippi, 2002), 112, 28.
22 See Hogue, Postmodernism, 241.
23 See Bunge, Conversations with Clarence Major, 72; Keith E. Byerman, The Art
and Life of Clarence Major (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012), 44.
24 Holquist, ‘Whodunit and Other Questions’, 155.
25 Clarence Major, Reflex and Bone Structure (1975; San Francisco: Mercury,
1996), 31. Hereafter cited in the text as RBS.
26 Byerman, The Art and Life of Clarence Major, 105.
27 Tvetan Todorov, The Poetics of Prose (London: Jonathan Cape, 1977), 49.
28 See Jeffrey T. Nealon, ‘Work of the Detective, Work of the Writer’ in Merivale
and Sweeney, Detecting Texts, 117–33.
29 Hogue, Postmodernism, 227, 3.
30 Sigmund Freud, ‘Notes Upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis [‘The Rat
Man’]’. In Case Histories II (Harmondsworth: Pelican Freud Library, 1984),
36–128 [70].
X-Ray Detectives 81
31 Peter Brooks, Body Work: Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 7.
32 Gill Plain, Twentieth Century Crime Fiction: Gender, Sexuality and the Body
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), 13.
33 Hogue, Postmodernism, 3
34 Plain, Twentieth Century Crime Fiction, 245.
35 Reed, Mumbo Jumbo, 93; Soitos, The Blues Detective, 180.
36 Bunge, Conversations with Clarence Major, 36.
37 See Byerman, The Art and Life of Clarence Major, 111.
38 Hogue, Postmodernism, 244.
Ch apter 5
Performing Identity
Intertextuality, Race and Difference in the
South Asian Novel in English
Peter Morey
A man who invents himself needs someone to believe in him, to

prove he’s managed it.
(Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 49)
Writing in 1928 an anonymous Indian critic compared the sympathetic

portrayal of Indians in A Passage to India to the actual reception accorded
to the Indian visitor to England: ‘if all the people he met were Forsterized
he would not nearly so often find himself forced into false positions. . . .
He is conceived long before he is accosted, and finds himself constrained
to live up to somebody else’s false notion or perhaps a thousand false
notions.’1 Here, in the form of a plea for greater understanding, is an early
instance of that consciousness which has grown and come to pervade con-
temporary postcolonial writing, with its frequent metafictional knowing-
ness and concern for questions of knowledge and power: the remarkable
persistence of the ‘second-hand’, already read quality in the British-Indian
relationship. Through the deployment of postmodern techniques of par-
ody, pastiche, and intertextual shaping, the South Asian novel in English
often seeks to contest the ‘lessons’ of a literary corpus wherein a two-way
gaze fixes both sides in a relationship of inequitable power and mutual
misrecognition.
South Asian literature in English has been at the forefront of debates
over the relationship of postcolonialism and postmodernism ever since the
appearance of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children in 1981. A number of
writers have testified to the influence of Rushdie, and magical realist nar-
ratives have appeared fictionalising the historical experience of the Anglo-
Indian and Parsi communities, among other groups, while writers from
the Indian and Pakistani diasporas have been quick to adopt and adapt
international stylistic influences.2 Such novels often inscribe an implicit
dialogue or creative tension between the overt political programme of
82
Performing Identity 83
postcolonialism and the linguistic focus of postmodernism. Yet there is
a deeper sense in which South Asian writing rehearses the same preoccu-
pations that also inform poststructuralist and postmodern theories. This
essay will argue that the conscious intertextuality of a number of these
novels inscribes a recognition that literary representations of India operate
in a discursive field that is always haunted by, and in dialogue with, colo-
nial constructions that have preceded them. In the Indo-British relation-
ship, the tentacular grip of orientalist and colonial textuality has been such
that there might almost be said to be an overdetermination of textuality,
with concomitant implications for notions of identity: an idea explored
in the work of writers as diverse as V. S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie and
Hanif Kureishi. Ideas of an authentic space outside or beyond such fram-
ing representations are problematised. This awareness reaches its peak
in the writings of second- and third-generation authors, often of mixed
background, such as the British-Indian novelist and journalist Hari
Kunzru. For such writers, it is no longer a case of choosing one or the
other tradition or identity, but recognising that one is a product of both as
they have been mutually constituted through acts of representation.
Kunzru’s novel The Impressionist (2002) is a polyphonic text woven
from allusions to, and pastiches of, the classic literary narratives of
empire. On one level, this intertextuality is part of its characteristic post-
colonial attack on Manichean identity structures and fetishisation of
kinds of purity. Yet, rather than merely celebrating cultural hybridity,
the text instead probes the unease of deracinated, in-between positions.
Identity, in The Impressionist, is revealed as dialogic and performative, only
attainable through the gaze of the other. Yet, for the central character,
Pran – unlike the protagonists of earlier novels – not only is there no
‘moment of arrival’ at a stable identity, it is suggested that there may be
no authentic ‘self ’ at all beyond the network of colonial representations
through which he has constructed his personas.
In writing, this sense of the ‘already written’ and ‘already read’ often
leads to mixed forms wherein textual apprehensions are anterior to any
external reality. How do these texts create a space for this recognition?
And how do they contest the ideological limitations imposed? The nar-
rative self-consciousness inherent in intertextuality allows for a critical
reflection on the process of hybridisation in identity formation inasmuch
as this, too, is partly produced through forms of representation. Likewise,
the relationship of intertextuality to lived experience might be thought of
as a way of encoding experience through familiar cultural forms – that is,
as a kind of shorthand for certain types of indicative experience – while
84 Peter Morey
also thereby gesturing towards a prehistory of the text which is linked to
the culture-giving aspects of colonialism.
The notion of intertextuality employed here is predicated on an under-
standing that the meaning of a literary text is to be found not in authorial
intention or formalistic hermeneutics, but rather that it exists, in Graham
Allen’s phrase, ‘between a text and all the other texts to which it refers and
relates’. This includes those texts which it cites and alludes to, but also
varieties of plot, types of character, symbolic structures, generic features
and so on. It also includes the social (con)text informing the work.3 For
Bakhtin, from whom the idea of intertextuality first derives, there is no
such thing as a singular utterance. All language use is a ‘two-sided act’.
Bakhtin says that, ‘language for the individual consciousness, lies on the
borderline between oneself and the other. The word in language is half
someone else’s.’4 In order to make it one’s own, an act of ‘appropriation’ –
of an utterance that is already infused with the traces of myriad existing
usages – is necessary, but even then it will never be entirely one’s own. For
postcolonialists, the notion of appropriation in relation to another’s lan-
guage and culture system will be familiar as a staple of theory at least since
The Empire Writes Back. However, in that text, it is to a large extent taken
to mean a conscious, willed political act on the part of the postcolonial
writer. To refocus our attention on intertextuality is also to recognise that
postcolonial writers in English, are always already writing ‘within and yet
against’ the ‘othering’ processes of colonial fiction.5
Furthermore, when considering postcolonial intertextuality, it is neces-
sary to bear in mind the broader history which will feed into the liter-
ary text: what Kristeva calls ‘the cultural or social text’. Those discursive
and historical struggles that characterise the social text will continue to
reverberate in the literary text. For Kristeva, ‘“the literary word” [is . . .]
an intersection of textual surfaces rather than a point (a fixed meaning), as a
dialogue among several writings: that of the writer, the addressee [. . .] and
the contemporary or earlier cultural context’.6 That is to say, a text com-
municates not only with its readers, but also with what Kristeva calls, ‘an
anterior or synchronic literary corpus’. The double-voiced nature of inter-
textuality, its embodiment of more than one perspective, allows it to resist
the monologic drives of authoritarian discourses (such as colonialism) and
to hold the potential for a radical social critique.
Postcolonial intertextuality takes a variety of forms: quotation and allu-
sion; intertexts as structuring frameworks for plot and thematics; the col-
lage type, where the juxtaposition of many intertexts creates an effect and
thereby generates meaning; and the intertext-as-archive, where a dialogic
engagement is conducted between the novel and aspects of a broader cul-
tural discourse – the grand narratives of Science or History – fostered by
colonialism. Theo D’haen has described how postcolonial intertextuality
creates ‘afterlives’ for its canonical forebears. In such reworkings, he says,
‘the “original” disappears after having been consumed by its “afterlife”.
Or, for the reader that does go back to the “original”, the latter has been
utterly changed by its “translation”.’ This is not a simple continuation of
the life and authority of the canonical text, ‘but rather [. . .] an updated
version, giving it new meanings, tying it to new locales, different times’.7
Intertextual practices vary, from direct rewritings and appropriations of
imperial fictions, such as Heart of Darkness, Robinson Crusoe, The Tempest
or Jane Eyre, to work that contains a more immanent acknowledgement
of how a colonial literary and cultural hegemony actually shapes identity.8
This latter kind can operate in different ways. It can either expose and
contest colonial narrative hegemony: as in The Buddha of Suburbia where
Karim comes to critique the stereotyped role he is expected to play; mark
the shortfall between a textually constructed, imaginary England and the
reality – as in several of V. S. Naipaul’s novels but especially The Enigma
of Arrival; satirise anglophile self-delusion (as in the character of Saladdin
Chamcha in The Satanic Verses); or inscribe the more unsettling possibil-
ity that, as Homi Bhabha would have it, colonial identity actually exists
between coloniser and colonised and that textuality is the primary means
by which we come to an understanding of who we are.
There are questions raised in intertextual theory which this essay can
only touch on briefly: for example, that of what could be termed the ‘loca-
tion of intertextuality’; does the site of intertextuality lie in the idea and
technique of the author, in the reader – bringing a degree of literary com-
petence to bear – or in the text itself? Likewise, one must acknowledge
the difference between the poststructuralist version’s emphasis on general
semiotic processes of cultural signification, and a more formalist approach
tracing elements of the internal textual architecture, so to speak. (In what
follows I will endeavour to hold the two approaches together as, argu-
ably, does the novel I will be examining.) Finally, it should be noted that,
despite Barthes’s insistence that, ‘the citations that go to make up a text
are anonymous, untraceable, and yet already read’, in Kunzru’s novel, the
intertexts are anything but ‘untraceable’; indeed, they are frequently fore-
grounded and operate on the level both of genre – the colonial novel of
India – and of those individual texts cited and parodied.9
86 Peter Morey
The Impressionist is a polyphonic text that employs many different nar-
rative tones – ribald, tender, impressionistic, satirical and fantastical – and
that strategically deploys direct intertexts to form the fabric of the pica-
resque tale. Kunzru offers pasquinades of the classic literary narratives of
India by Kipling, Forster, Orwell and others. In so doing, his text con-
fronts many of the dominant cultural forms and ideas from the ‘social
text’ of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: anthropology,
social Darwinism, theosophy and spiritualism, communism, fascism, anti-
Semitism and anti-colonial Indian nationalism. This polyphony is the for-
mal corollary of the theme of mixing, transgression and changing identity,
played out in the central character, Pran, the child of a brief encounter
between a British colonial tree-planter and a Hindu moneylender’s daugh-
ter in the early years of the twentieth century.
Pran begins life in the home of a wealthy Brahmin pandit in Agra who
believes himself to be the child’s father. Revelation of Pran’s illegitimacy,
however, results in the boy being cast out and forced to fend for himself.
In the rambunctious adventures that follow, Pran goes through a series of
different incarnations. First of all, he is taken to work in a brothel run by
hermaphrodites (or hijras), who dress him in women’s apparel and rename
him Rukhsana. Here he is spotted by a representative from the princely
state of Fatehpur, who whisks him away to the palace, intending to use his
waiflike charms and newly acquired sexual skills to compromise the British
representative, a Major Privett-Clampe, and so ensure the succession of
the Raja’s scheming younger brother. Finally extricating himself from the
political intrigue of the palace, having been tutored in the English lan-
guage and aspects of culture by the infatuated Major, Pran proceeds to
Amritsar just in time to find himself caught up in the 1919 massacre, when
British troops fired on unarmed protestors. Despite this experience, Pran
has come to associate Englishness with a superior way of life. Thereafter,
his aim is to become as English as possible and eliminate all traces of his
Indian origins. He sees identity as a ladder, with whiteness and Englishness
at the top and blackness at the bottom. After a period in Bombay with
a Christian missionary and amateur devotee of anthropometry – during
which period he is rechristened Bobby – Pran takes on the identity of a
young Englishman he has briefly met and who has been killed in a riot in
the city. Armed with his freakish white skin, and the necessary paperwork
to legitimate his new identity as ‘Jonathan Bridgeman’, he sails away to
the promised land of England where he attends a minor public school,
goes up to Oxford and embarks on an ill-starred love affair with the flighty
daughter of an anthropology don. When this relationship comes to an
abrupt end, he joins the professor’s party exploring a little known part of
Africa. Here he is brought up against blackness, that part of himself he has
forcibly repressed for so long. This results in some kind of identity crisis
and he leaves the little party of explorers, eventually ending up wandering
in the desert, the old coordinates of that so-carefully acquired and pol-
ished Englishness shed like an unwanted skin.10
Pran’s expulsion from his home at the start signals the beginning of
the problematisation of any fixed notion of identity. Indeed, several other
characters in the book also undergo a sloughing off or a soaking away
of identity. On one level, the novel launches a characteristic postcolo-
nial attack on Manichean identity structures and fetishisation of kinds of
purity. A number of characters harbour miscegenatory fantasies, under-
lining the proximity of colonial racism to desire: for example, the zeal-
ous missionary McFarlane is constantly subsuming the lust he feels for his
dusky female catechists beneath a pseudoscientific system of racial clas-
sification in which they will be forever ‘beneath’ him in the evolutionary
scale. The blurring of boundaries most notable in Pran’s multiple identities
is everywhere, present both in the colonial India described in the first half
of the book, and in the England of the second: the hermaphrodites are, of
course, in-between genders; the spiritualism favoured by Mrs McFarlane,
the missionary’s wife, offers a space where not only British and Indian but
also living and dead can mingle; and Dr Noble, Principal of Chopham
Hall public school experiments in cross-fertilising orchids, and is first ‘dis-
covered in the act of hybridisation’.11
In fact, the theme of hybridity and mongrelisation is highlighted, not
only in Pran’s mixed biological background, but also in his aspirations to
Englishness. As he becomes more adept at projecting himself as English,
he becomes harder to classify. He is described as hovering ‘at the limit of
perception, materialising [. . .] like someone only semi-real’. When Pran
arrives at the mission in Bombay, McFarlane thinks of him as ‘white yet
not white’ (I, 237, 234), immediately recalling Homi Bhabha’s formulation
to describe the locus of the radically split or ‘hybrid’ subject, ‘not quite/
not white’.12 His hybridity disconcerts the colonial master too: McFarlane
finds ‘something almost too avid about his concentration’ in their encoun-
ters. Using his childhood talent for mimicry, Pran – or Bobby as he is
now – tries to create himself as the perfect Englishman. His notions of
England are textually derived, hence the purpose and purchase of the inter-
textual technique Kunzru employs on the levels of both form and content.
Englishness can be learned: Pran memorises poetry and refines his accent
and punctuation with Privett-Clampe, gains a knowledge of English
88 Peter Morey
history from McFarlane, and, on arrival in England, keeps a notebook
wherein he records his observations and compares the English originals to
those social and cultural practices he has learned about second hand.
Indeed, much emphasis is placed on detail and appearances, such as
precise pronunciation or the cut of a tailored suit. Pran-as-Bobby’s skin
becomes a screen for projected effects. He fascinates those who encoun-
ter him; all of them ‘are prisoners of the conviction that if they stared
hard enough, they could unearth what lies beneath the beautiful mask of
Bobby’s face. [. . .] Yet this aura would not be there if Bobby knew why
he does what he does.’ Obliquely the question is raised of whether there
is anything beneath the surface at all. We learn, ‘Bobby is a creature of
surface. [. . .] He hints at transparency. [. . .] Maybe, instead of imagin-
ing depth, all the people who do not quite know him should accept that
Bobby’s skin is not a boundary between things but the thing itself, a screen
on which certain effects take place. Ephemeral curiosities. Tricks of the
light.’ Identity in the text is forever bound up with such outward forms. In
fact, for the most part, it is revealed as a ‘continuum’ in this book, full of
mutability and becoming. Sections characteristically end in conflagrations
of sorts – a tiger hunt that turns into a massacre, an anti-British riot –
resulting in some kind of purgation, out of which Pran emerges in the
next chapter in a new incarnation.
Indeed, the question of how we might read Pran’s transformations
is raised in the text itself. We are offered one option for understanding
his mutability: ‘You could think of it in cyclical terms. The endlessly
repeated day of Brahma – before any act of creation the old world must be
destroyed. Pran is now in pieces. A pile of Pran-rubble, ready for the next
chance event to put it back together in a new order’ (I, 65). One is also
tempted to apply the concept of asrama, the four ideal stages in Hindu
life, to this text. Pran is a brahmacharya (a student or apprentice) as he
learns how to be English from Privett-Clampe and MacFarlane; a some-
what frustrated and unsuccessful householder or husband (grihasthya) as
he pursues the elusive Star Chapel; a vanaprasthya when he withdraws
into the heart of Africa with Professor Chapel’s expedition; and finally a
sanyasi, renouncing the world and wandering in the desert at the book’s
end. However, we can also view Pran’s mutations as another variant of
the postmodern and postcolonial critique of Enlightenment thought: as a
reworking of the empiricist notion of identity as formulated by Locke.
Summarising the key ideas in An Essay Concerning Human
Understanding, Antony Easthope describes how Locke set aside the tra-
ditional belief that identity was conferred by possession of an immortal
soul, in favour of personal memory as ‘constitutive of individual iden-
tity conceived as diachronic’. According to Locke, identity is constituted
inwardly as ‘the Identity of consciousness [. . .] rather than on the basis of
the continuity of the body or identity socially inscribed’.13 Postcolonial
revisions of Enlightenment thought have typically broadened this para-
digm of identity to include the formative role of history: the migrations of
peoples during and after colonialism and the mixing of cultures that has
resulted. However, what I am arguing here is that a number of writers on
the British connection with India and its diasporas have also understood
the pivotal role of textuality, the mutually determining power of the gaze,
and the ‘already read’ (that is, the stereotype) in the construction of iden-
tity. This commonly appears in the idea that England and Englishness are
textually preconceived – often before the country is ever seen – by charac-
ters whose mental universe is decisively shaped by the colonial encounter.
Thus we can account for the determinedly intertextual nature of a work
such as V. S. Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival. Naipaul’s elegiac evocation
of the Wiltshire landscape famously draws on Wordsworth, Cobbett,
Hardy, T. S. Eliot and a host of others in its description of the writer-
narrator’s attempts to apprehend accurately his surroundings and recon-
cile the power of those literary representations of Englishness he has been
exposed to in his Trinidadian childhood with the decaying post-imperial
reality. He slowly comes to recognise constant change, rather than change-
lessness all around him. A catalyst and a context is provided by the second
section, ‘The Journey’, describing the young writer-narrator’s excursion
from his Caribbean home, first to New York and then to London, on his
way to study at Oxford. Writing retrospectively, the narrator is able to
see the creatively stunting alienation produced by his colonial education,
with its inculcated ideas of ‘the literary’ based on Bloomsbury paradigms.
For Naipaul’s young writer, growing to maturity involves reconciling the
young man undergoing the experience with the writer who would record
them. This provides a shape and a destination for the book he is writ-
ing. By the end: ‘The story had become more personal: my journey, the
writer’s journey, the writer defined by his writing discoveries, his ways of
seeing rather than by his personal adventures, writer and man separating
at the beginning of the journey and coming together again in a second
life just before the end’. This last phrase is significant. Earlier in the text
Naipaul refers to his time in the Wiltshire valley as ‘my second childhood
of seeing and learning’: a phrase immediately evocative of Locke’s model
of identity acquisition, with the child as tabula rasa building up know-
ledge, and thus identity, through experience.14 While, on one level, the
90 Peter Morey
task for the narrator is to extricate himself from the snares of the learned
and the textual, there is nevertheless an essential ‘self ’ behind the writing
(as one might expect in what is a memoir in fictional form):
India was special to England; for two hundred years there had been any
number of English travellers’ accounts and latterly novels. I could not be
that kind of traveller . . . there was no model for me here . . . neither Forster,
nor Ackerley, nor Kipling could help. To get anywhere in the writing, I had
first of all to define myself very clearly to myself.15
However, in another text from the late 1980s, Salman Rushdie’s The
Satanic Verses, we seem to be witnessing a more recognisably postmod-
ern onslaught on Enlightenment paradigms and notions of identity, most
strikingly in the metamorphoses of the two central characters, Gibreel
Farishta and Saladin Chamcha, into haloed angel and horned beast,
respectively. Rushdie’s diabolic narrator recognises the problematisation of
identity that ensues. He suggests that Gibreel and Saladdin embody ‘two
fundamentally different types of self ’:
Might we not agree that Gibreel, for all his stage-name and perform-
ances . . . has wished to remain, to a large degree continuous – that is joined
to and arising from his past . . . whereas Saladin Chamcha is a creature of
selected discontinuities, a willing re-invention; his preferred revolt against
history being what makes him, in our chosen idiom, ‘false’?
And, although the narrator then backs away from such hard and fast dis-
tinctions – ‘resting as they must on an idea of the self as being (ideally)
homogeneous, non-hybrid, “pure”’ – it is the case that Saladin’s idealised,
picture-postcard vision of England is an attempt to draw back from ‘real
history’, history-as-process, at the very moment when he is feeling its
effect through racist demonisation.16 In fact, what ensures continuity of
identity in this text full of grotesque bodily transmogrifications, is not
individual memory, but a consciousness of history and race, as embodied
in the radical poet Jumpy Joshi and, more indirectly, in the second-gener-
ation British-Bangladeshi Sufyan sisters. One might argue that the lesson
of these sections of the book for Saladin is to reconnect with his past self:
a movement culminating in the uncharacteristic emotionally evocative
naturalism of the final scene where Saladin is reconciled with his dying
father. Rushdie’s poststructuralist disclaimer notwithstanding, there does
seem to be an ‘essential’ Saladin behind the anglophile mask: his cut glass
accent momentarily slips when he is woken by an air stewardess on the
flight back to India, and his lover Zeeny Vakil gleefully likens it to a false
moustache.17
Graham Huggan has described the politics on display in both The
Enigma of Arrival and The Satanic Verses as being centred on ‘staged
marginalities’. Whereas, for him, ‘Naipaul’s novel effectively stages a
worn-out psychodrama of imperial imposture’, Rushdie’s text performs
the ambiguity (and co-optability) of ‘exotic’, hybrid and marginal iden-
tities. By contrast, a sense of deliberate staging and performance is always
foregrounded in the work of Hanif Kureishi, whose books and screenplays
explore ‘the political dimensions of its own theatricality’.18 Indeed, with its
emphasis on identity as performance, Kureishi’s 1990 novel, The Buddha of
Suburbia, would seem to share most with Kunzru’s take on ontology and
textuality. It is tempting to read this as a by-product of the ‘new breed’ of
Englishman personified by both authors, as well as their literary creations.
Thus, their willingness to explore the constitutive nature of performance
takes us a step beyond Rushdie and Naipaul’s respective explorations of
aesthetic identification and colonial Anglophilia and onto a terrain that is
as contemporary as it is unsettling.
As Bakhtin points out, identity itself is dialogic inasmuch as it is only
ever achieved in relation to an addressee whose answer affirms the subject’s
existence, and Bhabha gives this insight a psychoanalytic slant in his essay
on Fanon: ‘to exist is to be called into being in relation to an otherness,
its look or locus’.19 Similarly, in The Impressionist, identity is also revealed
as something one only attains through the gaze of, or in dialogue with, an
‘other’; at one point we learn that Pran ‘exists only when being observed’
(I, 347). In a sense, one creates a self for external consumption in terms
one expects will be recognised. Yet, while there may be no stable con-
cept of identity offered in Buddha, what Steven Connor sees as the central
question of the book – ‘how to resist the effects of typification’ – marks
a key difference between Kureishi and Kunzru’s texts, since on one level
The Impressionist seems to suggest that one cannot avoid typification: that
after four hundred years of textual apperception, and in our postmodern,
hyper-mediated world there may be nothing else to see.20
In his various refinements of self, we are told that ‘Bobby builds and
inhabits his puppets’, and there is a strong sense of identity as fixed
through expectation and prejudice, as dependent on stereotyping (I, 250).
The colonial scenario adds a special dimension to this fixity. One of the
intertexts hinted at in the novel is the work of George Orwell, both in his
novel Burmese Days and in the celebrated essay ‘Shooting an Elephant’.
Central to colonial identity as performance is the importance of spec-
tacle and of being seen to behave in the expected manner. Kunzru’s novel
reproduces that sense of the hollowness and absurdity of the whole thing
92 Peter Morey
that also occurs to Orwell’s imperial policeman sent out to kill an ele-
phant that has earlier gone must, but who is now quietly grazing. Not only
does The Impressionist present us with the similarly absurd posturing and
actual tenuousness of power of the colonial servants in the princely state
of Fatehpur, we are first introduced in a similarly Orwellian vein, to the
ill-fated real Jonathan Bridgeman, weaving drunkenly around the riot-
torn streets of Bombay. However, in this case, instead of an elephant, he is
accompanied by a cow he has befriended. Together they are described, in
the midst of the mayhem, ‘Under the lights, still performing for all they
are worth’ (I, 276).
Despite its portrayal of ontological mutability and what Jopi Nyman
has called identity ‘constructed through performance’, The Impressionist
is not ultimately a celebration of cultural hybridity.21 To be continually
in a state of becoming is also a form of evasion: ‘Then becoming is flight,
running knowing that stopping will be worse because then the suspicion
will surface again that there is no one running. No one running, No one
stopping. No one there at all’ (I, 463). The text, in fact, probes the unease
of deracinated, in-between positions; they are not seen as an end in them-
selves, as a final destination. In fact, at the very moment that he feels he
has arrived as an Englishman, Pran is unsettled to discover that he is just
too English for the tastes of his object of desire, the apparent apotheosis of
the doll-like English rose, Star Chapel. Instead she craves the sexual frisson
associated with blackness. Pran is horrified to discover that she is having
an affair with a black Jazz musician in Paris. Hers is the flipside of colonial
racist disdain: the covert desire for a fantasy of blackness – a fetishised
black sexuality lacking the inhibitions of the staid English. The discov-
ery of Star’s interracial affair exposes the limitations of the white English
construct. Even so, I find it difficult to concur with Shane Graham’s sug-
gestion that towards the end of the novel ‘the chameleon-like Jonathan
[Pran] reluctantly begins to confront the superficiality of the false identity
he has invented for himself ’.22 This reading seems altogether too wedded
to the notion that a ‘real’ self, submerged by colonial mimicry, is wait-
ing to resurface: something the text avoids confirming in its ambiguous
denouement. More telling, in this novel-of-surfaces, is the fact that Pran
himself is at all times surrounded by other stereotypes.
Pran’s efforts to blend in with the England of prep and public school
and Oxbridge merely operate to confirm the inevitably performative
nature of Englishness (at least in its colonial, middle-class form). We are
told that Pran is a consummate actor who, ‘deals in stereotypes’ (I, 237).
Indeed, throughout the novel, Kunzru deploys strategic stereotypes, such
as the disappointed colonial administrator Privett-Clampe, the repressed
missionary McFarlane, and Professor Chapel, the eccentric academic.
There is likewise a sense in which Pran is, himself, always read reductively
as a stereotype by those who come into contact with him. He has adopted
a certain role and has defined himself in terms that will ensure recogni-
tion and a dialogic answer. Indeed, Pran’s attempts to become the perfect
Englishman are themselves based on textually transmitted, circumscribed
and practiced versions of Englishness: an Englishness that can be ‘parsed’.
His success is predicated on the very fact that others also think through,
and recognise, the stereotypes he embodies: something that emphasises
the stereotype’s dialogic nature. Perhaps, what Steven Connor has argued
of Rushdie’s Saladin Chamcha applies equally to Pran: that his masquer-
ade in the heart of Englishness suggests, ‘the supplement of contend-
ing histories’, those narratives that are often excluded from conservative
accounts of national identity.23 Similarly, one might ask whether we too,
as readers, are being asked to read the Pran character-receptacle as simply
a string of stereotypes, a series of ever-shifting surfaces with no depth, a
sentence with no full stop.
There are, of course, political objections to the reading I have outlined
here, emphasising, as it does, the stereotype over lived experience. Any
idea of agency, it could be argued, is surrendered to the all-embracing
power of textuality. Yet it should be noted that not only is Kunzru offer-
ing what could be read as a cautionary tale about the pitfalls of obses-
sive colonial mimicry, in choosing to foreground the ‘already read’ quality
of the British-Indian relationship, he can be seen to be following those
earlier writers mentioned earlier by exposing an artifice that continues to
obtrude on contemporary community relations, especially now, in an era
of global terrorism and a heightened anxiety about national identity, race
and belonging. This is also to offer a partial answer to those objections
raised by critics such as Arun Mukherjee, who has attacked the idea that
all postcolonial texts have a parodic or revisionist relationship to imperial
textuality and that postcolonial subjectivity is, thus, shown to be still tied
to the erstwhile coloniser. The whole concept of ‘writing back’, according
to Mukherjee’s reading, implies ‘that we do not write out of our own needs
but rather out of our obsession with an absent other’, and texts such as
those cited here – with their investment in rewriting aspects of colonial lit-
erary discourse – merely constitute ‘a new inflection of “Orientalism”’.24
Such objections have been effectively answered by theorists such as
Stephen Slemon, who has pointed out that cultural acts of resistance
always involve an ambiguous refusal, but also an acknowledgement of
94 Peter Morey
colonial power, inasmuch as they employ a first world medium. Just as
anti-colonial Indian nationalism – as its very name makes clear – invoked
Enlightenment values of self-determination in the bounded space of a
nation-state marked out by the coloniser, so too
a theory of literary resistance must recognise the inescapable partiality . . .
the untranscendable ambiguity of literary or indeed any contra/dictory or
contestatory act which employs a First-World medium for the figuration
of a Third-World resistance, and which predicates a semiotics of refusal on
a gestural mechanism whose first act must always be an acknowledgement
and a recognition of the reach of colonialist power.25
One might add that, for mixed-heritage writers such as Hanif Kureishi
and Kunzru, the binary scenario invoked by Mukherjee may be merely a
distracting anachronism.
Moreover, it is possible to argue, along with Huggan that, ‘[t]o see dif-
ferent aspects of identity – sexual, ethnic/racial, national, socio-political –
as elements of a wider cultural performance permits an understanding of
marginality in terms other than those of social advantage and exclusion. . . .
Marginality becomes, instead, a self-empowering strategy within minority
discourse’, akin to that celebrated by Bhabha in his essay, ‘How Newness
Enters the World’.26 Indeed, Huggan’s interest in the political potential of
playing with pre-existing stereotypes suggests another way of understand-
ing the politics of intertextuality in The Impressionist. Writing of the pre
sentation and marketing of Arundhati Roy’s 1997 Booker Prize winning
novel, The God of Small Things, Huggan discerns the presence of what
he terms a ‘strategic exoticism’ in the book’s evocation of India, which
acknowledges the formative influence of prior textuality on its reception
in the metropolis:
It is aware of the recent history of Indo-Anglian fiction, and of the par-
allel history of imperialist nostalgia in the west: the films of David Lean
and of Merchant and Ivory; the profitable Heart of Darkness industry; the
travel writing business with its recuperative parodies of imperial heroism
and derring-do. In bringing these histories together, Roy’s novel shows the
continuing presence of an imperial imaginary lurking behind Indian litera-
ture in English.27
I would argue that the same kind of ‘meta-exoticism’ is in play in The

Impressionist with its manipulation of ‘commercially viable metropolitan
codes’ (I, 81) in narratives of British India. Like Roy (and, says Huggan,
Rushdie before her), Kunzru is aware that his writing: ‘ostensibly
oppositional, is vulnerable to recuperation; ironically rehearsing a
continuing history of imperialist perceptions of an “othered” India (India
available as spectacle; as alternating object of horror and fascination; as
world of magic, mystery and wonders; as site of colonial nostalgia; as
forbidden space of cross-cultural desire; as romantic tourist goal; and
so on)’.28 In short, The Impressionist self-consciously invokes an exoticised
imperial gaze, and draws its readers into an awareness of the prevalence
of such tropes in both writing and reading. The modification Kunzru
offers appears in the fact that in his novel the ‘exotic’ is turned back on
the metropolitan observer/reader; in those sections of the book set in
England, it is also the exoticism of an ‘othered’ England seen through
Pran’s inexperienced eyes.
At the end of the novel, Pran has extricated himself from Professor
Chapel’s expedition. However, he becomes disorientated in the African
wilderness inhabited by the Fotse people they have come to study.
Confronted with the totally alien environment, and with no recognisable
context in which to insert himself, the coordinates of his identity start to
break down. Hallucinating and suffering from sunstroke, he is rescued
by Fotse tribesmen and taken to a cave where an elderly sage, wordlessly
diagnosing him as having been possessed by a ‘European spirit’, performs
a rite of healing involving the patient being wrapped bodily in a chrysalis
of caked mud, ‘a clay mould inside which all is molten, formless and in
flux [. . .] he is an abyss, and the thing he thought was himself is plucked
out and flung away, leaving only a nightmare, a monstrous disorder’
(I, 473, 477). Here, we might say, Pran is stripped of those carefully cul-
tivated identities he has performed throughout the story. In a sense, he
undergoes Locke’s developmental schema in reverse: shedding experience,
knowledge, identity to become in the end – rather than at the beginning –
a tabula rasa. In the same way, we might conclude, Kunzru’s project of
postcolonial intertextuality in The Impressionist operates to lead us through
the labyrinth of narrative modes which has defined the mutual apprehen-
sion of British and Indian since the time of the East India Company, rec-
ognising their potency and longevity but perhaps suggesting that, with
the appearance of a new generation of writers who are the inheritors of all
these modes equally, the time has come to acknowledge and bracket the
mutually constitutive histories of colonialism and anti-colonialism which
shape the world today. What emerges when this is done? A new Man?
New modes of historical understanding? Time will tell. For now we are
left with the receding image of an unnamed traveller in the desert, accom-
panied by a camel train and a row of nomadic drovers: ‘Tomorrow he will
travel on’ (I, 481).
96 Peter Morey
Notes
1 Philip Gardner (ed.), E. M. Forster: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge,
1973).
2 Examples of those novels which employ fantastical narrative styles, frequently
drawing on indigenous traditions but which, nonetheless, are often under-
stood in terms of the attempt to stage what Fredric Jameson famously called
‘national allegories’, include: Shashi Tharoor’s The Great Indian Novel (1989);
Boman Desai’s The Memory of Elephants (1988); and I. Allan Sealy’s The Trotter
Nama (1988). The latter two books perform the task of ‘allegorising’ the com-
munal experiences of the Parsi and Anglo-Indian communities respectively.
3 Graham Allen, Intertextuality (London and New York: Routledge, 2000),
1, 14.
4 Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist,
trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas
Press, 1981), 293.
5 Allen, Intertextuality, 160.
6 Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art,
ed. Leon S. Roudiez, trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine and Leon S. Roudiez
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 65, 66.
7 Theo D’haen, The Routledge Concise History of World Literature (London and
New York: Routledge, 2012), 128–9.
8 The most famous example of postcolonial intertextuality is probably Jean
Rhys’s revision of Jane Eyre in Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). Among the numerous
other couplings of text and intertext are Wilson Harris’s Palace of the Peacock
(1960) and Heart of Darkness; J. M. Coetzee’s Foe (1986) and Robinson Crusoe;
Jack Maggs (1997) by Peter Carey which reimagines Great Expectations; Zadie
Smith’s riff on Howard’s End, On Beauty (2005); and Lloyd Jones’s Mr Pip
(2006) which translates aspects of Great Expectations to 1990s Papua New
Guinea.
9 Roland Barthes, Image-Music-Text, edited and translated by Stephen Heath
(London: Fontana, 1977), 160.
10 Indeed, it is difficult to know what to call the central character of this novel,
since his transformations are not so much disguises as wholesale revolutions
in identity. Eschewing the unwieldy compound names that suggested them-
selves – ‘Pran-Rukhsana-Bobby-Jonathan’ and so on – I have decided for
the most part to call the protagonist Pran throughout, despite the inevitable
implication that this is, then, his true, essential identity: something the paper
as a whole would clearly dispute.
11 Hari Kunzru, The Impressionist (London: Penguin, 2003), 308. Hereafter cited
in the text as I.
12 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge,
1994), 85–92.
13 Anthony Easthope, Englishness and National Culture (London and New York:
Routledge, 1999), 80.
14 V. S. Naipaul, The Enigma of Arrival: A Novel in Five Sections (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1987), 309, 82.
15 Naipaul, The Enigma of Arrival, 140–1.
16 Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (1988; Dover: The Consortium, Inc.,
1992), 427.
17 D. C. R. A. Goonetilleke, Salman Rushdie (Basingstoke: Macmillan,
1998), 77.
18 Graham Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic (London and New York: Routledge,
2001), 88, 90, 93.
19 See Allen, Intertextuality, 172; Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 44.
20 Steven Connor, The English Novel in History, 1950–1995 (London and New
York: Routledge, 1996), 98.
21 Jopi Nyman, Home, Identity, and Mobility in Contemporary Diasporic Fiction
(Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009), 101.
22 Shane Graham, ‘Memories of Empire: The Empire Exhibition in Andrea Levy’s
Small Island and Hari Kunzru’s The Impressionist’, Journal of Commonwealth
Literature 48/3 (2013), 441–52 [442].
23 Connor, The English Novel in History, 120.
24 Arun P. Mukherjee, ‘Whose Post-Colonialism and Whose Postmodernism?’
World Literature Written in English 30/2 (1990), 1–9 [6]; Bart Moore-Gilbert,
‘“I Am Going to Rewrite Kipling’s Kim”: Kipling and Postcolonialism’,
Journal of Commonwealth Literature 37 (2002), 39–58 [53].
25 Stephen Slemon, ‘Unsettling the Empire: Resistance Theory for the Second
World’, World Literature Written in English 30/2 (1990), 30–41 [37].
26 Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic, 103.
27 The Postcolonial Exotic, 77.
28 The Postcolonial Exotic, 81.
Ch apter 6
Performing Race in Caryl Phillips’s

Dancing in the Dark
Abigail Ward
Postcolonial author, playwright and essayist Caryl Phillips was born on

the Caribbean island of St Kitts in 1958, brought to the UK as an infant,
and raised in Leeds where his was ‘the only black family on a tough, all-
white working-class estate’, and racism was a daily part of his life. As he
has explained: ‘I knew that the main factor preventing my full participa-
tion in British life was the colour of my skin. If only they could some-
how colour me English – in other words, white – then nobody would
know the difference.’1 Phillips studied at the University of Oxford and
began his career as a playwright. In 1990, he moved to the United States,
and currently is Professor of English at Yale University. In his postmodern
novel Dancing in The Dark (2005), Phillips carefully weaves fact and fic-
tion in his nuanced portrayal of the life of ‘blackface’ New York vaude-
ville performer Bert Williams (1874–1922).2 Unusual for Phillips, whose
earlier works often explored Caribbean-British diasporic identities, and
later works have moved towards a consideration of the complex relation-
ship between black America and black Britain, Dancing in the Dark is
set almost entirely in America.3 Its protagonist struggles to define his iden-
tity as a migrant black performer in a segregated America largely keen to
accept as ‘authentic’ his stage persona as a ‘Real Coon’.4
Whilst many postcolonial theorists have argued against essentialist con-
ceptions of race, including perhaps most famously Frantz Fanon, whose
notion of the ‘epidermalization’ of inferiority paved the way for subse-
quent psychological approaches to race and postcolonialism, particularly
helpful to this essay is Paul Gilroy’s argument that races should not be
thought of as ‘simple expressions of either biological or cultural sameness’,
but instead as ‘imagined – socially and politically constructed’.5 Gilroy’s
claim perhaps finds an unlikely champion in Phillips’s ‘minstrel’ protag-
onist, yet I argue that the use of blackface serves to highlight the con-
structed and performative nature of racial identities. However, in Dancing
in the Dark, ultimately we find that Williams’s performance of race leads
98
Performing Race in Caryl Phillips’s Dancing in the Dark 99
to the erasure, rather than affirmation, of his identity. This dissolution of
selfhood is reflected in the novel’s fragmented form and Phillips’s use of
montage, as he assembles a variety of jarring narratives and genres in nar-
rating Williams’s story.
Williams was born in the Bahamas, and moved to the United States at
the age of eleven with his parents. He began performing on the stage in
1892, less than thirty years after the American Civil War had ended, and
at a time when opportunities for black performers were limited. He soon
paired up with a young African-American performer, George Walker and,
in 1896, Williams first tried wearing corkface – a ‘[p]erformative bondage’
from which he was unable to be fully liberated (DD, 6). Coincidentally,
this year also saw the publication of African-American poet and lyri-
cist Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poetry collection Lyrics of Lowly Life, which
included the poem ‘We Wear the Mask’:
We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,–
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
And mouth with myriad subtleties.6
As this opening stanza suggests, Dunbar’s poem captures the ambiguities

of the minstrel mask. Whilst the mask is grinning, it is duplicitous, and
though it may hide some of the performer’s facial expressions (the eyes
could portray sadness or shame, but of course instead could be confron-
tational or defiant) it also enables the wearer to communicate in a range
of subtle ways.7 The mask, therefore, may be understood as being both
acquiescent and resistant, and I shall explore this ambivalence along-
side postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha’s essay ‘Of Mimicry and Man:
The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse’ (1984). In so doing, I argue that
Williams’s minstrel performance may be read as mimicry not of African-
Americans, but of white American minstrel performers. Such an align-
ment may be seen to support those historians who argue for the subversive
and political nature of black performers in blackface minstrelsy, and also
sees the application of burnt cork as a complex mode of representation.
Postcolonial and postmodern approaches have, over the years, inter-
sected in fruitful ways, but there have been tensions too.8 Postmodernism,
for example, has been accused of Eurocentricism, yet, as Kimberly
Chabot Davis argues, ‘Any claim that the lives of black people have noth-
ing to do with postmodernism ignores the complex historical interre-
lationship of black protest and liberal academic discourse. [. . .] Racial
100 Abi g a i l Wa rd
liberation movements of the 1960s and ’70s (as well as the feminist move-
ment) contributed to the loosening of cultural boundaries that is seen as
characteristically postmodern.’9 There are certainly compelling similari-
ties between postmodern and postcolonial approaches; both, for exam-
ple, tend to be interested in irony; marginalisation; dismantling ‘grand
narratives’; the unreliability or fictionality of history, and may reveal a
corresponding attentiveness to fragmentation and the gaps and silences
within the archive. For Linda Hutcheon, postmodernism could include
any work that is ‘paradoxically both self-reflexive (about its technique
and material) and yet grounded in historical and political actuality’.10
As I argue in this essay, Phillips’s Dancing in the Dark is a self-reflexive
novel, that too is ‘grounded’ in both the historical and political past of
Williams’s lifetime, but it also raises important issues surrounding iden-
tity and nationality relevant to the late twentieth and early twenty-first
centuries. Such issues include the implications of racial and cultural
performativity, particularly for black entertainers who are still engaged
in issues of marketability, audience and the politics of representation,
or what Kobena Mercer describes as the ‘burden of representation’, ‘a
restricted economy of minority representation in which one speaks for
all’.11 As Phillips commented in an interview: ‘We can look at the com-
ments that the rapper Kanye West made only last month about what’s
happening in New Orleans [in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina].
There’s always been a tremendous amount of pressure on black perform-
ers [. . .] to be more than just performers and to be a representative of the
race.’12 As we shall see, it becomes clear in Dancing in the Dark that, as
one of the few black people in the public eye at this time, Williams also
labours ‘under what appears to be the burden of excessive responsibility’
(DD, 52), or the ‘burden of representation’.13
Dancing in the Dark is divided chronologically into three ‘acts’, and
within each act Phillips creates not only multiple narrative voices, but
also intersperses scripts from Williams and Walker’s performances, inter-
views and critics’ reviews. This plurality of voices and sources recalls ear-
lier works by Phillips, such as his novel about slavery and colonisation
Crossing the River (1993), which is divided into four distinct parts, with
a framing epilogue and prologue set in a transhistorical mode.14 Letters
and diary entries within the four sections of this novel are often non-
chronological and incomplete, and each story tells a tale of broken famil-
ial bonds. Slavery, Phillips seems to suggest, is a fractured and incomplete
past. Whilst Phillips often uses this postmodern tool of fragmentation in
his works, it operates in different ways according to context. In Dancing in
the Dark, fragmentation is used to indicate the instability of the perform-
ers’ identities, and – in particular – the self-reflexive inclusion of scripts
continually reminds the reader of the fictionality of the novel (notwith-
standing its basis in historical fact) and the inherent performativity of
identities.
The minstrel tradition had roots in early Europe; according to Michael
Rogin, the ‘first white European in recorded history to black her face was
Queen Anne, wife of James I, Stuart King of England’, and white perform-
ers were regularly using blackface since at least the time of Othello (1603).15
The years of the transatlantic slave trade saw the proliferation of images of
black people in print and on the stage, leading to the nineteenth-century
African-American abolitionist and writer Frederick Douglass declaring in
1848 that white blackface imitators were ‘the filthy scum of white soci-
ety, who have stolen from us a complexion denied to them by nature, in
which to make money, and pander to the corrupt taste of their white fel-
low citizens’.16 However, there was significant overlap in images of black
people in the two discourses of abolition and minstrelsy in the early years
of minstrels, before performances became overtly racist and, for Robert
Nowatzki, ‘minstrelsy may have done more to stir up anti-slavery senti-
ment among the working classes during this period than abolitionism
did’.17
After the Civil War, many black performers flocked to join the minstrel
shows; as Lynne Abbott and Doug Seroff argue, ‘Black minstrel companies
stole the audience away from the pale imitators, thus opening a pathway of
employment for hundreds of musicians, performers, and entrepreneurs.’18
This quotation raises an important issue concerning minstrelsy; namely,
that it improved working conditions and job prospects for black perform-
ers: Williams was one of the highest earning performers, irrespective of
race, on the US stage.19 At the same time, blackface minstrelsy did little to
improve conditions for the majority of black people in the United States,
and instead saw the perpetuation of racist imagery well into the mid-
twentieth century. As Karen Sotiropoulos writes in Staging Race: Black
Performers in Turn of the Century America (2006), ‘with the introduction
of mass production, stereotyped imagery appeared everywhere from song
sheets to food labels, making the black-faced minstrel a permanent part
of the American landscape. Over the years, minstrel imagery has reflected
and reinforced white supremacy and has caused black America immeasur-
able pain.’20 Whilst today it is not hard to see the damage done by min-
strelsy, many critics have argued that black performers had little option
but to participate in this degrading spectacle.21
As Dancing in the Dark progresses, Williams’s partner Walker becomes
increasingly aware of the problematic nature of blackface minstrelsy.
Phillips includes an extract from an article that appeared in Theatre
Magazine from 1906, in which the real Walker described the application
of cork as the ‘fatal result’ of the former white minstrels: ‘nothing seemed
more absurd than to see a colored man making himself ridiculous in order
to portray himself ’.22 Walker’s comments are interesting, not only because,
at this moment, he suggests that the black performer is onstage portraying
‘himself ’, a contradiction to comments made by Williams that the black
man he portrayed onstage was a fantasy, and ‘not any Negro known to any
man’ (DD, 120, 58), but Walker also pinpoints the application of cork as
being a ‘ridiculous’ performance of race; in order to portray a black man,
the already black performer has to wear a black mask.
My reading of blackface differs from Walker’s, for reasons I shall explain
in a moment, but this notion of the performative nature of race corre-
sponds with late-twentieth-century critical thinking by such writers as
Gilroy and Stuart Hall. For Gilroy, race has been seized as a way of try-
ing to stabilise identity but, given that race is constructed, rather than
biological, it is a fallacy that ‘the hollow certainties of “race” and ethnic-
ity can provide a unique protection against various postmodern assaults
on the coherence and integrity of the self ’.23 Instead, as Hall argues in
his essay ‘Cultural Identity and Diaspora’ (1990), the self is a far from
stable presence; identity may be thought of as ‘a “production” which is
never complete, always in process’.24 As Hall suggests, cultural identities
are shifting and changing, and the minstrel performances of Williams and
Walker may be seen as exaggerated and continually evolving performances
of racial and cultural identity.
There are other, less obvious, suggestions of the performativity of race
in the novel, including the hair-straightening potions that Williams’s wife
Lottie uses, ‘foul-smelling creams and ointments that promote the so-called
new colored beauty’. At a time when African-American hair was considered
a ‘deficiency’, her solution is to wear a hat all the time.25 In the production
of In Dahomey, in which Williams and Walker starred, a character called
Dr Straight similarly sings the praises of a new skin bleach, which ‘removes
the outer skin and leaves in its place a peachlike complexion. [. . .] Changing
black to white and vice versa’ (DD, 38, 74). ‘Passing’, of course, is another
version of a performative racial identity, but the humour here, presumably,
would be the idea of a white person voluntarily transforming their skin to
black, captured in the phrase ‘vice versa’ (the additional irony being the
nod to white minstrels appearing in blackface).
Yet, the blackface performances remain the clearest examples of racial
performativity in the novel. Taking as a starting point Judith Butler’s
assertion that drag ‘destabilizes the very distinctions between the natural
and the artificial, depth and surface, inner and outer through which dis-
course about genders almost always operates’, I argue that the blackface
performer also invites the questioning of these distinctions within the
framework of race.26 Whilst remaining mindful of Hazel Carby’s warning
of the potential dangers of posing ‘the question of the relation between
race and gender, in terms which attempt to parallel race and gender
divisions’, I would suggest that Butler’s work provides a helpful way of
reading the way in which race, like gender, is constructed rather than
inherent.27 For Butler, ‘gender practices within gay and lesbian cultures
often thematize “the natural” in parodic contexts that bring into relief
the performative construction of an original and true sex’.28 Borrowing
her ideas, we can read ‘the natural’ or ‘authenticity’ of Williams’s minstrel
performance as a parody of the performative construction of racial iden-
tities. This idea of racial parody and performance is further illustrated
by the case of the black minstrel performer of the 1840s, William Henry
Lane (known as ‘Juba’), who was made to wear blackface in order to avoid
offending white audiences; Lane’s use of the make-up enabled him, ironi-
cally, to pass for a white minstrel performer.29 Here we can see another
layer complicating Walker’s claim that he was a black man representing a
black man; instead, black minstrel performers wearing blackface were –
both initially and in later years – mimicking white American minstrel
performers, in whose footsteps they followed. To return to Butler, ‘when
the constructed status of gender is theorized as radically independent of
sex, gender itself becomes a free-floating artifice, with the consequence
that man and masculine might just as easily signify a female body as a
male one, and woman and feminine a male body as easily as a female
one’.30 We might think about her comments in relation to the ambigu-
ous meaning of the minstrel mask; the black mask that Williams or Juba
constructs may represent on one level an exaggerated and stereotyped
African-American persona, but arguably also symbolises the whiteness of
earlier minstrels.31 In this way, by putting on black make-up, the per-
formers become temporarily white.32
This mimicry of white minstrels may suggest a degree of subversion that
often has been overlooked. Though black performers found few opportun-
ities on the stage outside the minstrel sketches, this did not mean they had
to deliver a performance that was wholly compliant with the racism of Jim
Crow America.33 It is certainly feasible to read Williams’s object of satire
as being white Americans (the minstrel performers) rather than African-
Americans: a dangerous politicised practice, given the volatile nature of
segregated America at this time. In Dancing in the Dark, the popularity of
Williams’s performances with the black members of the audience indicates
that much of the irony of his performance was not lost on them: ‘he is
always grateful to hear a good number of these colored Americans applaud-
ing enthusiastically as In Dahomey unfolds’ (DD, 10). In fact, In Dahomey
was the first all-black performance on Broadway, suggesting that Williams
and Walker went some way to realising their dreams of revolutionising the
stage for black performers.34 Whilst, in later years, both figures would dis-
tance themselves from blackface performance, initially Williams clung to
the notion that these performances were deeply political, as he explained
that minstrels ‘are a thing of the past – because there are no more minstrels.
To cork your face and talk politics is not minstrelsy.’35
Some critics seem to have missed the point regarding Williams’s appli-
cation of cork. In his review of Dancing in the Dark, Nicholas Laughlin
writes that Williams was ‘a light-skinned black man who made his name
and fortune by darkening his face with burnt cork in order to play
the “coon”’.36 Critics contemporary to Williams’s performances made
the same mistake, as Sotiropoulos reveals: ‘Reviewers typically did not
write about “coon” acts as artistically rendered entertainment, but rather
as authentic representations of African American life. Typical of white
reviews is the comment “Williams is a light colored darkey, and has to use
make-up in order to become the black coon that he represents on stage.”’37
It would seem that both critics of Phillips’s book and Williams’s perform-
ances often misread his blackface performance as being a straightforward
attempt at ‘authenticity’.
The African-American author Ralph Ellison, in his essay ‘Change the
Joke and Slip the Yoke’ (1958), captured the ambiguity of meaning of
the minstrel mask when he wrote: ‘America is a land of masking jokers.
We wear the mask for purposes of aggression as well as for defense; when
we are projecting the future and preserving the past. In short, the motives
hidden behind the mask are as numerous as the ambiguities the mask
conceals.’38 It is arguably precisely because of this ambiguity that the per-
formance of minstrelsy has been read as both reaffirming and resisting
stereotypes. At this juncture, the ideas of Bhabha may be helpful in read-
ing the mask in terms of ambivalence, as I propose that the mask is simul-
taneously both compliant and subversive.
In ‘Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse’,
Bhabha explores the concept of colonial mimicry, arguing that ‘colonial
mimicry is the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of
difference that is almost the same, but not quite. Which is to say, that the
discourse of mimicry is constructed around an ambivalence; in order to
be effective, mimicry must continually produce its slippage, its excess, its
difference.’39 Blackface minstrelsy can be seen as an equivalent form of
ambivalence – ‘a subject of difference that is almost the same, but not quite’,
or as Bhabha writes of mimicry a few pages later, ‘almost the same but not
white’.40 I would suggest this is why Williams’s routines can be read as
both subversive and conforming; the minstrel mask as worn by Williams
also exists in ‘this area between mimicry and mockery’.41 His performance
of blackface makes him ‘almost the same’ as the white minstrel perform-
ers, but still he is ‘not white’. Bhabha’s claim that ‘mimicry is at once both
resemblance and menace’ underscores the potential for subversion and
mockery contained within the seemingly innocent performance.42 The
ambivalence of mimicry means that Williams is ‘read’ differently by those
who see his act. Entertaining at the time of the publication of W. E. B.
Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1903), in which Du Bois wrote of the
necessity of dignity when faced with the struggles of being ‘both a Negro
and an American’, Williams’s act appeared to many, even at the time, to be
anachronistic and deeply problematic.43 The novel charts a changing time
for black America, and as Williams’s career leads him to performing with
the all-white Follies, he too becomes more aware of the anachronism of
the minstrel show: ‘since Jack Johnson became the heavyweight champion
of the world, race pride has been rising everywhere, and these days some
Negroes look askance at him’ (DD, 164).
It is certainly clear to Williams that his ‘coon was a very particular
American coon as seen by a man from the outside’ (DD, 180). As his com-
ments reveal, despite having lived in the United States from an early age,
Williams does not identify with African-Americans; his Caribbean iden-
tity always casts him into the role of the outsider. Dancing in the Dark
therefore explores some of the complexities of diaspora, particularly for
Caribbean migrants like the Williams family who, on arrival in the United
States, are quickly made to understand that there is no such thing as inde-
pendent national identities; instead, they are simply black:
In this new place they are now encouraged to see themselves as inferior.
[. . .] In this new place called Florida they are not treated as West Indian
people who have come to America by steamship and who are keen to work;
they are not viewed as migrants who are prepared to remake themselves in
the new American world. [. . .] In this new place they are simply Negroes.
(DD, 23–4)
Correspondingly, Williams is soon aware of this fabricated notion of
blackness: ‘Eleven-year-old Bert begins to learn the role that America has
set aside for him to play’ (DD, 25). Phillips makes clear that it is habita-
tion in the United States that creates this image of ‘the Negro’, of which
the minstrel is, of course, a stereotyped representation. In fact, the real
Williams was candid about his construction of this American persona,
admitting that once he applied the burnt cork: ‘I began to find myself.
[. . .] I took to studying the dialect of the American negro, which to me
was just as much a foreign dialect as that of the Italian.’44
In contrast, in Dancing in the Dark, Williams’s father reads his per-
formance in a very different way. Phillips suggests that it is his perfect
emulation of an African-American identity that is so unsettling for his
father: ‘This is not his son. [. . .] This grotesque simpleton shuffling about
the stage who seems to be forever trapped in foolish predicaments. This
buffoon. This nigger.’45 For Williams’s father, it is specifically his son’s
habitation in America from an early age that has seen this transform-
ation from Caribbean migrant to American ‘nigger’: ‘Bringing his son to
America was an act of foolishness that has allowed the powerful nation
in the north to come between them. The country has made a nigger of
the boy’ (DD, 83–4, 144). His choice of words recalls a historical inci-
dent from 1898 concerning the African-American classically trained com-
poser Will Marion Cook. His mother, on hearing his song ‘Who Dat Say
Chicken in Dis Crowd?’ – in Eric J. Sundquist’s words, ‘a coon song with
patently offensive dialogue lyrics’ – cried out: ‘Oh, Will! Will! I’ve sent
you all over the world to study and become a great musician, and you
return such a nigger!’46 Williams’s father, like Cook’s mother, it seems, is
unable to understand his child’s involvement in a form of entertainment
that appears to enforce stereotypes of blackness.47
However we might choose to read the ambiguity of mimicry and the
mask, in the repetition of this complex performance of race and identity,
it would seem that Williams’s own self is gradually erased:
No longer Egbert Austin Williams. He kept telling himself, I am no longer

Egbert Austin Williams. As I apply the burnt cork to my face, as I smear
the black into my already sable skin, as I put on my lips, I am leaving
behind Egbert Austin Williams. However, I can, at any time, reclaim this
man with soap and water and the rugged application of a coarse towel.
(DD, 57)
Despite what Williams believes at this moment – that his true identity can
be located under the make-up – the underlying anxiety about the truth of
this assertion is revealed by the awkward repetition of his name. Towards
the end of the novel it becomes apparent that removing the cork no longer
enables him to ‘reclaim’ himself; instead, he is left without any coherent
sense of identity or self. It is perhaps unsurprising that Williams’s signature
song was ‘Nobody’, suggesting a lack of presence, or erasure.48 Williams’s
invisibility may be read alongside Ellison’s novel Invisible Man (1952), in
which he wrote: ‘I am invisible . . . simply because people refuse to see
me. . . . When they approach me they see only my surroundings, them-
selves, or figments of their imagination – indeed, everything and anything
except me.’49 Audiences viewing Williams’s act also see not him, but a fig-
ment of their imagination – the stereotyped ‘darky’. Yet, whilst Williams
believes that wiping away his make-up will enable him to become Egbert
Austin Williams again, arguably each performance distances him from his
real self or, indeed, illustrates that, without his performance of race, there
is no real self. By the end of the novel, as his health is fading, he looks into
a mirror and Lottie describes his reaction: ‘I watch as he is shaken into
panic by the puzzled face in the glass. . . . I know that once the mirror is
in his hands my husband is no longer with me. I know that my husband
will spend the whole day staring into the mirror’ (DD, 207). This passage,
with Williams’s inability to recognise himself, and fascination with the
face in the mirror, suggests a truly frightening loss of identity. If identity is
performative, when those performances end it seems there is a danger that
the individual may be left without any coherent sense of self.
The disintegration of Williams’s identity is echoed in the book’s frag-
mented form. As Walker becomes ill, and Williams’s sense of self less and
less stable, Phillips inserts more of this non-fictional material and con-
structs a rapid succession of narrative voices, suggesting a dislocating and
precarious sense of self as the protagonists find their identities coming
undone. In just two pages, for example, the narrative moves between the
voices of Walker, Williams, Lottie, an excerpt from an article from March
1910 published in The New York Age and a third-person narrator.50 The
reader is expected not so much to straightforwardly piece together these
narratives into a whole, but rather to recognise that there is no ‘true’ nar-
rative regarding Williams: he is both traitor and advancer of the ‘Negro
race’; fool and genius.
In conclusion, Dancing in the Dark explores the construction of
racial identities and the correlation between race and national iden-
tity. It recalls Phillips’s comments about his own childhood: ‘If only
they could somehow colour me English – in other words, white –
then nobody would know the difference.’51 This fascination with the
malleability of race and the coalition of race and national identity is
evident in Dancing in the Dark, where a distinction is made between
being American (meaning white) and a ‘Negro’. Whilst Williams’s per-
formances, particularly as a Caribbean ‘outsider’, do not challenge this
conflation, his application of blackface may have gone some way to
loosening the connections between skin colour and identity, where to
wear black make-up was, in fact, to masquerade as a white performer.
At the same time, his performance is temporary; ultimately, people will
still ‘know the difference’, to recall Bhabha’s words, he will always be
‘almost the same but not white’.52
Of course, whilst it is possible to read subversion in his acts, his per-
formances also perpetuated the ‘stock’ character of ‘the Negro’, and so still
undermined African-American identifications, leading to claims from his
contemporaries that ‘the nigger makes us all look bad’ (DD, 137). This
issue of representation has perhaps surprising relevance today; Phillips
has revealed that his interest in Williams coincided with a fascination
with ‘how hip-hop performers in particular were presenting themselves
(and being presented) to the wider American audience. There seemed to
be an aspect of performative minstrelsy to some of their work.’53 Just as
Williams is accused of making all African-Americans ‘look bad’, Phillips
has commented about hip-hop artists: ‘At what point do you tell an indi-
vidual, “you are letting the side down”?’54 Dancing in the Dark therefore
raises questions pertinent today regarding black performers, as Williams
contemplates: ‘Is the colored American performer to be nothing more
than an exuberant, childish fool named Aunt Jemima, Uncle Rufus, or
simply Plantation Darky, who must be neither unique nor individual?
Can the colored American ever be free to entertain beyond the evi-
dence of his dark skin?’ (DD, 100). Published more than 90 years after
Williams’s death, Phillips’s novel still ponders these questions, and testi-
fies to the existence of older versions of black representation repackaged
in new forms. As Strausbaugh has argued, the study of minstrelsy reveals
that ‘old modes of expression and representation that were driven under-
ground, suppressed or banned by well-intentioned and right-thinking
social engineers refuse to die, unless the social conditions and the functions
they served in the culture disappear with them.’55 Until racism and the other
pervading inequalities of American society disappear, it seems there will
always be black artists struggling with these ‘old modes of expression and
representation’, and with the associated problems of exaggerated per-
formances of racial identity – caught, even in the twenty-first century,
behind the minstrel mask.56
Notes
1 Caryl Phillips, ‘Colour Me English’, Colour Me English: Selected Essays
(London: Harvill Secker, 2011), 3–17 [3; 11].
2 There is some disagreement among historians about whether Williams was
born in 1873 or 1874.
3 See Abigail Ward, ‘“Looking across the Atlantic” in Caryl Phillips’s In the
Falling Snow’, Journal of Postcolonial Writing 47/3 (2011), 296–308.
4 Caryl Phillips, Dancing in the Dark (2005; London: Vintage, 2006), 41.
Hereafter referred to in the text as DD.
5 See Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann
(1952; London: Pluto Press, 1986); Paul Gilroy, Small Acts: Thoughts on the
Politics of Black Cultures (1993; London and New York: Serpent’s Tail,
2005), 20.
6 Paul Laurence Dunbar, The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar (New
York: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1913), 71. Dunbar later wrote material for
Williams and Walker.
7 Suggesting perhaps what Homi K. Bhabha refers to in The Location of Culture
as ‘sly civility’ (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 93–101.
8 For a useful essay exploring poststructuralism and the postcolonial see Stephen
Morton, ‘Poststructuralist Formulations’ in John McLeod (ed.), The Routledge
Companion to Postcolonial Studies (London and New York: Routledge, 2007),
161–72.
9 Kimberly Chabot Davis, ‘“Postmodern Blackness”: Toni Morrison’s Beloved
and the End of History’, Twentieth Century Literature 44/2 (1998), 242–60
[244]. Ana Monteiro-Ferreira makes a similar point about the usefulness of
postmodernism to approaches to African-American works in ‘Afrocentricity
and the Western Paradigm’, Journal of Black Studies 40/2 (2009), 327–36
[332].
10 Linda Hutcheon,‘“Circling the Downspout of Empire”: Post-Colonialism
and Postmodernism’, ARIEL 20/4 (1989), 149–75 [150].
11 Kobena Mercer, Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies
(New York and London: Routledge, 1994), 21.
12 Michael Krasny, ‘Caryl Phillips’ in Renée T. Schatteman (ed.), Conversations
with Caryl Phillips (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009), 151–9
[154].
13 Although there were few ‘famous’ black artists during Williams’s lifetime, by
the time of his death in 1922, the Harlem Renaissance had begun; as Langston
Hughes recalled, ‘The 1920’s were the years of Manhattan’s black Renaissance’
(The Collected Works of Langston Hughes, vol. 13, Autobiography: The Big Sea
[Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002], 175).
14 Caryl Phillips, Crossing the River (1993; New York: Vintage, 1995).
15 Michael Rogin, Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood
Melting Pot (Berkley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press,
1996), 19. Dale Cockrell adds that, initially, blackface wasn’t necessarily racial:
nineteenth-century ‘[b]elsnickels, callithumpians, mummers, and morris
dancers were manifestly not trying to represent persons of African heritage.
To black up was a way of assuming “the Other”’. Demons of Disorder: Early
Blackface Minstrels and Their World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1997), 53.
16 Cited in Eric Lott, ‘Blackface and Blackness: The Minstrel Show in America’
in Annemarie Bean, James V. Hatch and Brooks McNamara (eds.), Inside
the Minstrel Mask: Readings in Nineteenth-Century Blackface Minstrelsy
(Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1996), 3–32 [3].
17 Robert Nowatzki, Representing African Americans in Transatlantic Abolitionism
and Blackface Minstrelsy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010),
7. For an exploration of the relationship between the exhibition of black bod-
ies and blackness in minstrelsy and abolition, see Paul Gilmore, The Genuine
Article: Race, Mass Culture, and American Literary Manhood (Durham: Duke
18 Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff, Ragged but Right: Black Traveling Shows, ‘Coon
Songs,’ and the Dark Pathway to Blues and Jazz (Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi, 2007), 7.
19 W. Fitzhugh Brundage, ‘Working in the “Kingdom of Culture”: African
Americans and American Popular Culture, 1890–1930’ in W. Fitzhugh
Brundage (ed.), Beyond Blackface: African Americans and the Creation of
American Popular Culture, 1890–1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 2011), 1–42 [20].
20 Karen Sotiropoulos, Staging Race: Black Performers in Turn of the Century
America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 3.
21 See, for example, Allen Woll, Black Musical Theatre: From Coontown to
Dreamgirls (New York: Da Capo, 1989), 2; Rogin, Blackface, White Noise,
43; and Brenda Dixon Gottschild, Waltzing in the Dark: African American
Vaudeville and Race Politics in the Swing Era (2000; New York and Houndmills,
Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), 8.
22 The original was from George W. Walker, ‘The Real “Coon” on the American
Stage’, Theatre Magazine 6 (August 1906), 224–6. See also Ann Charters,
Nobody: The Story of Bert Williams (New York: Da Capo, 1983), 14.
23 Paul Gilroy, After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? (Abingdon:
24 Stuart Hall, ‘Cultural Identity and Diaspora’ in Patrick Williams and Laura
Chrisman (eds.), Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader
(Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993), 392–403 [392]. Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak also writes that ‘the “self ” is itself always production’.
‘Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography’ in Ranajit Guha and
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (eds.), Selected Subaltern Studies (New York and
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 2–32 [22].
25 See DD, 43.
26 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990;
New York, Routledge, 2007), xxxi.
27 Hazel Carby, ‘White Women Listen! Black Feminism and the Boundaries
of Sisterhood’ in James Proctor (ed.), Writing Black Britain 1948–1998
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 177–84. As Carby argues,
such parallels often render the black woman invisible.
28 Butler, Gender Trouble, xxxi.
29 Gilmore, The Genuine Article, 49.
30 Butler, Gender Trouble, 9.
31 Although Phillips does not dwell on this fact, both in real life and in Dancing
in the Dark, George’s wife Ada/Aida substituted for her husband onstage
when he became too unwell to perform, suggesting a further level of perfor-
mativity. See Woll, Black Musical Theatre, 48 and Arnold Shaw, Black Popular
Music in America: From the Spirituals, Minstrels, and Ragtime to Soul, Disco
and Hip-Hop (New York: Schirmer Books, 1986), 71.
32 I would suggest this may explain the seemingly cryptic comment made by
the composer C. F. Zittel on Williams’s death, that ‘Bert Williams was a black
white man’. Cited in Mabel Rowland (ed.), Bert Williams: Son of Laughter
(1923; New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969), 213.
33 See Lori Harrison-Kahan, The White Negress: Literature, Minstrelsy, and the
Black-Jewish Imaginary (Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001), 20;
Marvin McAllister, Whiting Up: Whiteface Minstrels and Stage Europeans in
African American Performance (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 2011), 80; and Brundage, ‘Kingdom of Culture’, 29.
34 Woll, Black Musical Theatre, 38.
35 Rowland, Bert Williams, 94.
36 Nicholas Laughlin, ‘Black as He’s Painted’, Caribbean Beat 78 (2006), http://
www.caribbean-beat.com/issue-78/bookshelf-march-april-2006 (22 October
2013). Max Davidson makes a similar comment in his review; see ‘Black
Humour’, Sunday Telegraph, 25 September 2005, 15.
37 Sotiropoulos, Staging Race, 99.
38 Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act (1953; New York: Vintage International,
1995), 55.
39 Homi Bhabha, ‘Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial
Discourse’, October 28 (1984), 125–33 (126).
40 Bhabha, ‘Of Mimicry’, 130.
41 ‘Of Mimicry’, 127.
42 ‘Of Mimicry’, 127.
43 W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr,
and Terri Hume Oliver (1903; New York and London: W. W. Norton & Co.,
1999), 11.
44 Robert M. Lewis (ed.), From Traveling Show to Vaudeville: Theatrical Spectacle
in America, 1830–1910 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press,
2003), 106.
45 In fact, Camille F. Forbes argues that, ‘By the end of his life, Frederick
Williams [Bert’s father] would become one of his son’s greatest supporters’.
Introducing Bert Williams: Burnt Cork, Broadway, and the Story of America’s
First Black Star (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2008), 7.
46 Eric J. Sundquist, To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American
Literature (London and Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University
Press, 1993), 285. See also Woll, Black Musical Theatre, 8; and Forbes,
Introducing Bert Williams, 77.
47 For Louis Chude-Sokei, Williams’s onstage mastering of a stylised African-
American dialect ‘was proof of his new identity as an American – an identity
so well performed that it could be taken for authenticity’. The Last “Darky”:
Bert Williams, Black-on-Black Minstrelsy, and the African Diaspora (Durham
and London: Duke University Press, 2006), 102.
48 For an exploration of the concept of erasure in this novel, see Dave Gunning,
‘Concentric and Centripetal Narratives of Race: Caryl Phillips’s Dancing in
the Dark and Percival Everett’s Erasure’ in Bénédicte Ledent and Daria Tunca
(eds.), Caryl Phillips: Writing in the Key of Life (Amsterdam and New York:
Rodopi, 2012), 359–74.
49 Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952; London: Penguin, 1965), 7.
50 See DD, 162–3.
51 Phillips, ‘Colour Me English’, 11.
52 Bhabha, ‘Of Mimicry’, 130.
53 Caryl Phillips, cited in Elvira Pulitano, ‘Migrant Journeys: A Conversation
with Caryl Phillips’, Atlantic Studies 6/3 (2009), 371–87 (372). For more on
the links between minstrelsy and contemporary black performers, includ-
ing rap and hip-hop artists, see John Strausbaugh, Black Like You: Blackface,
Whiteface, Insult and Imitation in American Popular Culture (New York:
Penguin, 2007) and W. T. Lhamon Jr, Raising Cain: Blackface Performance
from Jim Crow to Hip Hop (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University
Press, 1998).
54 John McLeod, ‘Dancing in the Dark: Caryl Phillips in Conversation with
John McLeod, Leeds 2005’, Moving Worlds 7/1 (2007), 103–14 [105].
55 Strausbaugh, Black Like You, 317.
56 The African-American comedian Dave Chappelle is a good example of an
entertainer still struggling with these legacies, after his much publicised exit
from comedy in 2005. In Joshua Jelly-Shapiro’s words, Chappelle ‘went into
self-imposed hiatus reportedly out of concern that his comedy was reinforcing
harmful notions of blackness, rather than contesting them’. ‘A Comic Genius
Lost under His Blackface’, San Francisco Chronicle, 25 September 2005, www.
sfgate.com/books/article/A-comic-genius-lost-under-his-blackface-2606625.
php. Accessed 22 October 2013.
Ch apter 7
Appropriate Appropriation?
Ishmael Reed’s Neo-HooDoo and Flannery
O’Connor’s Artificial Negroes
John N. Duvall
The near critical consensus is that white appropriations of blackness are

problematic at best and probably indicative of a deeper failure on the
part of the appropriator. For Toni Morrison in her now iconic Playing in
the Dark, white writers, in a fashion similar to blackface minstrelsy, have
deployed black characters and images of blackness ‘in order to articulate
and imaginatively act out the forbidden in American culture’.1 Morrison’s
sense of the minstrel implications of white writers’ appropriation of black-
ness was subsequently developed in broader cultural contexts by such
critics as Eric Lott, Michael Rogin and Susan Gubar.2 If for Morrison
white attempts to depict blackness lead to aesthetic flaws, for Gubar, the
problems that attend the white appropriation of blackness are inevitably
ethical. Speaking of journalist John Howard Griffin’s Black Like Me (1961),
in which the white author darkens his skin in order to go undercover to
expose white racism, she concludes that ‘even the most high-minded, ide-
alistic motivations will not save white impersonators of blackness from
violating, appropriating, or compromising black subjectivity in a way that
will inevitably rebound against the ethical integrity of whites’.3
Against this dominant view comes a strong minority report from
E. Patrick Johnson. Using a performance studies approach to the issue
of the appropriation of blackness, he sees blackness not as an essence
but rather as always an enactment, no matter the race of the performer.
Johnson is fully aware of the dangers of stereotypes and ‘fetishization’ that
can accompany white appropriations of blackness, such as the linguistic
appropriation of white rappers. He is, however, willing to imagine (in
ways Morrison and Gubar are not) that ‘cross-cultural appropriation of
blackness’ need not result simply in ‘colonization and subjugation’ and
at times may actually ‘provide fertile ground on which to formulate new
epistemologies of self and Other’.4
113
114 John N. Duvall
This essay pairs two postwar American writers – Ishmael Reed and
Flannery O’Connor – who both open issues of racial appropriation and
postmodernism in complementary ways. Bringing these writers together,
however, may initially seem perverse. After all, the former is an avow-
edly political African-American writer who bases his aesthetic practice,
Neo-HooDoo, on Haitian Vodun, while the latter is a white Catholic
southern writer who eschewed politics (even as the emerging Civil Rights
Movement began challenging white privilege in her world). Yet despite
the danger of flattening the social and historical contexts out of which
these writers worked, taken together, their fiction tells us more about race
and cultural appropriation than either one’s work separately.
What makes linking these authors compelling is that both, in their
own ways, satirise whiteness and its relation to blackness. Reed overtly
thematises and critiques white appropriations of black textuality. In his
full frontal assault on white theft of black culture, then, Reed works to
support the dominant theoretical view of appropriation. O’Connor’s rela-
tionship to cultural blackness, however, is more complicated. Although
O’Connor is primarily interested in the anagogical moment, her theo-
logical intentions mask the ways in which the moment of grace is almost
always also a moment of race. Stated differently, the possibility of God’s
grace is racially coded, a moment in which the presumptively white
character discovers the contingency of that whiteness through the unin-
tentional performance of blackness. Her central characters, to modify
slightly the title of one her most famous stories, are ‘Artificial Negroes’,
characters who perform blackness in whiteface. As such, they are more in
line with Johnson’s performance theory perspective. I want to immedi-
ately say, though, that the white performance of blackness in O’Connor’s
fiction is not a representation of the lived experience of actual black peo-
ple. It is instead a white fantasy of blackness. What makes such fantasy
productive (and arguably disruptive) is that it is projected not on the
bodies of African Americans but rather on white bodies. The result is a
social misrecognition that disrupts a stable sense of whiteness. Ultimately,
I argue, O’Connor’s satire of race is more deconstructive of white racial
identity than that of the supposed deconstructionist Reed. In making
this claim, I in no way mean to diminish Reed’s place in the canon of
African-American literature (which is secure) or to cast O’Connor as
some heroic race traitor (she clearly was not). My comparison of these
two writers is meant simply to underscore the fraught nature of cross-
cultural borrowing as a narrative strategy.
Appropriate Appropriation? 115
Flight to Canada, Literary Theft, and Reed’s Aesthetics

It has been a truism of Reed criticism since Henry Louis Gates Jr’s The
Signifying Monkey that the novelist’s Neo-HooDoo aesthetic is akin to
deconstruction.5 But Reed does not actually undo binary oppositions (i.e.,
white appropriator/black appropriated); he merely inverts their polarity
through satire, leaving the crime of appropriation intact. For Reed, a black
writer’s satiric appropriation of white writing and culture is always an
appropriate rhetorical move. That is because Reed sees the white appropri-
ation of black textuality as the instantiating moment of Western culture.
In his most famous novel, Mumbo Jumbo (1972), Reed essentially articu-
lates a version of Martin Bernal’s Black Athena before the letter, arguing
that, since human culture originated in Africa, all of culture onward, from
the Hebrew bible and the ancient Greeks, is an inappropriate appropria-
tion of Africa inasmuch as it not only fails to acknowledge Africa as the
origin of all culture but also relegates Africa to pre-civilised savagery.6
In his 1976 neo-slave novel, Flight to Canada, Reed playfully blurs the
boundary between 1864–1865 and 1976 by imagining the events constitut-
ing the endgame of the Civil War as occurring with television, jet airliners,
and tricked out cars with vinyl roofs. Flight to Canada moves from Mumbo
Jumbo’s mythic version of the white appropriation of black culture to a
specific literary historical case – Stowe’s appropriation of Josiah Henson’s
slave narrative in creating her character Uncle Tom. Although Stowe
acknowledges her debt to Henson in her Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Reed’s
author figure, Raven Quickskill, identifies Stowe’s action as criminal:
A man’s story is his gris-gris, you know. Taking his story is like taking his
gris-gris. The thing that is himself. It’s like robbing a man of his Etheric
Double. People pine away. [. . .] Human hosts walk the streets of the cities,
their eyes hollow, the spirit gone out of them. Somebody has taken their
story.7
Essentially, Stowe is identified as a bokar, an evil practitioner of Vodun. She

has turned Henson into her zombie by her theft of his story. But for her
act of appropriation, ‘Harriet paid. Oh yes, Harriet paid. When you take
a man’s story, a story that doesn’t belong to you, that story will get you’;
the way Stowe paid was through the Haitian loa Guede that ‘got people to
write parodies and minstrel shows about’ her. But Stowe’s payment goes
beyond being pilloried by satire. Raven speculates (in direct contradiction
to his claim that she turned Henson into a zombie by stealing his story)
116 John N. Duvall
that Henson retained agency and was himself a HooDoo man who made
Lord Byron’s ‘ghost rise out of his undead burial place of Romance and
strangle Harriet’s reputation’ as revenge for Stowe’s published claims that
Byron had committed incest with his half sister.8 Raven also takes ser-
iously Stowe’s claim that God wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
As Glenda R. Carpio has noted, Raven’s final thought about Stowe’s
disavowal of her authorship is a clue that explains the shift occurring in
the next sentence as the text stops being italicised and shifts from Raven’s
first-person musings about white literary appropriation to a third-person
account of his journey to Canada in order to escape his evil master, Arthur
Swille.9 Before leaving Swille’s plantation, Raven has been asked by Uncle
Robin, Swille’s trusted valet, to write Robin’s story. Like Stowe led by
God, Raven himself has become possessed by Guede to continue the sat-
ire of Stowe. Despite the marginal status of Stowe’s work occupied prior
to the feminist reclamation of her reputation, Reed clearly feels as though
Stowe had not suffered enough for her crime of appropriation and writes
a new story of Uncle Tom/Uncle Robin worthy of Josiah Henson. Stowe,
however, is hardly the only white literary figure appropriated and satirised
in the rest of the novel.10
Raven opposes Edgar Allen Poe to Stowe in his introductory remarks. If
Stowe is the inappropriate appropriator, Poe – Raven believes – should be
‘recognized as the principal biographer’ of the Civil War because Poe was
the ‘prophet of a civilization buried alive’ and therefore ‘got it all down.
Poe says more in a few stories than [do] all of the volumes by historians.’11
But although Raven speaks a ‘nevermore’ to slavery, Reed satirically appro-
priates Poe’s work every bit as much as Stowe’s in the body of the novel,
most particularly the climactic moment when Raven’s master, Swille, dies.
The evil master falls into the fireplace when he believes his sister, with
whom he has had an incestuous necrophiliac relation, has come back to
claim him, a moment that clearly draws on the climactic moment of Poe’s
‘Fall of the House of Usher’.
Ostensibly against the act of appropriation, Flight to Canada announces
its focus on black authorship by beginning with the eponymous poem
that creates Raven’s rise to literary fame. ‘Flight to Canada’ tells of Raven’s
escape to Canada on a jetliner and his return to Swille’s mansion to create
havoc and poison his former master. This poem, in its prepublication cir-
culation among the literati, makes Raven’s reputation and creates oppor-
tunities for him on the lecture circuit.
But if Raven’s first poem speaks a ‘nevermore’ to the white appropria-
tion of black labor, his second poem, ‘The Saga of a Third World Belle’,
shows Raven to be oblivious to his appropriation, not just of another
man’s story (crime enough in Reed’s novel), but that of another culture’s
story through his critical portrait of his love interest, the Native American
Princess Quaw Quaw Tralaralara.12 Throughout the novel, Raven criticises
Quaw Quaw for being a sellout. He finds her to be immature and unable
to recognise the ways in which she has turned her back on her native
culture for the material advantages of living among whites. The physical
descriptions of Quaw Quaw are highly sexualised, and despite his distaste
for her apolitical stance, he is as sexually infatuated with her, as she is
with him.
Part of ‘The Saga of the Third World Belle’ serves as Raven’s declaration
of his sexual desire for Quaw Quaw, which casts him as the predator and
her as his prey: ‘I’m on a fox hunt for you baby / Got my black cap and
red coat on’, but the poem’s real purpose is to inform Quaw Quaw that
she has been naïve in marrying the white pirate, Yankee Jack, a man who
. . . uses
Your Dad’s great-chief ’s skull
As an ashtray
And sold your Mom’s hand-knitted
Robes to Buffalo Bill’s
Wild West Show
He buried your brother alive

In a sealed-off section of the
Metropolitan Museum13
In describing how Yankee Jack has killed Quaw Quaw’s family (and one
should note that the description of the death of Quaw Quaw’s brother
alludes to another Poe story, ‘The Cask of Amontillado’), the poem
allows Raven to explain to his lover what she has failed to see for herself –
the genocide of Native Americans. Raven’s poem enacts Gayatri Spivak’s
famous declaration with a twist – one sees a black man saving a brown
woman from a white man.14 Although blissfully unaware of his theft,
Raven is guilty of appropriating the oppression of Native Americans for
his own artistic reputation and to steal Quaw Quaw from Yankee Jack.
There is another heretofore unrecognised moment where Reed engages
in intertextual appropriation that once again illustrates that his aesthetic
has less to do with deconstruction than with repeating the very theft that
he finds at the heart of white writing. In chapter 25, Yankee Jack tells
Raven that he should not return to Buffalo since Swille’s men are there
waiting to return Raven to slavery. Yankee Jack offers his boat to take
118 John N. Duvall
Raven over to Canada. On the verge of reaching Canada, the chapter ends
with italicised text set off with quotation marks but no source:
While they were on my vessel I felt little interest in them, and had no
idea that the love of liberty as a part of man’s nature was in the least pos-
sible degree felt or understood by them. Before entering Buffalo harbor,
I ran in near the Canada shore, manned a boat and landed them on the
beach . . . They said ‘Is this Canada?’ I said, ‘Yes, there are no slaves in this
country’; then I witnessed a scene I shall never forget. They seemed to be
transformed; a new light shone in their eyes, their tongues were loosed,
they laughed and cried, prayed and sang praises, fell upon the ground and
kissed it, hugged and kissed each other, crying ‘Bress de Lord’ Oh! I’se free
before I die!’15
Reed here appropriates text from Wilbur H. Siebert’s 1898 study The
Underground Railroad: From Slavery to Freedom.16 In the passage that
Reed directly quotes, Siebert, who was a history professor at Ohio State
University, tells the story of a conversion moment of a Captain Chapman,
who had been asked by two acquaintances to help a group of runaway
slaves. Siebert cites Elber M. Petit’s 1879 book Sketches in the History of the
Underground Railroad as the source of Chapman’s story. Reed, however,
clearly has taken the text from Siebert: Chapman’s story is longer in Petit’s
book and Reed’s text matches Siebert’s, even to the placement of ellipses
between the third and fourth sentences. In addition to being the source
for this previously unknown quotation in Reed’s novel, Siebert’s book
appears to have suggested the title Flight to Canada to Reed. The table of
contents of The Underground Railroad announces the second subheading
for chapter 7 as ‘Flight of Slaves to Canada’.
If Reed directly borrows from Siebert’s book, then he does to Chapman
what Flight to Canada has identified as thoroughly criminal. Reed has sto-
len another man’s story, a story in which a white man comes to recognise
what he always previously missed – the humanity of African Americans.
In fact, one might say that Reed’s act of appropriation is more ethically
compromised than Stowe’s, since Stowe admits that she borrowed from
Henson. Reed, however, makes no mention of the source of his appro-
priation, and given the framing of his novel, which announces its inten-
tion to satirise Stowe, a reader could be forgiven if he or she assumed the
nineteenth-century sounding text quoted without attribution came from
Uncle Tom’s Cabin. There is much that could be satirised in this telling of
Chapman’s story. Why, for example, does the narrator not use a minstrel
dialect to represent the first instance of black speech (‘Is this Canada?’
would have been ‘Is dis Canada?’) but then does so for all subsequent black
speech? However, since Reed does none of this contextualising or trans-
formative work, the ending of this chapter of Flight to Canada becomes
an instance of Fredric Jameson’s pastiche, a parody ‘amputated of its satiric
impulse,’ inasmuch as the object of Reed’s critique becomes almost impos-
sible to discern – who or what is being parodied or satirised?17
If appropriation is as ethically compromised as Raven argues, one might
expect Reed to posit an alternative to appropriation, but he does not.
For all its investment in the syncretic religion of Vodun, as opposed to
Western monotheism, Reed’s Neo-HooDoo can only repeat (and indeed
seems founded on) the crime of appropriation. Given his aesthetic, all
Reed can do is produce a series of revenge narratives that might all be
titled Ishmael, Unchained.
The Whiteface Minstrelsy of ‘The Comforts of Home’

Despite her implication in the racism of white southerners of the 1950s,
O’Connor’s aesthetic relation to appropriation is, oddly enough, less
compromised than Reed’s. O’Connor does not simply appropriate black-
ness; rather, she shows her characters, willy-nilly, being appropriated by
blackness. In other words, Reed represents whites appropriating black-
ness, while O’Connor shows us whites who experience an appropriating
blackness. As such, her characters are less whites in blackface than they are
blacks in whiteface, a figurative strategy that allows O’Connor’s fiction to
stage a more complex challenge to white essentialism than Reed’s more
overtly political fiction.
For white southerners in O’Connor’s fictional world, whiteness is not
a given but must be properly performed on a daily basis. To fail to do so
is to risk falling into the abject status of ‘white trash’. One of O’Connor’s
characters that maps social distinctions of race and class is Mrs Turpin in
‘Revelation’. Apparently confident in her whiteness, she spends her time
in a doctor’s waiting room dividing the other people there into white and
white trash by such clues as the kind of shoes they wear. Tellingly, at one
point she thinks about the choice she would make if Jesus were to make
her decide whether to ‘either be a nigger or white trash’; she decides she
would ask Jesus to make her ‘a neat clean respectable Negro woman, her-
self but black’.18 While Mrs Turpin is careful (right down to her shoes) to
correctly perform her whiteness, her obsession with identifying herself as
white actually marks the social contingency of whiteness.
Robyn Wiegman has objected to the critical whiteness work of such
scholars as David Roediger and George Lipsitz on the grounds that they
120 John N. Duvall
use ‘class as the transfer point between looking white and “being” white,
which relies solely on notions of economic interest to figure the psychic
implications of the white “wage”’.19 In O’Connor’s fiction, however,
despite the threat to white identity posed by the notion of ‘white trash’,
anxiety regarding the proper performance of white identity is not limited
to characters with marginal economic status. Instead, psychic investments
in whiteness for O’Connor’s characters extend to the fundamental status
of their souls; to be less than white is to be less than certain of salvation.
As a result of the multiple psychic investments in whiteness, there is
something uncanny about O’Connor’s whiteface minstrels that causes
social misrecognitions. They are racially white but they do not perform
their presumptive whiteness. If these characters were racially black, their
enactments of self would be part of the white southerners’ racialised
understanding of their community. The whiteface minstrel, then, is fun-
damentally subversive because this figure unhinges cultural blackness from
the southern construct of ‘the Negro’. For my primary example, I turn
to ‘The Comforts of Home’, a story that plays along the colour line in
the total absence of any racially black characters. All of the characters are
white – 35-year-old Thomas (still living at home), his mother and the way-
ward teenage girl whom Thomas’s mother attempts to save by bringing
the girl into their home. The plot turns on Thomas’s horribly failed plan
to remove this girl from his comfortable home.
I focus initially on the whiteface performance of the girl whom Thomas
loathes. Although not the narrator, Thomas serves (until the very end) as
the story’s point of view and in the second sentence, the girl is introduced
as ‘the little slut’.20 By the story’s second page, the performative element
of her character is marked by a particular piece of physical delineation –
her ‘face was like a comedienne’s in a musical comedy – a pointed chin,
wide apple cheeks and feline empty eyes’. In passing we might note that as
a genre, musical comedy derives from vaudeville, burlesque, pantomime,
and minstrelsy. In the minstrelsy of the girl known as Star Drake but whose
real name is Sarah Ham, everything about the way she is delineated, except
for her apple-cheeked whiteness, suggests cultural blackness: she is quick
to laughter; she’s often drunk; she is promiscuous (a ‘nimpermaniac’, as
Thomas’s mother calls her); she is, in Thomas’s judgment, ‘a congenital
liar’, and when she wakes ‘in the morning, her voice throbbed out in a
blues song that would rise and waver, then plunge low with insinuations
of passion about to be satisfied’ (CH, 384, 388, 395).
Racially white, she has no claim to southern whiteness because, as
Thomas asserts, she is ‘born without the moral faculty’ (CH, 385). If Star/
Sarah were racially black, she would be the stereotyped embodiment of the
Negro. Think here of McCaslin Edmonds’s response to Ike McCalsin in
part 4 of William Faulkner’s ‘The Bear’ when Ike is explaining the positive
qualities of African Americans that ensure that they will endure. Edmonds
breaks in to give an alternative, stereotyped list of the defining features of
the southern concept of the ‘Negro’ – ‘Promiscuity. Violence. Instability
and lack of control. Inability to distinguish between mine and thine.’21
Edmonds’s description fits Sarah Ham exactly.
The girl’s name is another clue to her enactment of cultural black-
ness. Just as her racial whiteness masks cultural blackness, her assumed
name serves as a screen that deflects attention from the implication of her
given name: Sarah suffers from the curse of Ham, that oft used antebel-
lum southern justification for the enslavement of African Americans. In
Genesis, Noah damns Ham’s son Canaan because Ham ‘saw the nakedness
of his father’, Noah. This moment of Ham’s seeing his father’s nakedness
has been interpreted as either Ham’s sodomizing or castrating his father.
Ham’s immorality thus is the reason Noah damns the children of Ham to
be the ‘servants of servants’.
‘The Comforts of Home’ ultimately undoes the presumption of white-
ness by showing that Thomas’s confidence that he was born with a moral
faculty (and so can identify those who lack one) is simply untenable.
One term of social difference that is strikingly absent in this story would
certainly seem applicable to Sarah’s subject position. That term is ‘white
trash’, a designation that O’Connor’s characters are certainly comfortable
using in so many of her stories. Any number of O’Connor’s rural charac-
ters reveal a deep anxiety about their whiteness and use the otherness of
the poor white to confirm their racial identities so that the otherness of
class becomes completely imbricated with the otherness of race. In ‘The
Displaced Person’, for example, although she and her husband are hired
labor, Mrs. Shortley is confident that she is white and not ‘white trash’.
However, after learning that she and her husband (rather than the black
hired help) have been let go, Mrs. Shortley suffers a fatal stroke and dies.
In her death throes, her face turns a volcanic red; quite literally at the
moment of her loss of whiteness, she becomes a coloured person! In sum,
the poor white functions in exactly the same way that African-American
characters do in Toni Morrison’s sense of the racial other being used to
confirm white identity.
Although Sarah’s race is never mentioned in ‘The Comforts of Home’,
the reader would know she is racially white even with the detail about her
‘apple cheeks’. If Sarah were black, the mother would never have tried to
122 John N. Duvall
rehabilitate the girl. Ironically, the marker of the mother’s class status, the
fact that she’s so confident of her identity as a white southern lady that
she has no need to identify someone else as white trash, simultaneously
retraces the colour line: her charity effectively says that the poor white is
salvageable; African Americans are not. In other words, whites, no matter
how degraded, have the possibility of developing a moral consciousness;
blacks do not. In this fashion, the abject Sarah is still filling the role of the
serviceable other, is still being used by Thomas’s mother to confirm her
southern whiteness.
The mother’s ultimate justification, however, for bringing Sarah into
her home is a maternal concern for Thomas. Whenever he presses her
regarding her charity towards Sarah, his mother responds, ‘Suppose it were
you?’ (CH, 385). But in the logic of the narrative, if Sarah, as a congenital
liar, embodies cultural blackness, that is precisely what Thomas is moving
towards; he undergoes a process of becoming culturally black. Indeed, the
story suggests that such blackness may be part of his biological condition,
one that the mother seeks to keep hidden. After one instance in which the
mother says that her kindness to Sarah is motivated by a concern for how
Thomas would be treated if he were as pitiable as the girl, the mother goes
on to point out that her boy has: ‘morals [. . . and] bad inclinations, noth-
ing you were born with’. Thomas points out that his father ‘would have
put his foot down’: ‘The old lady stiffened, “You,” she said “are not like
him”’ (CH, 393). Her assertion suggests that she is subliminally aware that
she has given birth to a moral mulatto, if you will. Her secret is that she
has had intercourse with cultural blackness in the form of Thomas’s father,
whose identity is a fraud. The reason she embraces Sarah, then, bespeaks
the mother’s secret guilt at having given birth to a mixed son, who might
find himself in Sarah’s outcast position (and who does indeed find himself
‘othered’ by the story’s conclusion).
Although not suffering from the curse of Ham, Thomas does seem
cursed by his father. Thomas has internalized the voice of his dead father
and that voice constantly criticises Thomas for his inadequate perform-
ance of white southern masculinity, particularly for allowing himself to
be bested by a girl. And yet the southern identity of the father, who had
been a respected lawyer in the community, had itself been a performance,
a kind of whiteface minstrelsy in its own right. Thomas reveals this when
he retreats to the study, where he senses that:
his father took up a squatting position in his mind. The old man had
had the countryman’s ability to converse squatting, though he was no
countryman but had been born and brought up in the city and only moved
to a smaller place later to exploit his talents. With steady skill he had made
them think him one of them. In the midst of conversation on the court-
house lawn, he would squat and his two or three companions would squat
with him with no break in the surface of the talk. By gesture he had lived
his lie; he had never deigned to tell one. (CH, 393)
And of course Thomas’s father never needs to tell a lie because his entire
identity is built on a fundamental misrepresentation of who he is. Stated
differently, Thomas’s father has been passing – pretending to be what he’s
not so that he’ll be accepted, indeed respected, in the white southern rural
community.
As the story moves towards its climax, the voice of the father becomes
increasingly insistent in Thomas’s mind. After Sarah fakes a suicide
attempt, the mother urges Thomas to lock up this father’s handgun, which
he keeps in his desk. To the mother’s concern that Sarah might truly do
away with herself, Thomas responds again in a racially coded when he
says ‘Don’t you know that her kind never kill themselves?’(CH, 397). This
assertion resonates with the racist belief that happy-go-lucky Negroes don’t
commit suicide because they lack the psychological depth ever to fully feel
the human emotion of despair that would lead to suicide. Nevertheless,
when the gun disappears shortly thereafter, Thomas finally gives into his
father’s voice and goes to see Sheriff Farebrother, whom he invites to come
to the house that evening to search Sarah’s room. Having returned to his
study, Thomas discovers just a few minutes before Farebrother is to arrive
that Sarah has replaced the pistol in his desk. Heeding his father’s instruc-
tions again, Thomas places the gun in Sarah’s purse but the girl catches
him doing so.
Almost in an attempt to stop the narrative’s climactic moment,
Thomas’s mother claims that he could not have put his pistol in Sarah’s
purse. While it is possible to indulge in psychoanalytic speculation about
the symbolic value of the pistol and the purse, for my purposes, the
moment is important as an instance in which class identifications mask
a claim about racial identity. The reason the mother backs up her son is
simple: ‘Thomas wouldn’t put a gun in your bag . . . Thomas is a gentle-
man.’ The mother’s affirmation of Thomas’s identity attests to her belief in
his congenital honesty, what she takes to be his essential nature. If racial
ideology says that blacks are congenital liars, the mother effectively says
that Thomas wouldn’t act in a devious fashion because her son is white.
The girl tells the mother to come look in the purse, but again obeying the
internalized father voice, Thomas says: ‘I found it in her bag. . . . The dirty
124 John N. Duvall
criminal slut stole my gun’ (CH, 403). In the climactic moment, Thomas’s
falsehood gives the lie both to his mother’s claim and to his own belief in
his innate honesty, which is the ground of his whiteness.
The mother recognises her dead husband’s voice in her son’s lie and
knows that what she has secretly feared has erupted into the Real – her
son’s mixed nature has manifested itself, which is why she throws herself
between Thomas and Sarah. Thomas grabs the gun and, still obeying the
father-voice, fires with the intention of killing the girl. Instead, Thomas
kills his mother.
When he fires the gun, Thomas is stripped both of his control of the
story’s point of view and his whiteness. He ceases being a moralising sub-
ject and becomes a stereotyped object. Whiteness depends on the ability to
define and name the difference of the other. Suddenly, Sheriff Farebrother
becomes our angle of vision in the last two paragraphs. From Farebrother’s
perspective, Thomas is merely a placeholder in a narrative that could serve
as the basis for the lyrics to one of the blues songs that Sarah sings each
morning:
[The sheriff] saw the facts as if they were already in print: the fellow had
intended all along to kill his mother and pin it on the girl. As he scruti-
nized the scene, further insights were flashed to him. Over the body, the
killer and the slut were about to collapse into each other’s arms. The sheriff
knew a nasty bit when he saw it. (CH, 404)
Thomas’s demotion from white southern gentleman to amoral Caucasian
with a blackened interiority creates a certain logic to the shift in the angle
of vision from him to his ‘fair brother’, if you will. The text has previously
marked Farebrother as the truer ideological heir, a younger ‘edition of
Thomas’s father’ who ‘had truly admired the old man’ (CE, 395). Stripped
of agency, Thomas is reduced to an object, ‘the killer’, driven by his lust
for ‘the slut’, and we should note that Sheriff Farebrother uses the same
word, ‘slut’, to describe Sarah that Thomas had when he served as the
white arbiter of morality at the story’s beginning.
Speaking of ‘The Comforts of Home’, O’Connor tells John Hawks
‘nobody is “redeemed”’ but goes on to say ‘if there is any question of sym-
bolic redemption, it would be through the old lady who brings Thomas
face-to-face with his own evil’.22 I would recast this slightly to say that
what the mother brings Thomas face-to-face with is the contingency of his
whiteness. In becoming an abject other to the white community, Thomas
now opens himself to the possibility of salvation. It is in this way that
‘The Comfort of Home’ again confirms a recurring theme in O’Connor’s
fiction: the matter of grace is always intimately tied to the matter of race,
even (or perhaps especially) when African-American characters are absent.
O’Connor’s fiction helps make whiteness visible as a race precisely through
a satiric minstrelsy of whiteness performed by her artificial Negroes.
Although Reed and O’Connor both use satire to challenge white privi-
lege, their different means of issuing their challenge (the actual objects
of their satire) may explain, in the end, why O’Connor’s work is more
deconstructive than is Reed’s. Reed repeatedly calls out whites for their
appropriation of black cultural products. He satirises white theft and rac-
ism. These are not O’Connor’s primary targets, and O’Connor is clearly
implicated in the racism of her time and place. However, because she is
not the racial other, O’Connor may more directly satirise whiteness by
focusing on her characters’ obsessions to claim whiteness and their fears
that they may fall short. O’Connor’s fiction reveals whiteness to be an
ideological mirage, a privilege that is radically contingent and a status that
may be withdrawn without warning. In other words, for all his satire of
white appropriation and his pillorying of white literary thieves (whether
Carl Van Vechten or Harriet Beecher Stowe), Reed never directly chal-
lenges the white-black cultural binary. But that binary is precisely what
O’Connor’s fiction troubles when she has her white characters perform
black stereotypes that they do not recognise as such because they cannot
see past their white skins. And in these performances, where racially white
people are shocked to discover that they are not white southerners, the
notion of racial essence becomes imperiled.
Notes
1 Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 66.
2 Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Michael Rogin, Blackface, White
Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1996).
3 Susan Gubar, Racechanges: White Skin, Black Faces in American Culture (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1997), 36.
4 E. Patrick Johnson, Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of
Authenticity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 6.
5 Henry Louis Gates Jr, The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American
Literary Criticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 218. See also
W. Lawrence Hogue, ‘Historiographic Metafiction and the Celebration of
Differences: Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo’ in John N. Duvall (ed.), Productive
Postmodernism: Consuming Histories and Cultural Studies (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 2002), 93.
6 See Bran Nichol’s chapter in this volume.
126 John N. Duvall
7 Ishmael Reed, Flight to Canada (1976; New York: Antheneum, 1989), 8.
8 Reed, Flight to Canada, 9–10.
9 Glenda R. Carpio, ‘Conjuring the Mysteries of Slavery: Voodoo, Fetishism,
and Stereotype in Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada’, American Literature, 77
(2005), 568.
10 For a discussion of Reed’s parody of David O. Selznick’s adaptation of
Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, notably the relationship between
Scarlett O’Hara as reimagined in Reed’s Mammy Barracuda’s domination of
Swille’s feminist wife, see Carpio, 571–5.
11 Flight to Canada, 10.
12 For a nuanced look at the ways in which Raven’s appropriation of Quaw
Quaw’s story is problematic, see Laura L. Mieke’s ‘“The Saga of the Third
World Belle”: Resurrecting the Ethnic Woman in Ishmael Reed’s Flight to
Canada,’ MELUS 32.1 (2007), 3–27.
13 Flight to Canada, 123–4.
14 Spivak’s actual line is ‘White men saving brown women from brown men’; see
‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (eds.),
Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Champaign: University of Illinois
Press, 1988), 297.
15 Flight to Canada, 155.
16 Wilbur H. Siebert, The Underground Railroad: From Slavery to Freedom (New
York: Macmillan, 1898), 197.
17 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
(Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 17.
18 Flannery O’Connor, ‘Revelation’ in The Complete Stories (New York: Farrar,
Straus, and Giroux, 1989), 491.
19 Robyn Wiegman, Object Lessons (Durham: Duke University Press,
2012), 174.
20 Flannery O’Connor, ‘The Comforts of Home’ in The Complete Stories, 383.
Hereafter referred to in the text as CH.
21 William Faulkner, Go Down, Moses (1942; New York: Vintage International,
1990), 281.
22 Flannery O’Connor, Habits of Being: The Letters of Flannery O’Connor, edited
by Sally Fitzgerald (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1979), 463.
P a rt T h re e
Nations and Belonging

Ch apter 8
‘How SCOTTISH I am’

Alasdair Gray, Race and Neo-nationalism
Len Platt
‘Modernity without Illusions’

Nationalism of the kind promoted by Alasdair Gray must distinguish
itself from ‘the monstrous ethnic nationalisms of early twentieth-century
imperial nations’, not least because those versions of nationalism have not
been confined to that historical period or to ‘imperial nations’.1 The move
is rarely straightforward in execution, with all versions of cultural nation-
alism having to negotiate territory where ethnic and linguistic dimensions
of race, however untimely, remain persistently engaged in one way or
another. But for many theorists, including Tom Nairn, the early analyst
of ‘the break-up of Britain’, modern Scottish nationalism is different. ‘This
is overwhelmingly a politically-orientated separatism’, Nairn wrote in the
1970s, ‘rather exaggeratedly concerned with problems of state and power,
and frequently indifferent to the themes of race and cultural ancestry’.2
Alasdair Gray adopts a similar position in his public political per-
sona where he constructs his fictional writing as operating in diver-
sity and multiplicity. In Why the Scots Should Rule Scotland (1992), Gray
acknowledges that:
Readers who live in Scotland but were born elsewhere may feel threatened
by the title of this pamphlet; I must therefore explain that by Scots I mean
everyone in Scotland who is able to vote [. . . which] includes second or
third generation half-breeds like me whose parents or parents’ parents were
English, Chinese, Indian, Polish, Italian and Russian Jewish.
Gray concludes his reassurance with the disarming, but risky, explanation
that his liberal take on race involves an element of professional interest:
Since nobody will read a writer who seems superior to them or tries to
boss them I am terrified of being thought a racist, and hope I have cleared
myself of that suspicion by demonstrating that the Scots are composed of
many races, not one. Moreover this pamphlet also deals at points with the
English, French, Irish, Welsh, and I think does so without prejudice.3
129
130 Len Pl at t
But the matter did not end there. The issue of Gray’s anti-Englishness has
re-emerged, most recently in a 2012 controversy when he raised consider-
able ire in some quarters by launching an attack on the appointment of
English ‘colonists’ to influential positions in Scottish arts administration.
‘Immigrants into Scotland’, Gray insisted, ‘as into other lands, are set-
tlers or colonists. English settlers are as much a part of Scotland as Asian
restaurateurs and shopkeepers, or the Italians who brought us fish and
chips. The colonists look forward to a future back in England through
promotion or by retirement.’4 Faced again with accusations of racism, his
response (or one of them), was a model of moderation and feigned inno-
cence, ‘All I can say is that my mother’s people were English – very nice
folk and many of my best friends are English.’5 For all the attempts at
smoothing things over, the furore persists producing some odd results on
the World Wide Web. If you now Google Gray, a picture of him looking
ill-kempt and fierce in braces pops up alongside a picture of Mel Gibson,
face blued up in Braveheart mode.
It should be said from the beginning that this chapter does not enter
into the public slanging match over what Gray may be up to in such com-
ments. The aim here is to contribute to a broader debate about the oper-
ation of neo-nationalism in its Scottish formation across a spectrum that
has conservative national tradition going back to Celticism at one end and
seeks to link up with the beat generation and post-racial cosmopolitan-
ism at the other.6 That issue could be focused on a huge range of cultural
products, from the genuine iconoclasm of a figure like Frank Kuppner to
the sickly sentimentality of the recent musical film scored with the songs
of The Proclaimers, Sunshine on Leith (2013). In this chapter, however, the
emphasis is on the most well-known works of the now institutionalised
figurehead of a contemporary movement that for the last thirty years or
more has been stunningly innovative in constructing ‘more authentic and
representative images’ for imagining a Scotland after ‘Tartanry and the
Kailyard’.7 The issue is viewed through the lens of how race and cultural
nationalism are intermingled in Gray’s fictional works, both in conven-
tional representational terms but also in relation to an idiosyncratic and
highly contemporary aesthetics. The chapter argues that race remains,
for all the postmodernity of Gray’s fictions, a central category in which
his work operates and has been received, involving as much in the way
of reconstructions of racial identity as deconstructions. Here a novel like
1982, Janine (1984), the great anti-Thatcher novel of the Thatcher decade,
becomes not a withdrawal from race but a fundamental remapping of the
male Scottish racial identity against what are, for Gray, the deeply flawed
‘How SCOTTISH I am’ 131
politics and culture of Britishness. Elsewhere, far from replacing stereo-
types, Gray confirms them, in narratives where colonial power relations
are traditionally re-enacted in conventional and much outmoded terms
of sexual exploitation. In this respect a short story like ‘YOU’, which
tells the story of an unnamed Scottish woman, an unnamed Englishman
and their brief affair, shares significant cultural territory with eighteenth-
century ballad traditions, except that here, landlordism is brought up to
date in the figure of the ‘outsiderly’ Englishman – an ethnic stereotype,
like other representations of English identities in Gray’s fiction, of brutal-
ity, materialism and self-obsession that slips into race discourse too eas-
ily.8 Poor Things (1993), on the other hand, seems almost entirely designed
around the idea of a radical historiographical rewrite that reinscribes the
modern world with new post-racial hybridity. Here the fin de siécle loveli-
ness, intelligence and compassion of ‘Bella Caledonia’ – part French, part
Mancunian and yet somehow all Scottish – stands in for a new Scotland
on the edge of a new twentieth century.9 The idea of race, in short, is fun-
damental to Gray’s work, to its politics and aesthetics. Both within single
texts and across the whole Gray oeuvre, it figures in varied, complex and
often contradictory formulations. But for all this ambiguity and nuance,
there is a primary and quite singular framework in which Gray’s
‘raciological’ imagination operates, a framework, this essay argues, that is
informed by contemporary neo-nationalism and is in various ways con-
substantial with Tom Nairn’s early and highly controversial articulation
concerning ‘the break up of Britain’.
Receiving Lanark – Problematics of Cultural

Nationalism and Race
Gray has been an outspoken Scottish nationalist since well before the
publication of Why the Scots Should Rule Scotland (1997). Such positions
are not easy to occupy in contemporary culture. In Scotland, as elsewhere,
organic historical unities of the Yeatsian or Wagnerian kind can no longer
seriously underwrite appeals to nation, one reason why Lanark has to be so
hybrid, but also so problematic in reception terms. This, Gray’s first novel,
was widely acknowledged as a Scottish masterpiece, marking nothing less
than the return of Scottish fiction to the contemporary world stage. Alan
Massie, writing in The Scotsman, described the book as ‘a quite extraor-
dinary achievement, the most remarkable thing done in Scottish fiction
for a very long time’.10 A number of important literary figures, including
Anthony Burgess, racialised the book through comparisons with Ulysses,
132 Len Pl at t
that other ‘Celtic’ masterpiece.11 The status of Gray’s novel was not least
contingent on the self-conscious contemporaneity which seemed indica-
tive of the cultural and political ambition of this four-book gospel. Books
one and two comprised a brilliant but familiar enough realistic narra-
tive in the Bildungsroman mould. Books three and four, however, were
dystopian – something like science fiction, but more like fantasy – and it
was with book three that Lanark, after a remarkable dedicatory illustrated
page, began. Strangely, a futuristic city, Unthank, where humans feed on
processed human flesh and the diseased morph into dragons, seemed con-
versant, if not intimate, with realist post-war Glasgow and the more or
less conventional Bildungsroman that told the story of an aspiring artist,
Duncan Thaw. On the other hand, this double-sided novel was clearly and
irreparably separate and divided. To put it starkly, if Duncan’s imagined
suicide was a tragic failure of culture and post-war politics, the exuber-
ant illustrations for Lanark, the wild typographies and the comic ‘index’
which listed examples of plagiarism in the book, dividing the theft into
three kinds – ‘block’, ‘imbedded’ and ‘diffuse’ – quite simply, were not.12
How did this formal experimentation, extravagant graphics and
the wicked splicing of styles, forms and tones work in terms of the
‘Scottishness’ of Lanark? If the novel’s cultural significance was underwrit-
ten precisely by the book being so much of the moment, at the same time
the indulgence in contemporary aesthetics was seen by some as trivialis-
ing, a withdrawal from the realities of a distressing and immediate politics
in favour of the trendy intellectualism of postmodernism. Here anarchic
authors like Gray, refusing ‘to accept or to reject any of a plurality of avail-
able ontological orders’, appeared in some highly influential formulations
to have no commitment to any kind of politics, or any kind of reality.13
Under these pressures, commentators tried to reconcile the remarkable
innovation of Lanark with historical versions of cultural nationalism and
racial identity. The contemporary Scottish novel was seen as taking up
the Celticist charge from Ireland. Introducing The Penguin Book of Irish
Fiction (2001), Colm Toíbín, invited his readers to ‘compare the calmness
of contemporary Irish writing with the wildness of contemporary Scottish
writing’. Drawing, ironically enough, on nineteenth-century English
stereotypes of the wild and magical Celt, he imagined ‘a legacy of Sterne
and Swift, Joyce, Beckett and Flann O’Brien [that] had taken the Larne-
Stranraer ferry’. In the writings of ‘James Kelman, Alasdair Gray, Irvine
Welsh, Janice Galloway and Alan Warner’, Toíbín wrote, ‘there is political
anger, stylistic experiment and formal trickery’.14 Writing in the Edinburgh
Companion to Twentieth-Century Scottish Literature (2009), Ian Brown and
Alan Riach formulated a different but still conventionally racialised posi-
tion, normalising the new Scottish novel in terms of the nation it repro-
duced – a ‘multi-faceted, complex identity . . . with many unfrequented
areas and unexplored riches’. This was set in contrast to ‘a linear monolithic
literature with imperial weight and the trajectory of a colonial empire, uni-
fied by a single language’, against which Scottish literature was apparently
compelled to write.15 Others still argued that Lanark was at its best where
it was most realistic, a view which Gray himself may have contributed to
through a well-known disassociation from postmodern cultural theory
(‘Post Modernism seems the creation of scholars acquiring a territory to
lecture on. I cannae be bothered discussing post-modern critical theory’) –
although at times he did sound, however unintentionally, quite postmod-
ern.16 He asserted, for instance, that his fictions, designed as ‘propaganda
for democratic welfare-state Socialism and an independent Scottish parlia-
ment’, were geared towards seducing ‘the reader by disguising themselves
as sensational entertainment’ – a sentiment immediately undercut by the
further half-joke that his ‘jacket designs and illustrations – especially the
erotic ones – [. . . were] designed with the same high purpose’.17
Some commentators, however, insisted that Lanark was neither
somehow mysteriously ‘Celtic’, merely playful, nor ruinously divided but,
rather, a novel which managed to pull off the feat of making contempo-
rary literary aesthetics viable in terms of Scotland. Randall Stevenson, for
instance, argued that for all the problematics, Gray ensured postmodern-
ism had a ‘particular potential for Scotland’, using the idea of ‘Caledonian
antisyzygy’ to illustrate his point – this was the early-twentieth-century
formulation that racialised Scottish identity in terms of doubleness, a pro-
pensity to alternate between dour matter-of-fact realism and wild fantasy,
‘confusion of the senses, the fun of things thrown topsy-turvy, the horns
of elfland’.18 Antisyzygy and ‘the experimental tradition of postmodern-
ism’ might be ‘different in origin’, Stevenson reminded us, but ‘they natu-
rally, fruitfully fall into alignment with each other. The Thaw/Lanark and
Glasgow/Unthank pairings, or the entanglement of erotic fantasies with
miserable reality in 1982, Janine, show how suggestively the two traditions
can coincide and coalesce within single works.’19 Stevenson’s role in this
and other essays was to find a way of reconciling some of the genuinely
radical new writing appearing in Scotland with the traditions of a literary
culture which figures like Cairns Craig saw as written out of history by the
authority of ‘England’. From such postcolonial perspectives, the intrigu-
ing pairing of postmodernism and racialised identity became not just pos-
sible but, as Stevenson said, somehow natural.
134 Len Pl at t
‘Dependable Tools’: Scottishness and 1982, Janine

Stevenson, positioning Gray in relation to divided texts central to the idea
of Scottish literature and the ‘Scottish predicament’ – like James Hogg’s
The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) and Robert
Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) – reconciles Scottish new
writing with well-established tradition. Others have taken the double
sidedness of Scottish culture back much further, to the Reformation and
earlier still to Celticism.20 The raciology most contemporary with Gray’s
writing, however, and most directly influential on its redrawing of racial
identity, was Tom Nairn’s treatment of the same concept of antisyzygy
which appeared in The Break-Up of Britain (1977).21
Nairn’s account conducted itself in terms of neo-Marxist discourses, but
its radical interference with progressivist historiographies and the Derridean
deconstruction of race as otherness would have been quite impossible
without the space clearing generated by the broader intellectual culture
with which it was contemporary. His historical account of nationalism
in ‘Scotland and Europe’ and ‘Old and New Scottish Nationalism’ drew
on traditional accounts in some ways, where the Scottish Enlightenment
was typically seen as aligning itself with Britain’s nineteenth-century
industrial development and civilising mission. But Nairn did not see this
as the conventional Lowland betrayal of an authentic Scotland. Rather,
it was an inevitable product of a dynamic that under normal conditions
linked nationalism to the margins, but which had a unique and in Nairn’s
terms ‘schizophrenic’ configuration in Scotland. Scottish intellectuals of
the modern age, Nairn emphasised, did not belong to an economically
‘backward’ culture. On the contrary, putting to one side the question of
the Highlands, modern Scotland was central to the development of the
‘workshop of the world’. There had been no historical logic compelling
figures like James Burnett, David Hume, Francis Hutcheson and Adam
Smith to appeal to the masses on the basis of a romanticised past, no rea-
son to formulate any version of standard nineteenth-century nationalism
other than the one which aligned them to the progressivist historiography
of a state formalised by the Act of the Union. ‘The new bourgeois social
classes’ were unique in Scotland. They
inherited a social-economic position in history vastly more favourable

than that of any other fringe or backward nationality. They were neither
being ground down into industrial modernity, nor excluded from it. Hence
they did not perceive it as alien, as a foreign threat or a withheld promise.
Consequently they were not forced to turn to nationalism, to redress the
situation. (TBUB, 145)
At the same time, Scotland was decisively distinct on a number of
grounds. Civically, in terms of religious culture, folklore and custom, edu-
cation, administration and so on, it evolved as ‘too much of a nation . . .
to become a mere province of the U.K.; yet it could not develop its own
nation-state on this basis either, via nationalism’ (TBUB, 146). This,
according to Nairn, accounted for the curious absence/presence of nation-
alism in Scottish culture, a particular ‘pathology’ where Scotland figured
as ‘a sort of lunatic or deviant, in relation to normal development dur-
ing the period in question’. Blighted by a kitsch version of nationalism
that appeared infantile and stunned into a conspiracy of silence about the
‘true’ nation, Scottish culture became doubly scarred, both by the horror
of its own self-neglect, the original sin, and by a feigned and (until fairly
recently) necessary indifference to any serious version of national destiny.
This accounts for what Nairn saw as ‘the Jekyll-and-Hyde physiognomy of
modern Scottishness’. He drew analogies between Scottish ‘realism’ and
the acceptance of the Union (and Conservatism). Fantasy – and Scottish
nationalism must turn to fantasy – had to be sublimated. ‘Is this not why’,
asked Nairn, ‘among the multiple caricatures haunting Scots society, we
still find a peculiarly gritty and grinding middle-class “materialism” – a
sort of test tube bourgeois who does, indeed, think everything but busi-
ness to be nonsense?’ (TBUB, 164, 146, 170).
This is the estate embedded in the doubleness of Lanark’s end-stopped
imagined pasts (progressivist, humanist, individualist) and terrifying
futures (militarist, consumerist, materialist) and configured over and over
in Gray’s fiction generally, and in racial terms, as artistic failure, shame,
disease, impotency and self-abuse. The antisyzygy of 1982, Janine, Gray’s
darkest and most powerful novel, turns precisely on the formulation of
an identity that is in outward respects the ‘test-tube bourgeois’ of Nairn’s
account, a conservative, no-nonsense, middle-class business man – ‘almost
everyone of my income group is a Conservative’ – who tours the country
as a security adviser for ‘national installations’.22 Inwardly, however, which
is the ground where almost all the novel takes place, the I-narrator lives a
fantasy life constructing the tiniest details of an endless sado-masochistic
fantasy constantly subject to anticipation, deferment, rehearsal and refine-
ment. The fantasies are enacted as a kind of text in-the-making:
But Janine is not (here come the clothes) happy with the white silk shirt
shaped by the way it hangs from her etcetera I mean BREASTS, silk shirt
136 Len Pl at t
not quite reaching the thick harness-leather belt which is not holding up
the miniskirt but hangs in the loops round the waistband of the white
suede miniskirt supported by her hips and unbuttoned as wide enough to
insert three fingers. I HATED clothes when I was young. (J, 18)
Gray’s 1982, Janine is typically in a moving, provisional state, its imagined

author subject to self-congratulation and rebuke as he passes a single night
of drunken masturbation in a hotel room, although the narrative stops at
various points for refills, sleep, ejaculation – not just named but enacted as
an astonishing textual pyrotechnics – ‘death’ and, finally, reality: ‘Footsteps
in the corridor./ KNOCK KNOCK./ A woman’s voice./ “Eight-fifteen,
Mr McLeish. Breakfast is being served till nine.”/ My voice./ “All right.”’
(J, 341).23
The fundamental distinction between ‘Jock’ McLeish’s divided self is
notionally measured by ironic control. Thus chapter 2 begins with ‘THIS
is splendid. I have never before enjoyed such perfect control. I have aban-
doned Janine at the exact moment when I nearly got too excited’. His
other self, and this is where the influence of neo-nationalist discourses
like Nairn’s becomes most evident, is a construct over which he has little
or no control. He has been formed by what he calls ‘politics’: ‘POLITICS
WILL NOT LET ME ALONE’ – ‘Everything I know, everything I am’
has ‘been permitted or buggered up by some sort of political arrangement’
(J, 28, 231–32). This is why, for all his bitter espousal of right-wing ideas,
he cannot be a ‘true Conservative’, no more than he can be called ‘true’ in
any sense. Like Edinburgh itself, ‘a setting for an opera nobody performs
nowadays . . . an opera called Scottish history’ (J, 151, 233), ‘Jock’ is a fabri-
cation, entirely contingent on his imagined other – indeed impossible to
formulate outside of this mirror image and at the Other’s disposal.
Again as in Nairn’s The Break-Up of Britain, the other of McLeish’s
divided self is a political culture which McLeish is both intimate with and
yet separate from, a Britain which has failed to modernise and contin-
ues to be ruled by a small elite – part of the logic determining McLeish’s
rationalist submission to Conservatism. Labourism, and democracy gen-
erally, are redundant. Thus ‘Glasgow means nothing to the rest of Britain
but unemployment, drunkenness and out-of-date radical militancy’ and
‘it doesn’t matter how the British manual worker votes at the election,
because the leaders of the big parties only disagree about small things,
things which do not disturb their investments’, a ‘perfectly frank and open
conspiracy’.24 Set against a nightmare of rampant and brutal individual-
ism, a ‘Falstaffian’ Britain where ‘The Great British Fictional Hero is a
secret policeman [James Bond] licensed to kill and [. . .] rewarded with
all the sexual and social privileges the country can afford’ (J, 136, 98, 138),
McLeish’s sexual fantasies bleed into a political discourse which becomes
increasingly crude and paranoid in its formulation. McLeish ‘can only
identify with middle class rapists who fuck with the help of expensive
machines and a corrupted police force and a worldwide financial network.
This is not surprising. National security thinks the sun shines out of my
arsehole.’ Where the ‘Jails and mental hospitals are full of sexually desira-
ble women’, it is as if, as one of McLeish’s lovers, Sontag, says, the fantasies
have in their violence ‘a convincing political structure’ and vice versa – the
political structures take on the dimension of a cruel and brutal fucking.
‘Scotland has been fucked. I mean that word in the vulgar sense of misused
to give satisfaction or advantage to another’ (J, 103, 120, 136).
The result is an astonishing amalgam of desire, guilt and anger all con-
textualised in a periodic flashback narrative which reconvenes McLeish’s
earlier life. Here there is the promise of a different national identity in the
hybrid Alan, who has a ‘sallow-skinned Arabic-Italian-Jewish look. I think
his father was Jewish. His mother was Irish.’ In this enigmatic and highly
idealised figure, McLeish sees the promise of something real and authen-
tic. This is a practical engineer, an inspirational young man, who sees ‘the
true strength in a thing’ (J, 109, 111); ‘not a coward, not an instrument’,
but someone whom McLeish has a strange ‘superstition’ about:
If Alan had lived . . . I believe Scotland would now have an independent
government. . . . He would have set an irresistible example by doing exactly
what he wanted in the middle row. . . . A fantasy, of course, but given time
Alan would have worked upon Scotland like a few ounces of yeast on many
tons of malt, he would have fermented those arselickers and instruments,
these stoical and hysterical losers into a sensible coherent people. (J, 108)
The promise is cut off, of course. McLeish is condemned to life as a prod-
uct of a British culture, organized itself ‘like a bad adolescent fantasy’
under ‘Machiavellian rule’ (J, 139, 141).
Just to restate, the 1982, Janine narrative, however much it evokes dual-
ity, is completely monologic, apart, that is, from an epilogue written for
‘the discerning critic’. Both underlining and undermining the fictionality
of things, these almost final pages of 1982, Janine (the final page is just
‘GOODBYE’ writ in large print) mostly acknowledge artistic debts to
such figures as Joyce, Buñuel, Tom Leonard, Berlioz and James Kelman.
But they also include a deeply ironic ‘personal remark which purely liter-
ary minds will ignore. Though John McLeish is an invention of mine’,
138 Len Pl at t
Gray writes, ‘I disagree with him’, a hardly surprising distancing given the
contents of this long, wild and often crazy Walpurgisnicht. ‘[F]or exam-
ple, he says of Scotland, “We are a poor little country, always have been,
always will be.” In fact, Scotland’s natural resources are as variedly rich as
those of any other land’ (J, 345). Set against the monstrous discourses that
form so much of 1982, Janine, this correction seems part playful. It works
in comic ways, winking knowingly at the dirt exposed in this powerful
text. But it is also hugely poignant, a marker both of Gray’s separation and
identification with this dark Jekyll and Hyde, the pitiable, perverse but
somehow elevated ‘Jock’ of modern times.
‘God Has Sent the Anglo-Saxon Race to Purify the Globe with
Fire and Sword’: Poor Things and Anti-Englishness
1982, Janine is postmodern but hardly post-racial. Racial identity is at the
heart of this novel, a construct which both is and is not a product of such
mysteries as language and blood. It also invokes a particular interpretation
of politics and history evoked everywhere in Gray’s fiction. That inter-
pretation is shaped in very specific ways not only by Nairn’s account of
the historical underdevelopment of Scottish nationalism but also by his
account of the break-up of Britain in ‘The Twilight of the British State’.
This, the first essay in The Break-Up of Britain, was a radical piece of
historical reasoning that sought to render Britain’s past incompatible with
Scottish futures, a splitting essential to the development of a genuinely
populist Scottish nationalism. It did so largely by constructing nineteenth-
century Britain not as the prototype modern nation but as a very particu-
lar failure, one condemned to archaism by the peculiarities of a political
settlement entirely geared towards the preservation of a corrupt and decay-
ing English social and political elite. From this position, Nairn was able to
argue that Britain, forever tied to the past by virtue of a unique political
conspiracy, never actually modernized at all. Far from being the balanced,
rational compromise of Whig myth, ‘the pioneer modern-liberal consti-
tutional state never itself became modern: it retained the archaic stamp
of its priority’, remaining ‘a basically indefensible and inadaptable relic,
not a modern state form’ at all. With this analysis, the idea that ‘Britain’
represented a wider consensus ‘outside England (empire, federation of
Scotland, Ireland, England, Wales)’ became nothing more than a ‘delu-
sion’ (TBUB, 22, 75, 78).
The fundamentally patrician nature of British culture was accepted, even
embraced, Nairn argued, in return for the considerable compensations
of industrial transformation and ‘national security’, which generated
public prosperity and prestige at the expense of any real transfer of pol-
itical power. It was then sustained by a series of what appear to be disas-
trous accidents – London’s control of the world’s money market in the
early twentieth century when industrial supremacy failed; the cultural
impact of the heroisms of the Second World War; and a ‘particular kind
of peaceful stability’ derived from Britain’s ‘civil relaxation of customs,
its sloth, even its non-malicious music-hall humour’. From this perspec-
tive, neo-nationalism, especially in its Scottish variety, became the radical
intervention that displaced a failed class politics. More than a viable alter-
native to the Scottish Labour Party, nationalism took on the status of an
imperative if Scotland was to avoid the awful fate of the British mess –
‘social sclerosis, an over-traditionalism leading to incurable backwardness’
(TBUB, 69, 40). Stability became a paralytic ‘over-stability’ operating
across the political spectrum from Conservatism to the ‘so-called “social
revolution”’ of the Labour Party in the post-war years and leading only ‘to
rapidly accelerating backwardness, economic stagnation, social decay, and
cultural despair’ (TBUB, 40, 43, 51).
Operating under the guise of a nineteenth-century Gothic romance,
Poor Things connects up with Nairn’s deconstructive analysis in a number
of central ways, although there are important divergences too – Gray’s
cultural politics in the 1990s were much more shaped by second wave
feminism, for instance, than Nairn’s version in the 1970s. In the first place,
Poor Things is scoped like Nairn’s work in terms of an implied historical
archaeology. Gray sees modern Scotland, imagined somewhat problem-
atically as a twentieth-century woman, in terms of a break-up of Britain
and ‘narratised’ as Bella’s dramatic escape from her brutal husband. This
is the English aristocrat par excellence – General Sir Aubrey de la Pole
Blessington Bart V. C. Indeed archaeological practice, the aesthetic cor-
respondence to Nairn’s dialectic, is central to Poor Things. Like Nairn’s
account, this is a text that digs into a nineteenth-century past, working
through the pretence that the text itself is a concoction of lost memoirs,
diaries and other ‘historical’ detritus – a detective’s notebook; an extract
from the 1883 edition of Who’s Who; graphics and illustrations by ‘William
Strang’ and so on. The conceit becomes the basis for the novel’s historical
interrogation. Claim and counterclaim become central, both to the main
narrative of Poor Things and the novel’s wider structure where the fantasy
narrative of the lost book is countered by a wife’s letter to posterity, and
both are subject to Gray’s ‘notes historical and critical’. This characteristic
opens up the past to radical reinterpretation, as does the conceit where
140 Len Pl at t
the world is perceived through the brain of an unborn child transposed
into the body of her dead mother – Gray’s revisionist version of Scottish
Gothic. The new composite thus has a mature body, but no personal his-
tory. She understands the world with the eyes of an innocent and a brain
that develops at a hugely accelerated rate – from innocence to maturity in
a matter of months. In complete antithesis to her monstrous prototypes,
Bella is no freakish outcast but, rather, a delightful, loving, precocious,
life-enhancing creature. The product of benign Scottish medical science,
her only pathology is an ‘obsessive linguistic trait’ that also becomes part
of the textuality of the novel as Bella struggles to articulate her sense of
the world. Thus when she is confronted with the visceral reality of poverty
and injustice for the first time, the page becomes an indecipherable scrib-
ble of tear and blood-stained anguish. Such devices establish the strange-
ness through which familiar ideologies become defamiliarised anew. Bella
listens with awe and astonishment to an American evangelist’s account of
why poverty and apparent injustice are predetermined, unalterable:
The Anglo-Saxon race to which she and I and Mr Astley belong have begun
to control the world, and we are the cleverest and kindliest and most adven-
turous and most truly Christian and hardest working people and most free
and democratic people who have existed. . . . This means that compared
with the Chinese, Hindoos, Negroes and Ameridian – yes, even compared
with the Latins and Semites – we are like teachers in a playground of chil-
dren who do not want to know that school exists. (PT, 139)
Harry Astley, a ‘thin stiff figure’ whose ‘stiff face, glossy top-hat and neat
frock-coat’ renders him ‘so comically English’, provides the counterpart
ideology – a monstrous Malthusian mixture of laissez-faire and cyni-
cism, so sickening that it acts as a prelude to Belle’s return to Scotland
and the figure who remade her, Godwin Baxter (‘God’ as she refers to
him). Here she plans to fulfil a twentieth-century destiny by marrying
her intended, the medical student, Archibald McCandless – a ‘thor-
oughly rational Scot’ – and determines that she ‘must be a Socialist’
(PT, 128, 220).
Like The Break-Up of Britain, Poor Things renders the idea of a
redemptive Scottish independence outside of Britain not just possible
but a necessity of historical logic quite outside the issues of historical
controversy, ambiguity and outright contradiction.25 Again, the role
of traditional aristocracy here is critical, central to the rationale of the
break-up of Britain thesis, and aristocracy is configured in Poor Things as
irredeemable – a brutal, hypocritical, immoral, elite entirely contingent on
mercantile money for its continuance and, above all, absolutely racialised
as ‘Anglo-Saxon’. Thus the point to which McCandless’s lost narrative
moves inexorably is the vanquishing of aristocratic authority, achieved
in the wonderfully cathartic moment when Bella realises that her first
husband, General Sir Aubrey de la Pole Blessington Bart V. C., is also the
masked libertine well known to the sex workers of Parisian brothels, as
Mr Spankybot:
Most brothel customers are quick squirts but you were the quickest of the
lot! The things you paid the girls to do to stop you coming in the first half
minute would make a hahahahaha cat laugh! Still they liked you. General
Spankybot paid well and did no harm – you never gave one of us the pox.
I think the rottenest thing about you (apart from the killing you’ve done
and the way you treat the servants) is what Prickett calls the pupurity of
your mumariage bed. Fuck off, you poor daft silly queer rotten old fucker
hahahahaha! Fuck off! (PT, 238)
The other central pillar of Nairn’s argument, the element that caused so
much difficulty for intellectuals on the British Left, was the radical inter-
vention which effectively erased labourism from any version of the past or
future political progressive. This was the crucial step which underwrote
the inescapable logic of cultural nationalism, and it figures poignantly
in the various endgames of Poor Things, at the end of the letter to the
future, for example, written at the outset of the First World War, where
Bella/Victoria celebrates the strength of ‘the Internationalist Socialist
Movement’ and almost hopes that:
leaders DO declare war! If the working classes immediately halt it by
peaceful means then the moral and practical control of the great industrial
nations will have passed from the owners to the makers of what we need
and the world YOU live in, dear child of the future, will be a saner and
happier place. (PT, 276)
And there is a later return to optimism, perhaps even more poignant, in
one of the last ‘historical and literary notes’, where Bella/Victoria writes to
‘Chris’ (Hugh Macdiarmid), knowing he will disagree with the sentiment,
applauding the first Labour government ‘with an overall working majority’
as a victory that makes Britain ‘suddenly an exciting country’ (PT, 316).
The ironies set up here are all part of the space-clearing exercise that makes
Scottish nationalism inevitable.
Conclusion
In her 2004 book Questioning Scotland, Eleanor Bell argues provoca-
tively that, with a few exceptions and in sharp comparison to Irish
142 Len Pl at t
Studies, Scottish Studies has been theoretically unsophisticated, inclined
towards essentialism – she cites the continued viability of the concept
of antisyzygy as a case point. Her own account is designed to ‘map the
realities of present, and future, forms of nationalism in ways that take
account of [. . .] theoretical developments without lapsing into conven-
ient forms of national essentialism.’26 By contrast, Scottish creative art-
ists are privileged in Bell’s account. They have struggled more heroically
to ‘highlight the fundamental unpindownability of our own national
identity, while also encouraging cultural identification’. She analyses
how ‘Scottish writers and artists have often sought to escape from the
overly rigid definitions of Scottish identity as defined by Scottish crit-
ics’.27 Maybe, but as this account has shown, there is no absolute cleanli-
ness to ‘creative’ writing as against critical writing, even among the most
accomplished of Scottish writers, and Gray, rightly, is certainly consid-
ered that. As these fictions illustrate, for all the innovation of his work,
traditional raciologies echo throughout it, either as Derridean hauntolo-
gies of a racialised past, or as the persistent stereotypes necessary to the
kind of neo-nationalist political intervention Gray makes. The English
stereotypes – outmoded versions by any truly contemporary account –
are somehow expected, part of the demotic world which his novels write
to, even as they operate as high-class fiction. This might account for the
carnivalesque frivolities he deploys, the comically monstrous accumula-
tion which renders ‘Thunderbolt’ Blessington so much a giant of Anglo-
Saxon stereotype – brutal governor of the Andman and Nicobar Islands
and Jamaica; one-time ‘hero’ of the Crimea, the Indian Mutiny and the
Opium Wars; eugenicist responsible for the suppression of the Chartists;
‘personal supervisor’ of an ‘experimental farm where slum orphans train
for resettlement in the Colonies’ (PT, 206–7); vile molester of maids
and sexually inadequate. This is a truly overdone ‘Englishman’, wrapped
up into one masterpiece of political discourse and rhetoric, posing with
irony and no shortage of seriousness, as new national culture.
Notes
1 David McCrone, The Sociology of Nationalism: Tomorrow’s Ancestors (London
and New York: Routledge, 1998), 132.
2 Tom Nairn, The Break-Up of Britain (1977; London: Verso 1981), 71. Hereafter
referred to in the text as TBUB.
3 Alasdair Gray, Why Scots Should Rule Scotland (Edinburgh: Canongate Press,
1997), 8.
4 Alasdair Gray, ‘Settlers and Colonists’ in Scott Hame (ed.), Unstated: Writers
on Scottish Independence (Edinburgh: Word Power Books, 2012), 100–10
[104].
5 The Scotsman, 25 August 2013.
6 For examples of these positions compare Cairns Craig, The Modern Scottish
Novel: Narrative and the National Imagination (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 1999) with Michael Gardiner, From Trocchi to Trainspotting:
Scottish Critical Theory since 1960 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
2006).
7 John Osmond, The Divided Kingdom (London: Constable, 1988), 93.
8 ‘You’ appears in Ten Tales Tall & True (London: Bloomsbury, 1993), 60–73.
It continues the long tradition of reconstructing colonial relations in terms
of sexual power. Significantly, the ‘Englishman’ (the ‘You’) is done in literary
style complete with speech marks and full sentences. The Scots woman speaks
in a first-person style that seems improvised, more ‘real’.
9 See Alasdair Gray, Poor Things (London: Bloomsbury, 1993) and the delightful
portrait of Bella on page 45. Hereafter referred to in the text as PT.
10 The Scotsman (28 February 1981).
11 Anthony Burgess, Ninety-Nine Novels, The Best in English since 1939: A Personal
Choice By Anthony Burgess (London: Allison and Busby, 1984), 221–4.
12 Alasdair Gray, Lanark: A Life in Four Books (London: Canongate,
1981), 485.
13 Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (London & New York: Methuen,
1987), 37.
14 Colm Toíbín, The Penguin Book of Irish Fiction (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
2001), xxxii.
15 Ian Brown and Alan Riach, Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-Century
Scottish Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), 1.
16 Quoted in Dietmar Böhnke, Shades of Gray: Science Fiction, History and the
Problem of Postmodernism in the Work of Alasdair Gray, (Berlin and Madison,
WI: Galda and Wilch Verlag, 2004), 284.
17 Quoted in Susan Windisch Brown, Contemporary Novelists, 6th edition
(London: St James Press, 1966).
18 G. Gregory Smith, Scottish Literature: Character and Influence (London:
Macmillan, 1919), 150.
19 Randall Stevenson, ‘Alasdair Gray and the Postmodern’ in Robert Crawford
and Thom Nairn, eds., The Arts of Alasdair Gray (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 1991), 48–63 [61].
20 See especially chapters 1 and 4 of Craig’s The Modern Scottish Novel.
21 The significance of Nairn’s work for reading Gray is well established. See
Craig, The Modern Scottish Novel which observes in relation to Gray that ‘the
language of schizophrenia is used, for instance by Tom Nairn in The Break-Up
of Britain’, fn 45, 249.
22 Alasdair Grey, 1982, Janine (London: Jonathan Cape, 1984), 61, 104. Hereafter
referred to in the text as J.
144 Len Pl at t
23 The extremities of this are difficult to reproduce but they include such formu-
lations as ‘THE SWEATSWERE CAUSED BY NOTHING BUT FUNK
AND (GOD HELP ME) FUNKANANANANANANANANANANHYSSS
SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSTERIA good to see you again folks
thought we had lost you back there just as things were getting interesting’
(J, 183).
24 See also J, 130. ‘Our Harold and Our Maggie, by playing along with the Stock
Exchange and cutting taxation and the public healing, teaching and life-
saving services have given a new power to the strong bits of Britain, the bits
that keep it running.’
25 Donald Kaczvinsky argues that Poor Things is a playful exercise in ‘histori-
ographic metafiction’, set up to expose the fancifulness of historical truth.
‘What is fact and what is fiction in Poor Things is up for grabs’ and claims
for ‘objectivity and truth’ become a mere ‘fictional construct’. There are a
number of difficulties here. In the first place, Gray takes a very different posi-
tion, suggesting that the ‘fictional construct’, or ‘art’ as Gray would have it,
has a better chance of staking a claim to truth than does history contami-
nated by ideology. This, presumably, is the point behind the final words of
Poor Things, a ‘factual’ note that appears to testify to the essential ‘truth’ of
the McCandle fantasy, that Bella really was the creation of Godwin Baxter.
More centrally for this chapter however, the idea of Poor Things operating at
this abstract, philosophical level removes it from the cultural and political
immediacies where its political intent is so manifest. See Donald Kaczvinsky,
‘“Making Up for Lost Time”: Scotland, Stories and the Self in Alasdair Gray’s
Poor Things,’ Contemporary Literature (2001), 42.4, 775–99.
26 Eleanor Bell, Questioning Scotland (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2004), 29.
27 Bell, Questioning Scotland, 98.
Ch apter 9
‘Justabit-Racist’
Dubravka Ugrešić, Cosmopolitanism and the
Post-Yugoslav Condition
Vedrana Velickovic
In his influential analysis of the postmodern condition, Fredric Jameson

establishes the following diagnosis for the type of cultural and literary pro-
duction that the postmodern decentred subject has been left with:
If, indeed, the subject has lost its capacity actively to extend its pro-tensions
and re-tensions across the temporal manifold and to organize its past and
future into coherent experience, it becomes difficult enough to see how the
cultural productions of such a subject could result in anything but ‘heaps
of fragments’ and in a practice of the randomly heterogeneous and frag-
mentary and the aleatory. . . . When that relationship breaks down, when
the links of the signifying chain snap, then we have schizophrenia in the
form of a rubble of distinct and unrelated signifiers.1
This practice of the randomly heterogeneous, fragmentary and aleatory
might well sum up Dubravka Ugrešić’s fiction and creative non-fiction.
In particular her many collections of essays, a primary focus of this chap-
ter, are characterised by the dispersal of seemingly unrelated signifiers – a
discussion of Emir Kusturica’s ethno village Drvengrad [Timbre Town],
Wittgenstein’s stairs, a postcard from Bali, a photograph of Putin kiss-
ing a giant fish, IKEA, the relay batons for Tito’s birthdays, references to
American, Russian and Yugoslav films, literature and popular culture, a
prefatory remark about goulash and a quote from a Japanese bestseller.
Following Jameson, one might call this imagination postmodern, a desig-
nation that has been applied to further aspects of Ugrešić’s work. Critics
such as Renata Jambrešić-Kirin have noted the postmodern repertoire of
generic hybridity and the ‘unexpected insights, ironic reversals [. . . and]
cynical attitude’2 evident in Ugrešić’s fiction and essays of the 1990s. This
engagement with postmodern aesthetics can be traced back to her work
from the 1980s – the novels The Jaws of Life (1981) and Fording the Stream
of Consciousness (1988), and the short-story collection Life Is a Fairy Tale
(1983). As Gordana Crnković suggests, Ugrešić’s early work also contained
145
146 Vedra na Veli ckovic
almost no intimations of ‘the growing political crisis in Yugoslavia’.3 Such
a reading is again consistent with those interpretations that construct
postmodernism as being apolitical in nature.
Ugrešić continues to revisit the fragmented post-Yugoslav space
and its localisms in a manner that is, at first glance, reminiscent of a
Western anthropological observer. Since the 1990s, however, her writing
has become more overtly political and global in perspective.4 Still satir-
ical and self-referentially aware, the dislocated writer now negotiates
her newly found ‘Eastern European’ identity in the West and the global
literary marketplace, and forges imaginary alliances with a host of con-
temporary postcolonial and post-communist others. At the same time, she
launches a critique of global digital culture or what Alan Kirby describes
as pseudo- or digimodernism.5
Indeed, a lot has happened since the 1980s in Ugrešić’s life, work and the
country of her birth, Yugoslavia. Seen through the iconic image of the fall
of the Berlin Wall, marking the ending of the Cold War and – according
to a figure like Francis Fukiyama – the triumph of free market capital-
ism, the year 1989 ushered in a reunification of Europe and the creation of
new nation-states in post-communist Europe. It also prefigured the vio-
lent disintegration of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Ugrešić’s post-Yugoslav exilic
novels, The Museum of Unconditional Surrender (1996), written entirely
in the form of footnotes during her stay in Berlin and drawing on the
Russian avant-garde and the work of the conceptual artist Ilya Kabakov,
and The Ministry of Pain (2004), both experiment with metafiction and
other postmodern techniques in a relentless attempt to exorcise the ghosts
of the recent Yugoslav past and ‘tame a vampire, one’s own trauma’,
even if only temporarily.6 Her latest novel Baba Yaga Laid an Egg (2009)
signals a return to feminist postmodern concerns in its playful twenty-
first-century rewriting of the Baba Yaga myth and a shift from the themes
of post-Yugoslav exile and war, but to which, as Ugrešić confesses, she
continues to return to with a kind of ‘exhibitionist pleasure’ in her essays.7
In her essay entitled ‘A Question of Perspective’ from her recent prize-
winning collection Karaoke Culture, Ugrešić, after many years, uneas-
ily reflects on the many absurd and insulting labels she acquired in the
Croatian media and the press following her outspoken critique of nation-
alism and war in the early 1990s. She lists some of the public name-calling
referring to her as ‘a woman with deformed vision’, ‘a murderess of the
Croatian nation who kills with her pen’, a woman who is ‘mixed-up’, a
‘homeless intellectual’, a ‘traitor to the homeland’, and a ‘witch’.8 A mix
of baffling signifiers indeed, unwanted accompaniments to the birth of
‘Justabit-Racist’ 147
what might be called a cosmopolitan imagination. At the same time,
Ugrešić reflects on her newly acquired status as a ‘native informant’.
Rather than celebrating new belonging to a heteroglossic community, she
describes her arrival on the global literary market in terms of ‘the lug-
gage of identifications’ (NH, 168) that trail behind her writing: ‘commu-
nism, Eastern Europe, censorship, repression, Iron Curtain, nationalism
(Serb or Croat?)’.9 Similarly, in The Culture of Lies, she ironically likens
the post-Yugoslav writer to ‘a kind of interpreter, psychologist, anthro-
pologist, sociologist, political analyst, ethnologist [. . .] a translator of his
own reality and the reality of his country into a language comprehensi-
ble to West European readers’.10 Ever since she left Croatia in 1993 and
settled in Amsterdam, Ugrešić has become a committed archivist of the
everyday absurdities of both the post-communist transitions to capitalism
and ‘the discrepancies of Western discourses of multiculturalism, solidar-
ity and open borders’, equally dissecting both the West’s stereotypes of
the ‘Eastern European’ other and vice versa.11 This chapter examines the
characteristics and draws the limits of Ugrešić’s post-Yugoslav cosmopoli-
tanism, but it begins with a somewhat aleatory reference to ‘Fish Soup’
intended to draw us into some of the complexities of the racial identities
handled in Ugrešić’s work.
In 1986, Riblja Čorba, (Fish Soup), one of the most popular rock bands
in then Yugoslavia, recorded a track called ‘Amsterdam’ for their new album
with the Caribbean-British reggae singer Eddy Grant who happened to be
in Belgrade after the last leg of his Yugoslav tour. Many ex-Yugoslavs will
remember the popular song, and many others will remember Grant for
his politically charged, anti-racist and anti-apartheid songs of the 1970s
and the 1980s such as ‘Living on the Frontline’, ‘War Party’ and ‘Gimme
Hope Jo’anna’. Apart from being a song about Ugrešić’s adopted home-
town, ‘Amsterdam’ bears no other relation to her writing, but it encapsu-
lates very well some of the unresolved contradictions surrounding race in
former Yugoslavia. On the surface, ‘Amsterdam’ is a witty song about (pre-
sumably) a Yugoslav traveller’s visit to the city – unlike their neighbours
behind the Iron Curtain, Yugoslavs could travel more freely to the West
with their much-prized red passport. As a newly arrived foreigner, the sub-
ject of the song does not quite fit in. For example, his Dutch bike gets sto-
len because he doesn’t know how to lock it properly. He seems to be trying
desperately to shake off the identity of the outsider by participating in all
the activities Amsterdam has on offer; each stanza ends with the line ‘so
that I wouldn’t feel like a stranger’.12 The song evokes markers of a famil-
iar tourist trial – canal cruises, cannabis coffee shops and prostitutes, the
latter reproduced in profoundly sexist ways in the song – unsurprisingly
our traveller remains outsiderly, an observer. With an anthropological eye,
the song registers in the third stanza the view that ‘there are no Dutch
people here/only Arabs, black people and Chinese’ although also claiming
how, in the hustle and bustle of the metropolis, it is difficult to tell who is
a stranger and who is not. Interestingly, as Yugoslavia slid into civil war in
the 1990s, Riblja Čorba’s frontman, Bora Đorđević, who wrote this song
and whose contentious lyrics and song titles used to be a subject of discus-
sion at the meetings of The Yugoslav League of Communists, became an
ardent supporter of Serbian nationalism and right-wing politics. Perhaps
a closeted xenophobe in the 1980s, in a 2013 interview following his per-
formance in Paris, Đorđević ‘came out’ with the following statement:
‘I am far from being a racist, but it seems to me that Paris is under arabo-
turko-black occupation.’13 Eddy Grant guest vocals towards the end of
the song where he sings a couple of unremarkable lines in English about
Amsterdam’s appeal. I was unable to find out if he had been fully aware of
the song’s content or if a translation had been offered to him prior to the
recording – apart from his part, the song is sung in Serbo-Croat – but if
this had been the case, would he have contributed to the Yugoslav hit?
What else can be drawn from ‘Amsterdam’? Alongside the darker ele-
ments, much of this song can be read as a relatively playful commentary on
cultural stereotypes, although on a deeper level it reproduces many of the
largely unexplored metamorphoses of racism in multi-ethnic Yugoslavia.
We have here, on the one hand, the situation of an ‘Eastern European
other in the West’, and on the other hand, the inability of that other to
empathise, or perceive a shared construction of otherness with other oth-
ers, one that could point towards a progressive subversion of European
hegemony. ‘Amsterdam’ also illustrates the position of a subject perceived
as semicivilised and not-quite European but still claiming cultural close-
ness to Europe – a schizophrenic state examined in detail by such scholars
of Balkanist discourse as Maria Todorova, Vesna Goldsworthy and Nataša
Kovačević.
As I have argued elsewhere, contemporary forms of cultural racism that
mark the post-communist ‘Eastern European other’ must be theorised and
considered with these complex (dis)-identifications in mind.14 This is not
to say that ‘Eastern Europeans’ should dis-identify from Europe – after
all, they are and want to be part of Europe – but a critical awareness of
Europe’s neo-imperialism would help expose various forms of exclusions
in/from ‘fortress Europe’ as well as interrogate such condescending terms
as ‘New Europeans’, used to refer to the EU’s new, ex-communist citizens
who joined in 2004 and 2007. In the song, the traveller’s cosmopolitanism
is put into question by the fact that he identifies with the West and the
perceived whiteness of Europe, as the verse about the immigrant, non-
white presence in Amsterdam confirms, despite coming himself from its
communist margins. This identification with whiteness appears in many
cultural forms – in journalistic accounts of the recent Romanian and
Bulgarian migration to Britain, for example, where it has been reported
that some Romanians have reminded British journalists that they should
not be confused or conflated with the Roma, a further complication of
the discussion of race in Eastern Europe.15
Ugrešić is aware of the inherent contradictions of the Yugoslav multi-
ethnic project and the ways in which the perceived openness or ‘closed-
ness’ to other cultures and other ‘races’ reverberates in the post-Yugoslav
present. She reflects on these changes with deep irony in her earlier collec-
tion of essays The Culture of Lies (1998):
The citizens of Yugoslavia persistently refused to identify with Eastern
Europe. . . . For a time they were non-aligned, but Africa was too black and
too far away for them to be open to the non-aligned brotherhood imposed
on them. . . . Many former Yugoslavs became nationalists, chauvinists, rac-
ists . . . meta-fascists and justabit-fascist.16
Ugrešić provides a useful encapsulation of such paradoxes. Yugoslavs did

not see themselves like their poor oppressed neighbours behind the Iron
Curtain, described, for example by Kapka Kassabova with ironic force
from the perspective of a teenage Bulgarian in her memoir Street without
a Name: Childhood and Other Misadventures in Bulgaria (2008). Yugoslav
involvement in the Non-Aligned Movement is also mocked by Ugrešić
for its failure to translate into everyday life the founding principles of
the movement, such as the struggles against imperialism, neocolonial-
ism and racism. As Ugrešić continues, in Yugoslavia, she lived ‘a happier
experience . . . of cultural cosmopolitanism and cordial xenomania, but
also cultural autism and frenzied xenophobia’.17
This ironic reminiscing is continued in Ugrešić’s recent essays where she
often uses generalising commentaries to talk about ‘[her] Balkan natives’
(NH, 50), or ‘[her] countrymen who did not acquire their cosmopolitan-
isms by hot-footing it around the world’ but instead ‘stood stubbornly in
one spot’ (NH, 55). At times, numerous passages like these make for an
uncomfortable read, and the reader gets the impression that she is sim-
ply repeating the stereotypes of Balkan primitivism and refusal to adapt –
violent behaviour, intolerance and machismo – but then a different pattern of
registration emerges. Ugrešić also laughs at the ideology of Yugoslav broth-
erhood and unity – her ‘colourful community’ that ‘encouraged stereotypes
about all the members of the brotherhood’ (NH, 20–1). The purpose of
such strategic essentialisms is parodic, designed to shake up the complacent
attitudes of those Westerners who may think that all ‘Eastern Europeans’
are the same. Thus various forms of European and post-Yugoslav cultural
racisms are deconstructed in a thoroughly postmodern way. Ugrešić puts on
the hat of a native informant when using such generalisations or becomes
the figure of an ‘anthropologist’, ‘ethnologist’ interpreter – the very figure
she is openly writing back to in other essays.
In parallel there runs a desire through her essays to mourn the passing
of the culture and the literature that was ‘born of its defiance of commu-
nism’ (NH, 214), as well as to recover the liberating potential of Yugoslav
citizenship as an alternative to the narrow ethnic identifications such as
Croat, Slovene or Serb, and those aspects of Yugoslav multi-ethnic life that
were more inclusive. In Europe in Sepia, Ugrešić returns this time to write
nostalgically of the Yugoslav non-aligned legacy that had been lost. The
names of the leading figures of the Non-Aligned Movement – Jawaharlal
Nehru, Kwame Nkrumah, Sirimavo Bandaranaike – rolled off the ten-
year-old girl’s tongue with ease, and despite the fact that she only had a
vague idea of where Congo was as she wrote letters of support to then
jailed Patrice Lumumba, her childhood was spent believing that all people
in the world, whatever the colour of their skin, deserve the right to free-
dom and equality.18 So if one of the key characteristics of postmodernism
has been a celebration of fragmentation of the subject and an emphasis on
multiple identities, then the term ‘balkanisation’ – in this case of Yugoslav
into Serb, Croat, Bosnian and others – one may suggest, has been its less
celebratory counterpart. The term has often been used to describe and
explain the violent disintegration of Yugoslavia in the 1990s as a homoge-
nizing Western narrative about ‘ancient ethnic hatreds’, incomprehensible
to a ‘civilized’ Western European. The postmodern politics of difference
was, in this case, embodied in the form of various ethnic nationalisms,
and so for Ugrešić, who still prefers an ethnically undefined identity for
herself and would simply refer to her father as ‘a Yugoslav, [who] mar-
ried a Bulgarian woman, [her] mother’ (NH, 281), the fragmentation was
traumatic.
Ugrešić’s semi-autobiographical novel The Museum of Unconditional
Surrender explores this traumatic loss of identity and one’s country through
photographs. It includes passages from Susan Sontag’s On Photography and
mini essay-like reflections on the nature of photography, writing and the
condition of exile. The novel is prefaced with a photograph of unknown
women swimmers on the Pakrac River in Croatia taken by an unknown
photographer, but also by a Contents page which reads subtitles such as
‘Family museum’, ‘Group Photograph’ and phrases in German such as
‘Ich bin mude’ (I am tired?), ‘Guten Tag’ (Hello/Good morning), ‘Wo
bin ich?’ (Where am I?). The river points to the place of the narrator’s
childhood (a place that was once safe), and the German phrases reveal her
current (dis)location in Berlin where she must now begin a life in a new
language, accommodate new surroundings and try to piece together the
fragments of her lost life in Yugoslavia following the war. But the narrator,
who announces herself as coming from Atlantis, never really ‘adjusts’ to
a life in a new language, nor does she acquire a new home in Berlin.19 At
the end of the novel, she is at the same point as she was at the beginning,
stuck in an immobilising neither ‘here’ nor ‘there’ and in a wearisome state
of ‘unbelonging’. Her first German phrase ‘I am tired’, which opens the
novel, mirrors the end scene in which she is exercising on the stair climber
in a Berlin fitness centre. Even though the memories of her country are
getting paler, as if they are slowly approaching the gaping whiteness of the
blank photograph, in front of her are the ‘steps that lead nowhere’ and her
feet feel heavy as if they have been stuck to the steps.20 The climbing of
these imaginary steps offers her a temporary healing and release, but at the
same time, their trajectory to nowhere uncannily and painfully reveals the
loss of her previously settled life. In the absence of any fixed coordinates in
the present, she is doomed to climb these steps forever.
Eva Hoffman has suggested that in the first stages of writing exile, the
writer deals with lyrical nostalgia and focuses on remembering the past
and the lost country, and that in the next stage, the concern is with a more
‘cosmopolitan, globalized, international or inclusive world-view’.21 In
After The Museum and in her later writing, Ugrešić has adopted a role of
a cultural nomad which, one could argue, is in line with the rise of other
celebratory and often abstracted conceptions of identity, such as hybrid-
ity, transnationalism, diaspora, exile, migrancy and the global, developed
within the frames of postmodernism and postcolonialism. It is better to be
an ‘ethnic bastard’22 and an ethnically ‘inauthentic’ writer, that dysfunc-
tional cog in the literary machine (NH, 170), than be granted belonging
only as a ‘clearly defined Serb, Croat’ (NH, 170, 167). But as much as such
a position provides a liberating alternative to narrow ethnic identifications,
Ugrešić is also sceptical, particularly in her novel The Ministry of Pain, of
those celebratory concepts as they often fail to account not only for the
complexity of the lived experience, but also for capitalism’s appropriation
of these conditions. As I have shown elsewhere (2009, 2010), there is a
powerful passage in the novel about those privileged young post-commu-
nist generations who will be able to reinvent, construct and deconstruct
themselves and those ‘less fortunate [who] will scrub toilets’.23 For Ugrešić,
exile is a condition that may be romantic in literature but traumatic in
reality, and, throughout her work, she speaks against the manipulation
where exile is positioned at an in-between vantage point offering a radical
vision of the world, or as a metaphor for a new kind of humanism and
epistemology. In her fiction, this is done through a repeated conflation of
the two figures, a ‘migrant flaneuse’, the female migrant loiterer, and that
of a Trümmerfrau, the ‘rubble woman’ engaged in the continuous, never-
ending task of piecing together and archiving the recent post-Yugoslav
and post-communist past.
On the other hand, a search for alternative modes of global diasporic
solidarity from the position of a displaced post-Yugoslav, or an Eastern
European ‘other’ now living in Amsterdam, continues in her essays.
She began developing this vision in her first collection of essays Have
a Nice Day: From the Balkan War to the American Dream (1994). In an
essay entitled ‘Melancholy’, Ugrešić writes about her frequent visits –
while in America – to a recent casualty of recession, the discount store
‘Woolworths’, where she feels at home among the ‘large black women’
who shop and work there. Just as their quality was not of a long-lasting
nature, the cheap products one finds in Woolworths offer a temporary
feeling of comfort and, being among its visitors, Ugrešić feels ‘a temporary
sense of belonging to a class, race, or kind which is ours or which we feel
to be ours’.24 In her next collection, The Culture of Lies, the ‘in-between’
state of the cosmopolitan and the crossing of boundaries of nations is cel-
ebrated in a conscious attempt to subvert them and pass as other wherever
possible. As Ugrešić writes, ‘I am no one. And everyone. In Croatia I shall
be a Serb, in Serbia a Croat, in Bulgaria a Turk’.25 In another essay titled
‘Life Vest’, the space of an airport becomes a ‘home’ to be desired:
I feel good here. I am a human larva. Here, in this no man’s land, I shall
weave my natural nest. I shall wander from sector A to B, from sector B to
sector C. I shall never leave. They’ll never find me. . . . I shall live under the
artificial airport light like a postmodern exhibit, in transitional phase, in
limbo, in an emotionally aseptic space.26
More than in any country, she feels at home in no-man’s-land which

becomes a phantom location where one can disappear. But this postmod-
ern fantasy thrives on an illusion that one can forever remain unnoticed
in such a place. For the white subject at least, the airport can still hold
fantasies of transitions, blending in and being unnoticed.
In another collection, Thank You for Not Reading, diasporic solidarity
is forged in terms of imaginary belonging to other marginalised minority
groups:
At street demonstrations I cry with the Kurds, I buy roses from the Tamils,
I put a coin in the hat of a Gypsy beggar, I buy my vegetables from a
Turkish man. Today I really am surrounded by brothers, black and yellow
and white, in New York, Berlin, Paris, Amsterdam. . . . I catch, infallibly, a
spark of recognition. I know my kind – exiles, nomads, émigrés. I nod my
head and smile.27
The contemporary ‘brothers’ she meets every day perhaps also remind her
of those absent non-white ‘brothers’ from the days of Yugoslavia’s non-
alignment whom she did not have a chance to meet in person. Sparked
by Ugrešić’s sojourn in the United States or by her experience and regis-
tering of what Paul Gilroy has termed ‘everyday conviviality’ developing
spontaneously in today’s culturally mixed metropolises, numerous other
essays are littered with such diasporic encounters.28 While in New York in
the early 1990s, Ugrešić befriends a homeless African-American man with
whom she shares experiences of ‘unbelonging’ and the anger of otherness –
he tells her not to stay in America as she will be ‘black like him’ – and in
another essay entitled ‘Refugee’, she writes about her encounter with an
immigrant fast-food seller:
I stand there, I, an ex-Yugoslav, I, who no longer knows who I am. I buy a
little package of fast food, winking at the swarthy assistant. . . . He smiles,
he’s ‘one of us’, Third World, I recognize him by the expression of conde
scension and cunning on his face.29
But although Ugrešić struggles to imagine alternative diasporic solidari-
ties arising from different global ruptures and forms affective attachments
with other immigrants and the marginalised, this diasporic solidarity and
the points of recognition are here built on an uneven encounter. The ‘we’
she creates is imagined from the vantage point of a privileged intellectual,
and there is another problematic aspect to this proximity. While she can
move between identities and deliberately adopt different disguises – in
her essay ‘Dreamers’ for example, she writes, ‘I am a Jew, a Pole, a Swede,
I am African, Russian, Italian, I am white, black and yellow’ – the black
man and the Third World ‘swarthy’ fast-food seller remain as nameless
others, identified only by their otherness.30 So as much as the essays serve
space as a site for destabilisation of nationally/ethnically/racially rooted
identities and endeavour to unite different histories of oppression and
marginalisation, her politics of dislocation sometimes tend to erase these
different and difficult histories of arrival. These aspects of Ugrešić’s cos-
mopolitanism are therefore problematic, which supports Ien Ang’s argu-
ment that ‘ultimately, diaspora is a concept of sameness-in-dispersal, not
of togetherness-in-difference’.31
In her essay ‘Rise Up, Ye Slavs!’ from Nobody’s Home, Ugrešić writes
about the encounters with the scattered and mainly Eastern European
underclass – hotel cleaners, bus drivers and toilet attendants. They recog-
nise each other ‘in an instant’ by asking ‘are you one of us?’, even if they do
not always speak the same language. Touched by such encounters, Ugrešić
calls for a new sense of ‘global brotherhood’ (NH, 83–5), but this ‘we’ is
less tinged with a touch of irony than with a sense of being at home with
ordinary people who, in the end, used to share the socialist ideology of
brotherhood and unity and who have been variously scarred by its effects.
Ugrešić hopes that she would at least be able to partly reciprocate the gift
of recognition based on this shared space as well as the gift of their hospi-
tality and friendliness. She promises the money she will earn from writing
this essay to the hands of other members of the underclass in need – a
Bulgarian woman in charge of a toilet, a Romanian window washer, a
Russian street musician – whom she meets daily or whom she might meet
in the future. Interestingly, in the American edition of Nobody’s Home, the
title has been stripped of any ethnic identifiers and renamed ‘Rise Up, Ye
Proletarians!’ Ugrešić seems to be revitalizing the last rallying cry from
Marx and Engels’s The Communist Manifesto, ‘Proletarians of all countries,
Unite!’ which was later popularized as ‘Workers of the World, Unite’. She
is calling for a new rhetoric of internationalism that would interrogate
the short-lived optimism and a celebratory attitude to post-communist
transitions to capitalism and help expose new forms of exploitation. In
Ugrešić’s diagnosis of the post-communist condition, the ‘weary Western
Europeans from the front lines of capitalism’ are not spared from criticism
as it is equally them who are flocking en masse to the former commun-
ist countries to get their share of ‘the forgotten appeal of royal treatment’
and affordable ‘full service: pedicures, dentists, doctors . . . even sex’ (NH,
288). She also deconstructs contemporary structures of Eastern European
‘othering’ in the context of their recent ‘tsunami’ migration to Britain and
Western Europe, exemplified in the familiar image of the Polish plumber
whom she aptly describes as the new ‘colonial bogeyman’, or ‘the new
European phantom . . . who wends his way around Europe in overalls,
with a wrench, terrifying the local working class’.32 Rather than demonise
the Eastern European worker, Ugrešić suggests that ‘the first victim of
European unification’ (NH, 236) deserves to be commemorated in a
‘Monument to the [unknown] Polish Plumber’, as the title of her essay
also states. So she calls on post-communist Eastern Europeans not only
to unite in a struggle against neo-liberal capitalism, but also against forms
of cultural racialisation that welcome them on their arrival to Western
metropolises. As I have suggested (2012, 2010), this cultural racialisation
operates through a complex mobilisation of both audible and visible mark-
ers of difference and through a conception of whiteness that is ‘not-quite’,
dirty or exaggerated. This position of being an Eastern European white
other abroad/in the West then problematises binary racial oppositions.
Finally, the famous political slogan is transformed into imagining new
forms of oppositional solidarity based on the ‘togetherness-in-difference’,
as Ugrešić calls on the ‘foreigners of all countries’, in a typical ironic ges-
ture, not to unite ‘because without them [the locals] wouldn’t know that
[they] are – locals’ (NH, 222). In her latest collection, Europe in Sepia,
rather than celebrating ‘uprootedness’, the postmodern cultural nomad
displays an acute awareness of lingering otherness – she will always be a
‘Balkan’ nomad – and a desire to belong is repeatedly thwarted by the lack
of authenticity. In one of the essays, Ugrešić proposes to a Roma compatriot
now settled in Berlin that they adopt her as a Roma writer. But even
though he welcomes his former Yugoslav ‘sister’, he reminds her that she is
‘not a Roma’, causing her to remember all the other similar rejections when
she did not qualify as a ‘true’ Croatian, Serbian or Dutch.33 A closer crit-
ical reflection on the policing of boundaries of national/ethnically defined
literatures is offered in ‘What Is European about European Literature?’
from the previous Nobody’s Home where Ugrešić evokes Azade Seyhan’s
concept of transnational literature and Deleuze and Guattari’s concept
of minor literature in order to celebrate those ‘“ethnically inauthentic”
authors’ like herself. Despite being published, as she reminds us, ‘within
imposed, unjustly narrow and often discriminatory categories – exile,
ethnic, migrant, émigré, Diaspora’, these writers are actually ‘building
their own place, a third cultural zone, a “third geography”’ (NH, 172–4).
Accordingly, Ugrešić’s answer to the question ‘What is European about
European Literature?’ invokes the work of Joydeep Roy Bhattacharaya, a
writer born in India who currently lives in New York and writes about
Eastern Europe. Thus reclaiming the position of an outsider as a priv-
ileged standpoint and turning it into a condition of critical theoretical
activity, Ugrešić declares her belonging to these ‘new’ literatures and calls
for this creative force to colonise national literatures. She concludes with
a sense of wonder and optimism – ‘Who could have predicted that this
invisible, alternative world which had been discriminated against has so
rapidly outgrown the previously exhibiting one . . . or that Lolita would
turn up one day in Teheran?’ (NH, 175).
While I am in agreement with Nataša Kovačević’s point about Ugrešić’s
concern with ‘a subaltern transnationalism that connects postcolonial and
postcommunist migrants, gathered around a shared condition of pov-
erty and exclusion from EU corporate discourses’, this essay has sought
to examine more closely both the subversive potential and the limits of
Ugrešić’s post-Yugoslav cosmopolitan imagination, and call for a more
nuanced reading of Eastern European otherness in the West by pointing
out the unresolved legacy of racism in Eastern Europe.34 In Nobody’s Home,
Karaoke Culture and Europe in Sepia, one can also trace the waning of
some of the earlier optimism in the belief in effective countercultural cri-
tique and ways to reimagine the world. During the 1990s, what was seen
as a depoliticised postmodern preoccupation with fragmentation, ‘nostal-
gic concern with past, place, space and “images” of home, the hybridiza-
tion and pastiche of earlier forms and discourses’ came to be theorised
and understood as being more productive in that it articulated an ‘intense
cultural expression of the desire for social forms capable of representing
what is “lost” in the experience of Enlightenment modernity’.35 Ugrešić
in her ‘obsession’ with archiving the ‘remains’ of Yugoslav and commun-
ist culture does precisely that, although in a slightly different context – to
represent what has been lost in the experience of post-communist transi-
tions to capitalism. Similarly, Eric Santner in the rhetoric of mourning of
postmodern discourses sees an invitation ‘to mourn the shattered fantasy
of the (always already) lost organic society that has haunted the Western
imagination, and to learn to tolerate the complexities and instabilities of
new social arrangement, as well as more hybrid, more “creole”, forms of
personal, sexual, cultural and political identity’.36 While Ugrešić mourns
the fragmentation of Yugoslavia and points to the problematic aspects in
the ‘globalisation’ of Eastern Europe, on this note she is more sceptical.
She writes about our apathetic age and reminds us, by quoting Žižek, that
critical energy has dissipated and ‘found a substitute outlet in fighting for
cultural differences which leave the basic homogeneity of the capitalist
system intact’ (NH, 270). And via Alan Kirby, she is distrustful of the vir-
tual spaces generated by our contemporary networked systems and their
allegedly liberating potential in terms of offering multiple connections
between subjects. As Kirby writes in his analysis of what he calls pseudo-
modernism, ‘in place of the neurosis of modernism and the narcissism
of postmodernism, pseudo-modernism takes the world away, by creating
a new weightless nowhere of silent autism’.37 In a similar way, Ugrešić
proclaims, ‘Totalitarianism is dead, long live totalitarianizing freedom!’38
For Kirby, as well as for Ugrešić, pseudo-modernism undermines the cap-
acity for a progressive critique, but no alternative is being offered by either
of the commentators. Perhaps then, as Jameson claims in the quote with
which I began this chapter, it becomes difficult to organise our past and
future into coherent experience. Because ‘what all of us are left with in the
end’, in our contemporary world where we live with the lack of future-
oriented imagination and discredited rhetoric of solidarity, is ‘an eternity
of the implacable logic of capital’ (HN, 272).
Notes
1 Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
(Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 33–4.
2 Renata Jambrešić-Kirin, ‘Personal Narratives on War: A Challenge to Women’s
Essays and Ethnography in Croatia’, https://sapientia.ualg.pt/bitstream/1040
0.1/1369/1/5croatia.PDF, Estudos de Literatura Oral 5 (1999), 73–98 [79].
3 Gordana Crnković, ‘Women Writers in Croatian and Serbian Literature’, in
Gender Politics in the Western Balkans: Women and Society in Yugoslavia and the
Yugoslav Successor States, ed. Sabrina P. Ramet (University Park: Pennsylvania
State University Press, 1999), 221–41 [239].
4 While it does not address the growing tensions in Yugoslavia, I would disagree
that her work from the 1980s is apolitical. Rather, the oppositional nature is
directed elsewhere – for example at challenging conventional gender roles and
the genre of mass-market romances in The Jaws of Life.
5 See Alan Kirby, Digimodernism: How New Technologies Dismantle the
Postmodern and Reconfigure Our Culture (London: Continuum, 2008).
6 Dubravka Ugrešić, Nobody’s Home, trans. Ellen Elias-Bursac (Rochester: Open
Letter Books, 2008), 280. Hereafter referred to in the text as NH.
7 Dubravka Ugrešić, Karaoke Culture, trans. David Williams (Rochester: Open
Letter Books, 2011), 178.
8 Ugrešić, Karaoke Culture, 178–9.
9 Dubravka Ugrešić, Have a Nice Day: From the Balkan War to the American
Dream (London: Jonathan Cape, 1994), 138–9.
10 Dubravka Ugrešić The Culture of Lies: Antipolitical Essays (London: Phoenix
House, 1998), 169.
11 Jambrešić-Kirin, ‘Personal Narratives on War’, 80.
12 The author of the lyrics is band member Miša Aleksić. For the English transla-
tion see http://lyricstranslations.com/translated/riblja-corba-amsterdam. The
link to the official video is available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=
cqsmoe57kCk. Accessed 1 April 2014.
13 Novosti 6 http://www.novosti.rs/dodatni_sadrzaj/clanci.119.html:423003-Cor-
bopisi-Pravilan-pristup-Evropskoj-uniji (March 2013, author’s translation).
Đorđević‘s 1984 song ‘Besni Psi’ (Rabid Dogs) produced complaints from the
Embassies of Zaire and several Arab countries in Belgrade for equating non-
aligned students in Yugoslavia with rabid dogs. See Srećko Horvat’s account
of Croatian responses to the presence of African asylum seekers in a Zagreb
suburb where he identifies a fetishistic denial in the ‘I’m not racist but’ for-
mulation. He quotes an interviewee who comments ‘I’m not racist, but I do
get uneasy when I see groups of black men aimlessly wandering around the
neighborhood and watching our children’. Srećko Horvat, ‘I’m Not Racist,
but . . . The Blacks Are Coming!’ in What Does Europe Want?, Slavoj Zizek and
Srećko Horvat, eds. (London: Istros Books: 2013), 109–19 [109].
14 See Vedrana Velickovic, ‘Belated Alliances? Tracing the Intersections between
Postcolonialism and Postcommunism’, The Journal of Postcolonial Writing 48/2
(2012), 164–75.
15 For an excellent discussion of some of these issues see Aniko Imre’s ‘Whiteness
in Post-Socialist Eastern Europe: The Time of the Gypsies, The End of Race’
in Alfred J. López (ed.), Postcolonial Whiteness: A Critical Reader on Race and
Empire (Albany: SUNY Press, 2005), 79–102.
16 Ugrešić The Culture of Lies, 258–9.
17 The Culture of Lies, 175.
18 Dubravka Ugrešić, Europa u Sepiji [Europe in Sepia] (Beograd: Fabrika Knjiga,
2013), 11.
19 Dubravka Ugrešić, The Museum of Unconditional Surrender (London:
Phoenix, 1999), 105. Lost Atlantis is a recurring metaphor for a no longer
existing Yugoslavia and it has resonated in literature, fiction, film and theatre
from all former Yugoslav republics.
20 Ugrešić, The Museum of Unconditional Surrender, 247–8.
21 Eva Hoffman, ‘The Uses of the Past’ in Vesna Goldsworthy (ed.), Writing
Worlds 1: The Norwich Exchanges (Norwich: Pen & Inc Press, 2006), 13–18.
22 Ugrešić, The Culture of Lies, 272.
23 Dubravka Ugrešić, The Ministry of Pain, trans. Michael Henry Helm (London:
Telegram, 2008), 228–31. See Vedrana Velickovic, ‘Open Wounds, the
Phenomenology of Exile and the Management of Pain: Dubravka Ugrešić’s
The Ministry of Pain’ in Agnieszka Gutthy (ed.), Literature in Exile of East and
Central Europe (New York: Peter Lang, 2009), 139–54.
24 Ugrešić, Have a Nice Day, 124 (author’s translation).
25 Ugrešić The Culture of Lies, 270.
26 Ugrešić, Have a Nice Day, 225.
27 Dubravka Ugrešić, Thank You for Not Reading: Essays on Literary Trivia, trans.
Celia Hawkesworth (London: Dalkey Archive Press, 2003), 147.
28 See Paul Gilroy, After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture (London:
Routledge, 2004).
29 Ugrešić, Have a Nice Day, 80, 25.
30 Have a Nice Day, 213.
31 Ien Ang, On Not Speaking Chinese: Living Between Asia and the West (London:
32 Ugrešić, Karaoke Culture, 232.
33 Dubravka Ugrešić, Europa u Sepiji, 242–3.
34 Nataša Kovačević, ‘Storming the EU Fortress: Communities of Disagreement
in Dubravka Ugrešić’, Cultural Critique 63–86; [83] (2013), https://emich.
academia.edu/ NatasaKovacevic/Papers. Accessed 20 April 2014.
35 Wendy Wheeler, ‘Nostalgia Isn’t Nasty: The Postmodernising of Parliamentary
Democracy’ in Mark Perryman (ed.), Altered States: Postmodernism, Politics,
Culture (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1994), 90–112; [95].
36 Eric L. Santner, Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory, and Film in Postwar
Germany (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 7.
37 Alan Kirby, ‘The Death of Postmodernism and Beyond’, http://philoso-
phynow.org/issues/58/The_Death_of_Postmodernism_And_Beyond. Accessed
1 April 2014.
38 Ugrešić, Karaoke Culture, 85.
Ch apter 10
Postmodern Prose and the Discourse

of the ‘Cultural Jew’
The Cases of Mailer and Foer
David Witzling
With all due respect to Roland Barthes, ‘the author’ can never wholly die
as long as the dissemination of written texts accords economic privilege
to the writer, and as long as publication and reception are shaped by cul-
tural formations that associate literary authority with reified conceptions
of social privilege circulating around race and ethnicity. The publication
of a novel, reviews in prominent journals that credit the writer’s author-
ity, and book contracts and sales that produce income for the writer are
all manifestations of a kind of privilege that bridges the politico-legal
meaning of that term – an opportunity granted to certain individuals
or categories of individuals under the law – to the looser sense in which
the term tends to be used today – a condition of social and economic
well-being that enables those whom it names to take better advantage
of opportunities that are, in theory, available to all. Once privileged by
contract and accreditation, a writer becomes an author whose privilege
facilitates the power to influence readers’ understanding of the topics
with which he or she is engaged. As Cheryl I. Harris observes, ‘when the
law recognizes, either implicitly or explicitly, the settled expectations of
whites built on the privileges and benefits produced by white suprem-
acy, it acknowledges and reinforces a property interest in whiteness that
reproduces black subordination’, and literary authority is one of those
implicit forms of recognition through which the property interest in
whiteness is reinforced.1 Harris’s formulation illuminates the legal, con-
tractual and economic situations that surface as explicit topoi in liter-
ary texts that have long been discussed as avatars of the social realities
of ethnoracial identification and difference. If the contemporary usage
of the term ‘privilege’ informs the author function, then the formation
of canons concerned with racialised subject-groups must be theorised
in terms of how authorship in contemporary literary cultures remains
160
The Discourse of the ‘Cultural Jew’ 161
bound to both the spectral history and enduring institutional power of
white privilege as such.
I offer these remarks on the racialisation of authority as a preface to a
discussion of the relationship of partial and cultural Jewish identity forma-
tions to the broader postmodern turn in U.S. national culture. Cultural
Jewishness in postmodernity can only be understood in comparison to
constructions of other ‘ethnic’ and ‘racial’ minority cultures subject to
some complex of social prejudice and politico-legal discrimination. Many
individuals of Jewish descent and Jews as a group have benefitted from
the expansion of whiteness in the United States to include them during
the middle decades of the twentieth century. The Jewish-American liter-
ary renaissance of the post–Second World War decades, epitomised for
many by the examples of Saul Bellow, Grace Paley and Philip Roth, was
enabled by the relative economic success of first- and second-generation
Jewish Americans as well as by the sense of shared human equality and
the economic advantages afforded by whiteness, however ambivalent or
uneven the acceptance of Jews as white may have been.2 The reception of
these authors has been shaped by the relationship between anglophone
Jews’ participation in white privilege and the social positions staked out
by people of Jewish descent whose identification was self-consciously par-
tial and cultural rather than religious or ethnoracial.
The cases of Norman Mailer and Jonathan Safran Foer make visible
the ways in which partial and intermittent Jewishness is a phenomenon
reflected in a kind of Jewish-postmodern writing that evokes the awk-
ward coexistence of Jewish male privilege, the relationship of Jewish male
identities to male identities structured through other racial and national
formations and the ongoing effects of forms of Jewish male racial subor-
dination that were becoming less visible and less powerful during the early
postwar decades.3 Eric Goldstein observes that ‘a good deal of coercion
[was] involved in the process by which Jews became part of the white
majority, a process that entailed significant losses as well as gains’, and I
take Mailer and Foer to be paradigmatic of ways in which Jewish-American
literary authority represents itself as both a self-satisfied privilege and a
product of such invisible coercion.4 Two elements I wish to highlight in
these cases are the incompleteness of the process of Jewish self-identifica-
tion and the sense that Jewish content is absent from much of the writer’s
life and work. Representing one of the common attitudes in Jewish lit-
erary studies, Ruth Wisse claims that ‘in Jewish literature the authors or
characters know and let the reader know that they are Jews’, but that is not
actually the case.5 A sense of Jewish self-identification that is always only
162 Davi d Wi tzli ng
partial runs through the subjectivity of many contemporary Jews, and the
sense of absence that connects such a sensibility with the more radical,
even anti-cultural and antihistorical, modes of postmodern thought and
affect is obscured by the focus on the iteration of Jewish ‘content’ in many
studies of Jewish-American literatures and cultures. Jonathan Freedman
and Dean Franco have taken an alternate approach to the construction of
Jewish identities in literary culture, rightly finding that such identities are
the product of what Franco calls the ‘proximity’ between Jews and other
cultural groups. Franco also speculates that the distinctive position of Jews
in American society has enabled Jewish-American authors to understand
American racial and political formations with a distinctive perspicacity.6
This may be so, but I mean here to highlight the ways in which a degree of
complicity with white supremacy and American exceptionalism troubles
authors’ attempts to mediate their positions as inheritors of national iden-
tity and Euro-American literary tradition given their Jewish backgrounds.
Because Mailer and Foer articulate ways that Jewishness can disappear
into invisibility or even render itself wholly absent, their examples can
be used to illustrate the convergence of postmodern and Jewish sub-
jectivities in ways that authors whose Jewishness is closer to integral or
total cannot, whether we mean mid-twentieth-century recorders of par-
tially assimilated immigrant communities or contemporary writers who
are concerned more with the vitality of Jewish textual and cultural tra-
ditions in postmodern settings.7 The resonances between their treatment
of a number of important sociocultural and political topics and the rela-
tionship among them – specifically, the Holocaust, the employment of a
character based on the writer in the text and the dramatisation of the rela-
tionship of the Jewish/white author-character to figures in less privileged
cultural positions – demonstrates the convergence between allegories of
literary authority and representations of cultural tradition that I am argu-
ing is central to a Jewish-postmodern mode of thinking and important to
the evolution of postmodernist literature more broadly. Mailer and Foer
each employ formal gestures associated with postmodernity and postmod-
ernism to ironise – but not necessarily challenge – a generalised form of
authority that, if situated at all in terms of a group identity, is American
or western. These writers do represent a felt and experienced Jewishness of
some sort, but they frame such representations within – and subordinate
them to – the authority to write within the framework of the supposed
universality of post-Enlightenment philosophical thought and literary
form with which the traditions of French poststructuralism and anglo-
phone postmodernist fiction converse.
Mailer’s collection Advertisements for Myself (1959) self-consciously
ramatises the concept of authorship in the context of mid-twentieth-
d
century American publishing, politics and literary dialogue. As David
Savran has argued, the fragmented, hyper-self-conscious and sociocultur-
ally heterogeneous voice Mailer adopts – particularly in ‘The White Negro’,
the centerpiece of the collection – is an early iteration of the dissolution of
the subject in postmodernist literature.8 As a fragmented intellectual auto-
biography of Mailer’s early career, Advertisements is also a commentary
on the relationship between the specific instances of institutional privil-
ege from which Mailer benefitted and his cultivation of the ‘hip’ ‘white
Negro’ persona that was central to his fame and critical reception during
the sixties and seventies. It is precisely the extent to which Mailer empha-
sises his occupation of socially and institutionally privileged positions in
which cultural identity might be rendered invisible or wholly eradicated
that we can find a correlation between post-Holocaust and post–Second
World War Jewish experience and postmodernism’s emphasis on figures of
absent presences and de-centred subjectivity. Mailer is distinctive among
those authors of Jewish descent of his generation in the extent to which
his work reveals the complicity between emergent postmodernist tropes,
practices, and concepts and a universalising imperative that is hostile to
claims of Jewish difference from Euro-American or ‘white’ social and
intellectual norms.
The newly written pieces that connect and introduce the previously
published short stories, novel excerpts and essays in Advertisements sketch
a fragmented autobiographical story about the failure of Mailer’s second
and third novels, Barbary Shore and The Deer Park, and Mailer’s subse-
quent search for forms through which to articulate his idiosyncratic
socialist critique of contemporary American society. This story culmi-
nates in ‘The White Negro’, originally published in 1957, which, as Mailer
hints in ‘First Advertisement for Myself ’, is the strongest expression
of his desire to ‘[make] a revolution in the consciousness of our time’.
The voice employed in the new transitional material in the collection
resembles the outrageous affect of that essay and, presumably, is meant
to evoke the experience of a self that has, in Mailer’s notorious phrase,
‘absorbed the existentialist synapses of the Negro’ (AfM, 341).9 Mailer
implies that the writing subject needs to mark itself as partially ‘Negro’
in order to revitalise and legitimate modern American society, which was,
he believed, veering towards a totalitarian evisceration of human freedom
and vitality. The fragmented autobiographical elements of Advertisements
undercut the euphoria he associates with the state of ‘white négritude’ by
designating the social structures and personal narratives in which ‘white
négritude’ is made possible by white privilege. By illuminating the cryptic
presence of a Jewish-American and immigrant subtext in Advertisements,
I mean to suggest that ‘white négritude’, in addition to typifying a form
of racial ventriloquism that reinforces the boundaries between ‘white’ and
‘black’, serves to symbolise the way in which the possible disappearance
of a Jewish content to one’s identity can be experienced simultaneously as
liberty and self-erasure.10
‘First Advertisement for Myself ’, which opens the collection, focuses on
the ‘circus of variations and postures’ that results from Mailer’s attempts
to write about himself and introduces the cultural contexts that challenge
the very possibility of a stable self in the American culture of the 1950s.
Mailer tells us he becomes ‘a quick-change artist’, a phrase that Thomas
Pynchon would soon borrow in V. to characterise Herbert Stencil, an
even better known example of the unstable postmodern subject than the
‘white Negro’. With respect to the question of whether Jewish culture
requires explicitly Jewish content, the presence of some concrete markers
of Mailer’s biography and the absence of others are important here. The
first example Mailer provides of the instability of his identity is that he
was torn between two possible responses to an invitation to contribute to
the fifteenth-anniversary report of his Harvard class of 1943, a suggestive
choice given the importance of tacit anti-Semitism in American universities
during the period when second- and third-generation American Jews were
beginning to participate quite vigorously in the humanities and in literary
circles. He thought about contributing something ‘conventional’ in the
‘inimitable lead-kitten charm of Harvard prose’, but decided to contribute
a comment that was ‘destructive and therefore useful’, that is, more in the
mode of the aggressive, outrageous persona adopted for the new work in
Advertisements.11 One ironic context for these remarks is that both Mailer’s
Harvard classmates and the readers of Advertisements are likely to know
Mailer best through a third authorial persona: that of the best-selling and
respected author of The Naked and the Dead. At this point, the material
markers of Mailer’s life are his identity as a Harvard graduate and, impli-
citly, his fame as the author of a novel written in a recognisably conven-
tional naturalist form adapted primarily from Dos Passos and Dreiser, not
from his Jewishness.
Mailer also provides one significant piece of information about his
youth in ‘First Advertisement’: he writes that he ‘started as a generous but
very spoiled boy’ before becoming the ‘fighter’ he is in the present. Here,
too, Mailer does not mention his Jewish background, but the comment
suggests an important link between that background and the fascination
with ‘Negro’ bodies he evinces in ‘The White Negro’. The ‘spoiling’ of a
child is complex: it implies material security and a sense of safety – or
the illusion of safety – from social forces that threaten family and per-
sonal integrity. ‘Spoiling’ also entails a form of parental love that damages
the child’s ability to socialise himself properly once mature. Moreover, the
descriptor ‘spoiled’ is consistent with other representations of the con-
flicted sense of privilege and vulnerability in second-generation Jewish-
American homes, such as that in Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), and
hints at the complex of relative economic security, mother-love, partial
segregation and partial assimilation that structured the common expe-
riences of first- and second-generation Jewish immigrant communities
in the United States. This act of self-representation ironically echoes his
claims that Negro identity is created by the sense of constant threat and
exclusion created by racial oppression in ‘The White Negro’.12 His pos-
ition as a spoiled (Jewish) child is characterised by relative privilege, and
his adopted position as a rebellious ‘white Negro’ is necessitated by sys-
temic oppression, but these positions converge in a propensity towards
rage directed towards the withheld promise of freedom which he associ-
ates with national culture. Mailer, in this way, suggests alternative cogni-
tive and biographical routes towards the vital aggression of his persona
than the adoption of an essentialising identity he associates with the Negro
male body. The rage, sexual desire and insouciance of the ‘white Negro’
persona also bear a family resemblance to the ‘rage’ Freedman claims
characterises Philip Roth’s adaptation of the high culture of modern fic-
tion and the ‘rudeness’ and ‘immaturity’ that, according to Ross Posnock,
characterise Roth’s reiteration of humanist cosmopolitanism. In the cases
of both authors, these affects are responses to, and rhetorical strategies for
engaging, the whiteness of national culture, as Freedman implies, and,
as both critics would agree, these affects signal resistance to the value of
expressing an essentialising Jewish identity.13 In Mailer’s case, the occa-
sional nature of his engagement with Jewish content and the prevalence
of examples whose Jewish content is entirely subtextual can be read as a
symbolic manifestation of the dependence of Jewish-American economic
privilege and literary authority on a whiteness that tends to efface, if not
obliterate, the writer’s connection to Jewish community and history.
Due to Mailer’s limited engagement with explicit Jewish topoi, he has
remained a marginal figure in the academic study of Jewish-American lit-
erature as such, and Sanford Pinsker has argued explicitly for this margin-
alisation on the grounds that his work is not driven by a sense of Jewish
identity.14 Warren Rosenberg, by contrast, claims that Mailer’s historical
situation as a person of Jewish descent is central to his work, and argues
that the opposition between the good, but passive, male identity of the
Jewish ‘mensch’ and a male identity associated with aggression and sexual
potency forms a central structuring device in that work. Mailer, Rosenberg
claims, ‘has felt, on the deepest level of his being, a need to purge those
Jewish elements from his character that he sees as weakening his strategic
position’, and he ‘fully embodies – in every sense of that term – the strug-
gle between an inherited Jewish past and an adopted American Gentile
present’.15 The comment about having been a generous, but spoiled, boy
affirms the pattern Rosenberg documents, but the presence of absence,
as it were, of Jewish historical experience in Mailer’s texts remains crucial
to their aesthetic effect and historical importance even after we supple-
ment them with their unuttered Jewish contexts and with a reinscription
of the Jewish male body that troubled Mailer and that has been central
to Euro-American discourses surrounding the figure of the Jew. Jewish
experience also goes unnamed in ‘The White Negro’, even though, as
Andrea Levine perceptively argues, ‘Mailer’s effort to appropriate a power-
ful phallic “blackness” for the white hipster functions in part to mask the
presence of another racial body: the Jewish victim of the Holocaust.’16 In
terms of the context of the historical relationships among self-professed
Jews, partial or non-religious Jews and members of other minority groups,
it bears mention that Mailer’s employment of racial ventriloquism in ‘The
White Negro’ is a response to and, to some extent, a reaction against the
adoption of mainstream liberal ideological positions in the work of the,
mostly Jewish, New York intellectuals. The leading figures in this group
were themselves involved in a performance of partial and cultural Jewish
identity that was translated into the universalising discourses of liberal-
ism, socialism and culture. Although the figures in this school took a var-
iety of political positions, the movement began in progressive circles in
the thirties and exemplifies the common association assumed in modern
American Jewish communities between modern forms of Jewishness and
progressive political commitment.17 When Mailer, in ‘The White Negro’,
contrasts the hipster to the ‘Square cell, trapped in the totalitarian tis-
sues of American society’, a similar impelled silence to that concerning the
Holocaust informs the issue of Jewish intellectuals whose success through
assimilation entails the loss of their particular history (AFM, 339). His
essentialist sensualisation of both race and gender in ‘The White Negro’,
among other consequences, indicates a manifest failure to describe the
relationship among white privilege, black subjection and a distinctive
form of Jewish privilege that Mailer can hardly even acknowledge expli-
citly, even as he implicitly critiques its operation in the culture of other
1950s intellectuals.18
One important similarity between Mailer’s career and the later career
of Jonathan Safran Foer is the extent to which their self-presentation to
the public has dramatised their distance from Jewish communities. This
will probably seem more self-evidently true of Mailer than of Foer, but
Foer has emphasised his literary and scholarly discovery of a partial Jewish
identity in his writing and he has moved in and out of Jewish topics in
his writing in ways that resonate more with the assimilated intellectu-
als of Jewish background who were Mailer’s contemporaries than with
the array of authors of his own generation who have defined themselves
primarily in terms of Jewish religious and cultural continuity, such as
Allegra Goodman, or with the community of Holocaust survivors and
their descendants, such as Thane Rosenbaum. Foer has narrativised his
own process of becoming a Jewish author with self-conscious reference to
environments in which cultural expression is inevitably comparative and
idiosyncratic, dramatising the ways in which such a fundamentally com-
parative cultural milieu challenges the imperative to return to some form
of tradition and stability through religious ritual or historical memory.
In Foer’s first novel, Everything Is Illuminated (2002), a character called
‘Jonathan Safran Foer’ takes a ‘heritage tour’ in which he hopes to visit
the site of the shtetl in Ukraine that his grandfather escaped immediately
before the murder of its population by Nazi invaders, and the conceit of
centring the novel on a character with his own name resembles Mailer’s
narrativisation of his public role as a famous author. The portions of the
narrative representing Jonathan’s visit to Ukraine are narrated by Alex, a
Ukrainian whose family owns and operates ‘Heritage Touring’ and who
acts as Jonathan’s translator during his journey. Alex’s voice is charac-
terised by malapropism-filled English and naïve affection for the myth-
ologies of American popular culture. The novel has been interpreted by
critics largely in terms of how Alex and Jonathan work through the shared
trauma of the Holocaust from the divergent perspectives of Ukrainians
complicit in the Nazi genocide of Jewish victims and in terms of the
ramifications of the Holocaust for the ‘third generation’ descendants of
survivors.19 The centrality of the Holocaust to Jewish cultural conscious-
ness surfaces in this criticism, but the absence of a sense of a guiding,
let alone totalising, Jewish identity from the life of the quasi-autobio-
graphical narrator is an important feature of the novel. One of its funniest
set pieces involves a Ukrainian waitress’s failure to understand Jonathan’s
vegetarianism, and, in the context of the character’s search for a Jewish
history, his vegetarianism exemplifies a set of rituals, ethics and aesthetics
that is not Jewish in orientation. Foer’s mediation of the story inscribes
the Jewishness of the text and its implied author as a necessarily mediated
identity that is a form of knowing and re-membering common to other
‘postmodern’ social formations. The fictional Jonathan is a postmodernist
writer who invents the sections of the novel that imagine a magic real-
ist, pre-Holocaust shtetl for his ancestors. As Tracy Floreani argues, the
novel makes the reader ‘come to see how writing complicates the abil-
ity to know and, consequently, reveals the limits of fully excavating, and
serving as witness of, the past’.20 By juxtaposing Jonathan’s postmodern-
ist historiography to Alex’s ingenuous first-person narration of Jonathan’s
mid-1990s journey, Foer associates his experience of Jewishness with forms
of institutionalised privilege including some degree of economic security,
with affective and cognitive distance from the historical suffering that is
assumed to be central to the history of this ethnic group, and with his
relationship to the contemporary study of the humanities.
Reviews of the novel, and an interview with Foer at the time of its pub-
lication, stress that Foer did not feel the burdens of the survivors’ com-
munity while a child, and only discovered his interest in writing about his
family’s experience of the Holocaust while studying fiction at Princeton
with Joyce Carole Oates.21 Alex says of the fictionalised Jonathan that he is
‘not a jew with a large-sized letter J, but a jew, like Albert Einstein or Jerry
Seinfeld’, and so the reader is invited to speculate that the same may be
true of the author.22 In the decade since he published Everything, Foer has
participated in the American Jewish cultural and religious revival of recent
decades by working with fellow novelist Nathan Englander on a new ver-
sion of the Passover Haggadah, but his most recent book-length work is
a monograph making a moral argument for the vegetarianism he drama-
tised in Everything.23 Foer’s second novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly
Close (2005) reiterates the first novel’s engagement with trauma narrative
in the context of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and focuses on
non-Jewish characters of German descent, establishing more distance
between Foer’s authorship and the notion that survivors’ descendants have
a personal connection to, and obligation to invoke, the historical particu-
larity of the Holocaust.
Reviews of both of Foer’s novels generally centred on the question of
whether the literary personae he creates articulate the traumatic events he
evokes with sufficient maturity and compassion, with many reviewers of
Extremely Loud contending that the voice of Oskar Shell, a nine-year-old
narrator whose father was killed on 9/11, is not as convincing or affecting
as that of Alex.24 Without wishing to make a claim about the merit of
either novel, I would argue that the relationship of precocious percep-
tion and knowledge to forms of perception and knowledge that are pos-
sibly more mature or wise is central to the meaning of both works. The
focalisation of precocious subjectivities is a common element of the cur-
rent generation of white, male postmodernists (for example, David Foster
Wallace, Dave Eggers and the filmmaker Wes Anderson), and, in Foer’s
case, such precocity frames attention to the way in which the author’s
identity as a Jew is always mediated and framed by his prior and more
all-encompassing subjectivity as a white American who is, not coinciden-
tally, familiar with postmodernist narrative as a set of easily accessible con-
ventions. In Everything Is Illuminated, two specific forms of precocity are
compared and related to each other: first, that of the Jewish-American
author searching for material traces of his personal history in Ukraine and
writing magic realist fiction as a means of recreating that history in text-
ual form and, second, that of Alex, whose non-idiomatic English is the
central medium through which the novel provides a sense of access to the
history, and therefore the identity, the author seeks.
In terms of the postmodern-Jewish literary complex that is my cen-
tral concern, the conceit of the Alex-Jonathan relationship serves as means
through which to meditate on the relationship between the privilege of
‘American’ and ‘western’ literary authorship and the erasure of Jewish iden-
tities and histories that were a central feature of modern Euro-American
history; and, as in the work of Mailer and his contemporaries, whiteness
remains a condition of possibility for Foer’s work as a partial Jew. As
Mailer does through the ‘white Negro’ persona, Foer uses the voice of Alex
to perform self-consciously the forms of privilege that produce the work
he authors, in effect creating a new form of authorial privilege based on
the conceit of opening the voice of the work to the subjectivity of a disad-
vantaged other, in this case that of a minstrelised gentile Eastern European
rather than a minstrelised African American. We need, then, to under-
stand the way the characterisation of Alex comments on Foer’s Jewish,
white and American authorship, both in terms of the internal dynamics
of this text and in terms of Foer’s evocation of the long tradition of racial-
ised literary representation from a self-consciously white perspective. As
an American, Jonathan is a symbol of both cultural and economic power.
As a Jew, Jonathan is part of the community terrorised, victimised and
traumatised by the violence in which, as we learn at the story’s climax,
Alex’s grandfather took part and which Alex’s whole family has repressed
between 1942 and Jonathan’s visit to Ukraine in the mid-nineties. The
contradictory attitudes towards Americans and Jews felt by Alex and his
grandfather and the ‘real’ situation of economic power represented by
Jonathan’s hiring of Alex’s family as guides are a central subject matter of
Alex’s narration and dialogue. Alex introduces the plotting of his emerging
friendship with Jonathan in the first chapter by explaining that before his
‘voyage’ with Jonathan, he ‘had the opinion that Jewish people were hav-
ing shit between their brains’ because all he ‘knew of Jewish people was
that they paid Father very much currency in order to make vacations
from America to Ukraine’.25 These open-minded, but overtly anti-Semitic,
remarks resemble but also ameliorate the attitudes of Alex’s grandfather,
who openly claims to despise Jews and openly resents that he has to work
as Jonathan’s driver. In letters that Alex writes Jonathan after his time in
Ukraine which comprise roughly a third of the novel, Alex’s desire to gain
approval from Jonathan for the sections of narrative he has produced are
intertwined with expressions of his desire to save enough money to move
to the United States and study accounting there. The structure of the novel,
in which the letters from Alex written after Jonathan’s trip alternate with
Alex’s narration of that trip and Jonathan’s stories of the pre-Holocaust
shtetl, demands that the reader must always relate the period during which
the two young men are already friends to the time at which Alex believed
in the anti-Semitism that the novel suggests is common to Ukrainian soci-
ety. One consequence of this temporal structure is that the reader must
see Alex’s desire to occupy the subject position of the American and to
achieve the economic security he associates with American identity as the
pretext for the affection he and Jonathan share; this is to suggest, too, that
it is Jonathan’s position as American and masterful English speaker that
fosters the eventual transcendence of Alex’s reflexive anti-Semitism. The
representation of this friendship and its politico-economic context is also
informed by Foer’s emphasis on processes of linguistic mediation that per-
sistently challenge the illusion of reality created by narrative and represen-
tation. In his letters, Alex frequently asks Jonathan if he likes the way he
has told the story, or he justifies something that he embellished or made
up. Gestures such as this demonstrate that the history Jonathan wishes
to discover only ever exists in its linguistic and narrative mediations, but,
more importantly, it also exemplifies how the novel subordinates the
realities of Jonathan’s history and cultural identity – narrated in the third
person with magic realist embellishments – to the affective reality of this
relationship – narrated in a first-person epistolary form that recalls the
sentimental tradition. Jonathan’s partial Jewishness is associated with this
always mediated past and European anti-Semitism, and, although anti-
Semitism persists in Alex’s narration of their shared travels, it is a kind of
relic of that past. The economic disparities between the United States and
the post-Soviet eastern bloc, by contrast, are imbricated in the friendship
that is the basic locus of affective meaning in the novel and that is concre-
tised in the novel’s narrative structure.
Although the sociopolitical contexts that make the role of Alex’s
voice in the novel meaningful are the histories of relationships between
European Jews and non-Jews and between the United States and the
former eastern bloc, the literary representation of Alex falls squarely in
the U.S. narrative tradition of racially inflected dialect writing influ-
enced, in turn, by minstrelised representations of black vernacular cul-
ture. The ‘property interest in whiteness’ that founds the reinforcement
of racial boundaries in the literature of black-white racial ventriloquism
surfaces here as a property interest in American-ness that informs the
figuration of the Ukrainian characters in the novel as its symbolically
‘Negro’ others, suggesting that particular forms of privilege cluster-
ing around issues of economic globalisation, but still shaped by earlier
moments of the modern history of racism and colonialism, structure
culturally Jewish identity formation in recent decades. Alex’s sections are
full of phrasing and remarks that yield ironic meaning to the knowing
reader, many of which reflect back on the sociocultural and economic
issues that I argue are central to the novel. Alex’s voice is constructed
from stereotyped anglophone conventions concerning Eastern Europe,
and his character seems to be intended to reflect the interests of the anglo-
phone reading audience rather than a thorough knowledge of Ukrainian
histories and subjectivities. This is the sense in which Alex functions
as a minstrel figure: he provides comedy and pathos for the audience
and he also provides a medium through which an anglophone audi-
ence can cross the boundaries between American wealth and state secur-
ity and the politically vulnerable ‘Second World’ milieu of the former
Soviet bloc without undermining that audience’s privileged cultural and
politico-economic positions. The difference between Alex’s subject pos-
ition and that of the knowledgeable reader capable of interpreting the
texts is defined by several factors: first, competence in English that cre-
ates ironic humour out of Alex’s non-idiomatic malapropisms; second,
the knowledge of American popular culture and the logic of American
economic opportunity that Alex strongly desires but evidently does not
possess; third, a cosmopolitan outlook through which one can frame
the Jewish, American and Ukrainian cultural exchanges that are central
to the novel’s story; and, fourth, familiarity with the magic realist and
postmodernist narrative conventions that are part of the basic language
of this novel. The parallels between the political relationships encoded
in this act of plotting and earlier examples of literary minstrelsy such as
‘The White Negro’ are not merely heuristic; instead, they reiterate an
identical structure of feeling in which white, liberal and (sometimes)
Jewish male subjects imagine affective relationships that challenge some
social and cultural boundaries central to the dominant form of U.S.
national culture, but that also affirm the imperial relationship between
the author’s subject position and some less powerful other.
Some of the most important of Alex’s improper utterances concern
Alex’s and his grandfather’s fascination with American ‘Negro’ culture.
Alex’s grandfather has named his dog ‘Sammy Davis, Junior, Junior’
because he loves Sammy Davis Jr., but he is dismayed to learn from
Jonathan that the famous African American had converted to Judaism.
When Alex claims in his introductory chapter, ‘I dig Negroes, par-
ticularly Michael Jackson’, Foer identifies Alex’s partial competence in
English with the very language of ‘hip’ that Mailer explored, and his
simulation of English with a seeming Russian accent recalls both black-
white race relations and Jewish immigrants’ adoption of English. Later
in the same passage, Alex’s role in the central plot – translating for
Jonathan during his ‘heritage tour’ – is introduced to him as he watches
‘the greatest of all documentary movies, The Making of “Thriller”’. The
ironic pretense to knowledge in this assertion of taste invokes the uncom-
fortable question of whether the absence of knowledge also implies the
absence of intelligence. This remark, and the question about the intel-
ligence of the other that it raises, recalls similarly ironic dialogue and
narration in the most famous modern American narrative about racial
formations, Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and, in turn, also
invokes the tradition of minstrel performances that play on the trope
of ‘Negro’ ignorance and naïveté. For another example, near the start of
the novel Alex reports that he and his grandfather ‘are both people who
remain conscious very tardy’, a remark that signals the novel’s interest
in the belated process through which Alex will learn of his grandfather’s
actions and of the hollowness of their shared anti-Semitic feeling. At
the key moment of the story – the revelation that Alex’s grandfather
killed Hershel, his Jewish best friend, in the same massacre from which
Jonathan’s grandfather was the only survivor – Alex imagines himself
saying to his grandfather that ‘even if you were a bad person, I would
still know that you are a good person’.26 Here, Foer echoes the motif
of belated transformation suggested in the earlier passage. The contra-
diction in the statement signals the possibility that, like Huckleberry
Finn and Jim, Alex might not himself understand the full implications
of what he cannot say explicitly. My point in invoking Twain is that
Foer reiterates a particular tradition of modern narrative irony in which
the implied author and the implied reader are placed in the position of
the mature, knowing liberal subject and the character is placed in the
position of the learner whose growing understanding may be comfort-
ing to the liberalism of that implied reader, but serves also as a signal
that the character remains, at least for the moment, inferior with respect
to his ability to thrive in a public sphere that demands a subject able to
comprehend discursive codes through cosmopolitan understanding and
mastery of a standard and complex form of English.
Critics’ emphasis on the sentimental and therapeutic rapprochement
between Ukrainian and Jewish-American subject positions that the novel
achieves after the grandfather’s actions are ‘illuminated’ has obscured
the way in which the novel reinscribes the authority and privilege of
the novelist who frames this naïve voice in the conventions of postmod-
ernist and magic realist literary discourse. The invisibility of culturally
Jewish personal and social experience, and of the textual tradition of
Jewish education and religious practice that define the convergence of
Jewish and nascent postmodern cultures in the period of Mailer’s early
career, is not at issue in this contemporary novel; but still at issue is the
interdependence between the reclamation of Jewish religious and textual
traditions and the firm establishment of white and American privilege
for people of Jewish descent. Also, and as the comic representation of
Alex’s fascination with Michael Jackson suggests, the, as it were, cos-
metic heterogeneity of American national culture hides not only the
persistence of white privilege but the identity of white privilege within
domestic borders and American privilege in the sphere of global culture
and geopolitics.
Neither the precocious comedy of postmodernist writing nor the narra-
tion and voicing of ‘racial cross-dressing’ are Jewish or exclusively Jewish
textual practices, of course; additionally, if the correlation between white
privilege and postmodernist textual play I have sketched is historically
significant, further study is necessary of the ways in which non-Jewish
male writers such as Pynchon and Don DeLillo as well as Jewish female
writers whose negotiations with authority tend to be quite different from
those I have sketched here – Grace Paley or Adrienne Rich, for example –
all wrestle with the same histories and cultural relationships I have dis-
cussed. I would nevertheless end by speculating that the cases of Mailer
and Foer leave us with some important phenomena that pertain generally
to contemporary Jewish cultural history: one is that there need be no
explicitly or even implicitly Jewish textual content for a work to function
in its reception as Jewish. I do not just mean here that a readership inter-
ested in invisible, but still Jewish, experiences will impose this interest on
the text. I mean instead that the erasure of connection to Jewish textual
and cultural traditions remains part of contemporary ‘Jewish’ experience
and that this erasure is equally important to the work of authors who
emphasise the absence of Jewish content such as Mailer as it is to authors
who either assume or seek Jewish content such as Foer. The other is that
critical discussions of new forms of Jewishness have tended to elide the
complicity between the formation of new Jewish identities and commu-
nities and the politico-economic institutions that reinforce white and
American privilege.
Notes
1 Cheryl I. Harris, ‘Whiteness as Property’ in Kimberlé Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda,
Gary Peller and Kendall Thomas (eds.), Critical Race Studies: the Key Writings
That Formed the Movement (New York: New Press, 1995), 276–91 [281].
2 For the intellectual history of whiteness and racial categorization in the United
States, see Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European
Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1998); Nell Irwin Painter, The History of White People (New York: W. W.
Norton, 2010).
3 For historical background on Jewish and European immigration to the
United States in relation to the theorisation of whiteness, see Karen Brodkin,
How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says about Race in America (New
Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1998); David Roediger, The Wages of
Whiteness: The Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 1999).
4 Eric L. Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 5.
5 Ruth Wisse, The Modern Jewish Canon (New York: Free Press, 2000), 15.
6 Jonathan Freedman, Klezmer America: Jewishness, Ethnicity, Modernity (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2007); Dean J. Franco, Race, Rights,
and Recognition: Jewish American Literature since 1969 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 2012), see especially 14.
7 For studies documenting and celebrating this trend among recent writers, see
Helene Meyers, Identity Papers: Contemporary Narratives of American Jewishness
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 2011) and Derek Parker Royal
(ed.), Unfinalized Moments: Essays in the Development of Contemporary Jewish
American Narrative (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2011).
8 David Savran, Taking It Like a Man: White Masculinity, Masochism, and
Contemporary American Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1998), 49.
9 Norman Mailer, Advertisements for Myself (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1992), 17, 341.
10 On racial ventriloquism, see Susan Gubar, Racechanges: White Skin, Black
Face in American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). On ‘The
White Negro’ and racial boundaries, see Eric Lott, ‘White Like Me: Racial
Cross-Dressing and the Construction of American Whiteness’ in Amy Kaplan
and Donald Pease (eds.), Cultures of United States Imperialism (Durham: Duke
University Press: 1993), 474–95; Kobena Mercer, Welcome to the Jungle, 300–1.
11 Mailer, Advertisements for Myself, 18.
12 Advertisements for Myself, 22, 340.
13 Jonathan Freedman, The Temple of Culture: Assimilation and anti-Semitism
in Literary Anglo-America (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2000), 204–8; Ross Posnock, Philip Roth’s Rude Truth: The Art of Immaturity
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).
14 Sanford Pinsker, Jewish-American Fiction, 1917–1987 (New York: Twayne,
1992), 106–7.
15 Warren Rosenberg, Legacy of Rage: Jewish Masculinity, Violence, and Culture
(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001), 115. See Allen Guttmann,
The Jewish Writer in America: Assimilation and the Crisis of Identity (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1971). See the introduction and 153–5, for a related
reading of how the experience of assimilation and disavowal of Jewish reli-
gious tradition frames Mailer’s work.
16 Andrea Levine, ‘The (Jewish) White Negro: Norman Mailer’s Racial Bodies’,
MELUS 28 (2003), 59–81 [60].
17 See Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks, 3; Deborah Dash Moore, At
Home in America: Second Generation New York Jews (New York and Guildford:
Columbia University Press, 1987), 6–16.
18 David Witzling, Everybody’s America: Thomas Pynchon, Race, and the Cultures
of Postmodernism (New York: Routledge, 2008), 38–47.
19 See, for example, Phillipe Codde, ‘Keeping History at Bay: Absent Presences
in Three Recent Jewish American Novels’, Modern Fiction Studies 57 (2011),
673–93; Jennifer M. Lemberg, ‘“Unfinished Business”: Journeys to Eastern
Europe” in Thane Rosenbaum’s Second Hand Smoke and Jonathan Safran
Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated’ in Royal (ed.), Unfinalized Moments, 81–95.
20 Tracy Floreani, ‘Metafictional Witnessing in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything
Is Illuminated’ in Royal (ed.), Unfinalized Moments, 139–49 [139].
21 Joyce Wadler, ‘Seeking Grandfather’s Savior, and Life’s Purpose’, The New York
Times, 24 April 2002.
22 Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
2002), 104.
23 Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals (New York: Little, Brown, 2009);
Jonathan Safran Foer and Nathan Englander, New American Haggadah (New
York: Little, Brown, 2012).
24 For typical reviews of Everything, see Brooke Allen, ‘Books & Critics’,
Atlantic Monthly, April 2002, 141–2; Siddartha Deb, ‘Novel of the Week’, New
Statesman, 1 July 2002, 55. For Extremely Loud, see Walter Kirn, ‘Everything
Is Included’, New York Times Book Review, 3 April 2005; John Updike, ‘Mixed
Messages’, The New Yorker, 14 March 2005.
25 Foer, Everything Is Illuminated, 3.
26 Everything Is Illuminated, 4, 7, 227.
Ch apter 11
Race, Comedy and Tourism

The Hideous Embarrassments of Will Self ’s The Butt
David Punter
Narrative, Reversal, Teleology

Will self-published The Butt: An Exit Strategy in 2008. The narrative
appears to be centred on a character called Tom Brodzinski. He is on holi-
day, with his wife and four children. He seems to be from the United
States, although this is never fully confirmed; and the country – or land,
or continent, or ex-colony – where the action takes place is never fully
named either. At the beginning, Tom has decided to give up – not for
the first time – smoking; from his hotel balcony, he flips his final butt,
and it lands on the bald pate of an elderly man on the balcony below
him, causing some degree of injury. The elderly man’s part is taken by
his companion, Atalaya, a young woman from one of the numerous tri-
bal groupings which dot the locality; and Tom discovers that he is unable
to leave, because his act has become entangled in a vast complexity of
national, regional, ex-colonial and purely local laws.
Among these laws is a law of restitution, which requires Tom to buy a
quantity of guns, cooking pots and so on, and to travel personally with
them to give them to the tribe from which Atalaya comes. All this, Tom
learns, after a series of remarkably equivocal experiences involving the hon-
orary consul, Winthrop Adams, a man of deep professional and personal
ambiguity, and a local lawyer, Jethro Swai-Phillips, whose own motivations
appear all but indecipherable. Tom’s family return home, leaving Tom to
make the journey ‘over there’, a journey whose distances are almost com-
ically extended to many thousands of miles, but what makes this fate – to
be undertaken in the face of devastating heat, threatening local insurrec-
tion and incomprehensible languages – even more disturbing is that it has
to be made in the company of another ‘Anglo’, Brian Prentice, who also
seems to be offering restitution to a tribal group whom he has offended.
According to an unintelligible system operated by local ‘makkatas’ or
witch doctors, the relative status of Tom and Prentice keeps changing, and
177
178 Davi d Punter
accordingly, so does their sense of physical well-being; at one time Tom
seems to himself, and perhaps to others, to be enacting a myth of the
Great White Explorer, rather in the manner of Irvine Welsh’s Marabou
Stork Nightmares (1995); at another time he is barely able to move and has
to be supported, both physically and mentally, by Prentice, whom at all
times Tom believes to be guilty of a far worse crime than his own – which
was, after all, merely accidental, although we are repeatedly told that the
version of justice observed by these tribal peoples contains no concept of
‘accident’.
We pursue Tom in his attempts to make sense of the difficulties which
surround him; indeed, we find ourselves drawn into this nightmare, which
has been sometimes referred to as Kafkaesque, within which he tries to
survive. But as the narrative draws to a conclusion, we discover that noth-
ing has been as it seems. All of the characters with whom Tom has been
in contact, including his own wife, the honorary consul, the lawyer Swai-
Phillips and many others, have been in conspiracy to bring him before the
absurd ‘court’ of a character called Erich von Sasser, who appears at first
glance to exercise a peculiar sway over the particular tribe before whom
Tom stands accused.
But there is much more to it than this; because by the end of the novel
we are brought to realize that the natives of the interior of this vast and
forsaken land, the virtually sole occupation of which is forced labour in
the terrible, indeed ‘hellish’, bauxite mine known as Eyre’s Pit, are them-
selves a pure postcolonial construct. Having no remembered traditions or
customs of their own, they have been treated as a tabula rasa by von Sasser,
who has succeeded, albeit with many faults, in implanting an entire myth-
ology and belief system by means of a version of lobotomy, a kind of usu-
ally botched operation to which Tom, for his faults in the upbringing of
his adopted son, who is only now revealed to have been the victim of one
of von Sasser’s earlier failed experiments, is now being called to succumb.
The Butt
The story opens with a butt, a cigarette butt, and develops from the night-
marish consequences of an unmotivated, if careless, ‘flipping’ of a butt.
But; there is always a ‘but’. What if, for example, the consequences of that
ignorant (because this country has strict laws around smoking) but non-
malicious event had not fallen within the confines of a net of communal
laws? What if no physical damage had been done? But: it has, and the
novel slowly unfolds the upshot of the action.
Race, Comedy and Tourism 179
Yet the notion of the ‘butt’ figures also in a different way, cognate with
the ‘butt’ of the joke, although this is drawn out to considerable length in
the novel, and it comes down to two issues. First, is it Tom or his hated,
despised confrère and, no doubt, alter ego Prentice who is the butt of this
terrible joke; but secondly, and more germane for our purposes, since both
Tom and Prentice are Anglos, who is it that has been the butt of the joke
or, perhaps better, charade, played on, or played out in, this postcolonial
scenario for the past decades?
In a dream in which he has severed Prentice’s head, and has a presen-
timent of the complicity of all the other characters he has met in this
exotic but curiously disarranged locale, Tom says that he ‘“had to do it.
I’m, like . . .” he snickered. “The butt of this situation as much as you are –
more, even. They were all on to me, fucking riding me, man – Adams,
Swai-Phillips, Squolly, the judge, even Gloria here.”’1 It is not crucial to
identify all of these characters; what is crucial is to identify how what the
author is portraying here, in graphic detail, is a sense of postcolonial para-
noia, the sense of being lost in a system which has inexplicably risen up
against you.
But there is more to it than this; for in fact every one of the characters
named here is said, at least at one point in the text, to be of indetermin-
ate identity. Adams, the honorary consul, has largely submerged issues of
sexual orientation. Swai-Phillips is, obviously, of at least dual racial heri-
tage, but has also a variety of physical disabilities which alter according to
context. Squolly, the senior policeman, belongs to an intermediate racial
grouping whose presence on the continent is the subject of lengthy but
entirely contradictory explanations. The judge is perhaps an ‘Anglo’, but
then in the novel the very term ‘Anglo’ has two different and incompatible
meanings, roughly corresponding to ‘long-time expatriate’ and ‘tourist’.
And Gloria, Swai-Phillips’s cousin, also appears to be inhabiting a dual
identity, impersonating Tom’s absent wife, while undergoing a continuing
series of role changes, as she travels with Tom and Prentice over the last
parts of their (irreversible) journey.
The butt; the cigarette butt; the butt of the joke; but then there is
also the butt in the anatomical sense, and it is significant that Tom’s
hatred and fear of, and contempt for, Prentice arises from an unjustified
assumption that Prentice’s crime must at least be worse than his own,
and in order to flesh out this fantasy (which turns out not to be entirely
a fantasy) he invents a ‘Prentice’ who is a paedophiliac violator. These
matters, of course, circle round: just as Tom has violated the head (and
indeed the surrounding airspace) of his neighbour with his butt, and
180 Davi d Punter
has thus entered into a space where he is in continual fear of being the
butt of a joke which he cannot understand (and indeed, as it turns out,
he never will), so questions continually arise as to who really is the butt
here of an ongoing process of racial abuse. These questions are, naturally
in view of the book’s stated distrust of the western ‘habit’ of teleology,
not answered.
Topography, Prejudice, IEDs
The Butt has, as I have mentioned, a curious topography. Tom is almost
certainly from the United States; it would take little insight into Prentice’s
sub-public-school Anglicisms to see him as British. Whether there is any-
thing more to be made of this dialectic, wherein eventually an alliance of
British tradition and German imperial anthropology destroys the naïve
U.S. traveller, is not clear, but it is, in any case, not the main point, which
has to do with the identity, or non-identity, of these vast and sprawling
lands over which imperial powers and forces of various kinds have sought
to spread themselves.
Cover comments on The Butt have most frequently sought to identify
the terrain with Iraq, but apart from a single reference to IEDs, this is
incorrect, and motivated, presumably, by a simple wish to match fictional
and actual political terrains. There are echoes of parts of South America;
there are echoes of the devastated island of Nauru; but above all, the rec-
ognizable features of this land belong to Australia. It advertises itself to
tourists with huge billboards which turn out, of course, to fall somewhat
short of the truth:
big billboards that had encouraged him to fly his family halfway around
the world to this island-continent. On these, smiling Anglo servitors, clad
in spotless white, were laying out tableware on spotless linen, while behind
them a towering rock formation burned orange in the low-angled sun.
‘We’ve set the table and checked under it for flippers’, the slogan read. ‘So
where the hell are you?’ (TB, 35)
The transformation of the emblematically aboriginal Ayers Rock into

Eyre’s Pit, symbol of the geological and cultural devastation of inten-
sive mining, is all too resonant, as are the more minute particulars – the
‘laughing surfers on the beaches down south, and bubbling snorkelers on
the Angry Reef up north’ (TB, 35), but the text is more complex than
this, as the indisputable presence and effect of the IED signifies. Rather,
what we have is a compound of postcolonial after-effects (although Iraq is
rarely regarded as a postcolonial country, that is, of course, exactly what it
is, and now perhaps in more than one sense).
Built on a partially recognisable Australia, we have a more general trope
of natural inhospitableness. The vast distances over which Tom and his
occasional companions have to travel are largely desert; the very thought
that humans could ‘own’ these spaces, that they could be subdued to such
a simplistic and modern concept as nationality, appears increasingly irrel-
evant as he penetrates the ‘interior’ – the outback, the ‘empty quarter’,
however it might be named (always, of course, by the other).
Behind the text, it seems to me, there lurks one of the most profoundly
disturbing of all modern writings, Paul Bowles’s The Sheltering Sky (1949),
in which the deserts – this time of North Africa – destroy anything non-
native which moves into the interior, a novel totally without redemp-
tion. But The Butt, of course, is not exactly a tragedy on the scale of The
Sheltering Sky; indeed, it is a kind of comedy, full of jokes and sly asides –
although indeed these do nothing to preserve Tom from his own eventual
fate, which is terrible in itself.
Conspecifics
There are, in this unspecific land, three racial categories. There are the
‘natives’, often described in the terms of obvious prejudice as ‘bing-bongs’,
although occasionally in more elevated, though probably false, ways –
‘the desert folks believe the land is always becoming – never, ah, finished.
That every time a traveller visits a region it, ah, springs into being for
him, taking on the characteristics of his own mind’ (TB, 139). But this
seeming account of the theory of aboriginal songlines is spoke only by
the Honorary Consul, the quintessence of unreliable witnesses, and thus
becomes a kind of parody of Western colonial romanticism in the very
instant that it is spoken.
The second group are the Tugganarongs, whose origin is in a state
of continuing doubt. They might have arrived here (wherever ‘here’ is)
from neighbouring islands, a concept of origin which has all too obvi-
ous Polynesian echoes; or they might have been brought here by Western
settlers to do the kinds of work the natives would not or could not do,
in an echo of the importation of African slaves into the Caribbean. The
Tugganarongs, at any rate, occupy an intermediate space; usually physic-
ally obese, one could say that they are built out of spare body parts from
Tonga and from other island nations ruined by Western conquest; in
The Butt, many of them appear to have been transformed into a kind of
182 Davi d Punter
internal security force, which could be construed as keeping the peace but
could also simply be a projection of their intermediate position between
the natives and the Anglos.
The Anglos, of course, run the show; they are the governing class and
the major entrepreneurs, as well as the main group of tourists who ensure
the viability of the local economy (Australia’s own dependence on tour-
ism has vastly increased in recent years). But the mysterious Swai-Phillips
has another source of power which comes precisely not from a clarity of
boundary but from a mixing of blood and race: ‘He has Gandaro and
Aval blood; hill and desert. There’s a dash of Tugganarong in there as well,
and, of course, his mother’s mother was Belgian. So, he covers the, ah,
waterfront’ (TB, 43). The colonial and postcolonial references abound
and multiply; this is the language of mulatto, quadroon and octaroon,
the minute distinctions by means of which Western imperialists tried to
maintain – even while, absurdly, undermining – the possibility of purity
of blood. It would be difficult also not to think that the Belgian allusion
takes us back to Conrad and the ‘heart of darkness’, that darkened, if also
paradoxically all too brilliantly lit, space from which the traveller stands
only the slimmest of chances of returning.
‘Conspecifics’ – an unusual term, but one that von Sasser uses during
the course of the immensely long, meandering speech towards the end of
the novel in which he in effect justifies having played the role of god and
invented a civilization – but it is a civilization which has, like all civiliza-
tions, its limits: we ‘have always desired’, he says, ‘a more perfect union,
justice for ourselves, if not our blacker conspecifics’ (TB, 303). Von Sasser’s
aim is not much different from those of earlier advocates of lobotomy: to
root out the causes of psychopathy, to produce ‘harmony’ at all costs; but
in The Butt this is revealed in its full starkness as a project with an obvi-
ous consanguinity with the colonizing project. From this paradise of har-
mony, black ‘conspecifics’ will be excluded; civilization and racial purity
go hand in hand, and species identification has no power to override the
imperial power drive.
Race and Colour

Tom and the Honorary Consul discuss Tom’s case; or rather, the case
against Tom. Tom asks what motive he could possibly have had for caus-
ing injury to the elderly man, Lincoln. ‘There’s motive in abundance,
Brodzinski’, the Consul says, almost choking with laughter, ‘Jealousy, for
one. Atalaya has already told Commander Squoddoloppolollou that you
were looking at her, ah, breasts, before you flipped the butt –’:
‘Oh, ferchrissakes!’ Tom cried.
But Adams continued: ‘Or, should the police choose to paint you up, ah,
blacker still, they could say this was a race-hate crime.’
‘Lincoln’s not black!’ Tom expostulated.
‘Mr Lincoln is an initiate of the Tayswengo, Brodzinski.’ His lips twisted
with the irony. ‘And, so far as they’re concerned, they come in only one, ah,
colour.’ (TB, 94–5)
The status of ‘initiate’ is one which Lincoln has apparently gained by
marrying Atalaya, although the status of this marriage remains uncertain
because of the complexity of conflicting laws which lie like a shimmer-
ing network across the island-continent; at any rate, it is sufficient for
Tom on the contrary to occupy the position of the outsider. From this
position, a considerable amount of what he experiences could fall under
Homi Bhabha’s heading of ‘sly civility’; there is occasional open hostility,
but most of the time Tom is left in a series of doubts as to precisely what
tone is being used towards him, and how dangerous or farcical his situ-
ation actually is.2
The discourse of race and colour runs through and through the book,
especially once it is revealed that Tom and his wife Martha’s adoption of
their son Tommy Junior may have been the spark which has ignited the
conflagration in which Tom now finds himself. Tommy Junior has a scar
(which is even later explained as an effect of the ‘operations’ which von
Sasser performs and which will later leave Tom as a lifeless, memory-less
scavenger of cigarette butts), and Martha, who handled all the particu-
lars of the adoption, had implied to Tom that what lay behind ‘the scar
explained, in part, why an otherwise perfect – and more or less white –
baby was available through this particular agency, which usually sourced
children from poorer, browner regions of the world’ (TB, 112).
If Martha did explain anything to Tom, then he either was not lis-
tening or has since forgotten, because he makes no connection between
Tommy Junior’s origins and the predicament in which he now finds him-
self; in fact, Tommy’s physique and predilections suggest to us that he is a
Tugganarong, an occupant of an in-between status before being subjected
to von Sasser’s experiments: ‘more or less white’ is the resonant phrase, the
equivocal phrase, the phrase which haunts the text; at another point in the
text, his body is described as ‘murky-brown’ (TB, 161).
184 Davi d Punter
And so racial difference is both crucial in the novel, and yet sometimes
strangely indeterminate; it is as though colour sways before the eyes, as
though colour itself can be anything you want – or need – to believe. The
benign view of this would be that Tom and Martha have lived with their
son for so long that the question of his skin colour has lost all meaning,
has faded into the background; the less benign interpretation would have
it that even questions of colour, even ones which should notionally admit
of a precise interpretation, can be altered and manipulated according to
the needs of power.
The Triplicity of Justice

One of the most startling scenes in the novel occurs when Tom is brought
before a law court to learn what his punishment is to be:
The door behind the bench swung open, and a beadle led in the judges.
Staring at the bizarre trio that came in, Tom was flummoxed by how the
courtroom had gulled him. On entering, it had seemed so ordinary as to be
banal. . . . That the strip lighting seemed harsh and the carpet jaggedly pat-
terned, he put down to the Seagram’s [whiskey]. This mental astigmatism
perhaps also accounted for the way the escutcheon seemed to be leaning
out from the wall above the bench at a precipitous angle.
However, as the native judge, his black body elaborately painted with white
stripes slipped behind the end of the thorny screen that bisected the cham-
ber, Tom realised that he hadn’t even noticed this weird organic baffler.
(TB, 123–4)
Tom has completely misread the scene: what he has seen as slightly irritat-
ing features of the courtroom’s lack of design taste turn out, in fact, to be
specifically designed to accommodate one of the trio of judges, the native
‘makkata’, and to such an extent that they assume the status of protective
‘colouring’. This judge cannot be seen; he can perform his functions only
behind a screen. He is sacred and taboo; symbol of a prior law and pro-
tected from contact with all that might contaminate that law.
Yet this is too solemn a description, for once again it needs to be
emphasised that this is essentially a comic book, even if Tom’s state of
near continual embarrassment challenges the limits on our laughter. Here
come the other two judges: ‘Tom stood and gawped at the two remain-
ing judges: one Anglo, one Tugganarong. Their full-length robes were
so bedecked with ribbons of various hues that they resembled raggedy
dolls with human heads stuck on them.’ The ramifications are manifold.
Whereas the native judge is virtually naked and blends perfectly into his
background, these two are, as it were, impositions on the scene. In their
panoply they resemble nothing more than fetishes, voodoo dolls, made-up
beings put together from bits and pieces, relics; their ‘civilized’ moder-
nity appears more primitive than the primitive. But the triplicities move
on from there (Lincoln’s full appellation, we now note perhaps anew, is
Reginald Lincoln the Third) – for the justice they come to administer is,
in fact, the ‘three forms of justice provided for under the linked constitu-
tional and Native Title provisions [itself a term from the Australian law
book]. To whit: punitive, retributive and corrective’ (TB, 124–5).
The three judges; the three Fates; the Furies – the list of triplicities could
go on and on, except of course that the majority of these trios in Western
myth are female, and these judges are all, in their rather different ways,
resolutely male – unless we accept that the question of dress, nakedness
set alongside the ‘robes’ which can signify a feminization of the male
body, puts a question as to who, and by what means, Tom is actually to
be judged. In any event, the legal proceedings are a little less farcical than
the weirdly parallel proceedings in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland
(1865); and in both cases matters hinge on the utter incomprehensibility
of these matters of adjudication to the victim – for at this point, Tom is
undoubtedly more the victim than Lincoln or his Atalaya ever were.
The three forms of law: but whereas it might sometimes be supposed
that these three forms might be alternative to each other, in this parody
of a postcolonial, but still human-rights-conscious, legislature they are all
to operate at once; there is no telling how the outcome might go, or what
the result might be in terms of what Tom may be compelled to do. And
so here we have a reversal: Tom’s status as Western tourist is not a mark
of his exemption, but rather of his ultimate subjection – not through the
punishments themselves, but through his incredulous incomprehension
of how this legal system, or set of systems, applies to him. Indeed, the
prosecutor does not hesitate to accuse Tom not only of his own crime – if
crime it is – but also of the entire panoply of consequences of colonialism,
even to the appalling condition of the oppressed miners of Eyre’s Pit.
But what he is most accused of – and here is where the issues of the
colonial and of tourism come into sharp focus – is ‘ignorance of both our
civil and our customary laws’, (TB, 128) and this is one of the main themes
of The Butt. It is not one which is unfamiliar: it is about how the tourist,
perhaps unwittingly, perhaps in wilful contempt of locale, contributes to
a degradation of local economies even while, at the same time, he or she
is contributing to its flourishing. Not a new question, but one that still
186 Davi d Punter
I suspect does not have any clarity of answer; The Butt ironizes the ques-
tion, suggesting in the end that the only way in which one can properly
contribute is to undergo a process that will force one to forget one’s own
place, even one’s own time: the perfect tourist would not pretend to know
where he or she is, but would become the mere servant of the economy
and culture in which he finds himself. Or, as in the desperately sad case
of Tom, in the end fails to find himself, is reduced to yet another lobot-
omized patient allowed out onto the streets only on sufferance – which is,
as Self suggests, in fact what tourists often are.
Discourse, Plosives and the ‘Bing-Bong Question’

The native judge, the makkata, does not speak a non-native language.
Well, that turns out to be a lie; he does, but he chooses not to. What
he does speak is described as a ‘volley of tooth clacks and palate clicks’.
Perhaps fortunately for Tom, perhaps not, his lawyer Swai-Phillips speaks
the same ‘tongue’: he ‘returned fire, then the two went on, peppering each
other with plosives’ (TB, 132).
A discourse which appears not to be a discourse; a speech made up of
sounds unintelligible to the outsider, even when that outsider is probably
their ‘subject’. Yet ‘subject’ in what sense? The full range of meanings of
the word ‘subject’ is mobilized in The Butt. Tom is ‘subject’ to laws and
conventions which are never explained to him (probably because such
explanation would be impossible, since it would have to choose one lan-
guage from amid a polyglot community of languages with its own internal
mutual incomprehensions). Tom is also possibly the ‘subject’, the butt, of
the joke; he also ends up as one the ‘subjects’ of von Sasser’s experiments,
‘subjected’ to a version of a process which has its own reminiscences of
that other good doctor, Doctor Moreau’s well-motivated but catastrophic
experiments on the brains of animals.3
A speech entirely replaced by plosives, articulation and the liquidity
of other consonantal and vowel sounds supplanted by those particular
phonetic forms which appear, above all, to suggest confrontation, vio-
lence, threat. It is with plosives that we express our aggression; it is with
teeth clacks and palate clicks that we express our resistance to the end-
less colonization of language. But this, of course, is in part only how the
Western myth goes; another articulation suggested in The Butt is what
we might call the use of the continuous interrogative – or the upward
inflection at the end of sentences which suggests that the speaker is
either anticipating incredulity on the part of the listener, or is intending
to attempt confirmation of his/her own world view at regular, rather
short intervals:
‘As you all know’, Gloria resumed, ‘this is the fifth anniversary of our pro-
ject being up and running in the Tontine Townships, yeah? During that
time, we’ve helped some 700 tontine orphans to find new domiciles, yeah?
These can be state facilities or private institutions, yeah? Other children
stay in our own homes, and in several cases we’ve even managed to secure
adoptions, yeah?’ (TB, 132)
The context of this is the orphans created by a process of tontines, or pyra-
mid selling, that has resulted in a massive outbreak of murders and sui-
cides among those standing to lose out, but I have no space to go into this
here; my point is simply about the discourse, the apparent questioning
which is, of course, no questioning at all. Common to the United States
and Australia, it is a form of speech that seems to treat the world at every
turn as unbelieving and/or unbelievable, to confirm a kind of alienation
which can only be resolved by sedulous adherence to a new convention.
The Hideousness of the Foreign

What are we to do with the foreign? Are we to exoticise it, to see it writ
large on advertising billboards?; are we to plunder it for its art and cul-
ture?; are we to attempt, as some Zen Buddhist writings persuade us,
to pass through it without leaving a trace, without risking the ‘butterfly
effect’ which might damage local economies beyond the point of repair?
And this is not only one-sided; there is no doubt that London, Paris and
Madrid have been as much damaged by tourism as have Bangkok, Beijing
and New Delhi; the problem is that some economies are better prepared
for resilience than are others.
In The Butt, Tom does have one moment of clarity as he confronts –
or more usually evades – the potential consequences of his condition, or
even his presence in this foreign land:
Tom let his head fall back on his sweaty neck. Heavy storm clouds were
piled up above, their spongy masses saturated with rain-in-waiting. His fel-
low tourists – and the native Anglos when they’d had a drink – hymned
the beauties of this mighty land. Yet, now that he was left behind here,
Tom thought he might be looking at it with the more realistic eyes of the
natives, seeing the scarred hillsides of the coastal ranges, smelling the fae-
cal decay of the mangrove swamps. Certainly, there was nothing pictur-
esque in the parts of the interior he had driven through with his family:
the salt pans that flaked like eczema, the warty termite mounds, the endless
188 Davi d Punter
charcoal strokes of the eucalyptus trees on the wrinkled vellum of the grass-
lands. Even here, on the coast, Tom sensed this alien landscape to his rear,
an apprehension of a door ajar in reality itself, through which might be
glanced seething horrors. (TB, 69)
There is an issue here about ‘staying on’, which might perhaps be best
addressed through Paul Scott’s novel of the same name; but perhaps more
pressingly there is the question of how to read these strangenesses, these
exoticisms. We might take that issue up through Jean Rhys’s wonderfully
apt novel Wide Sargasso Sea (1966); but I would prefer to do so via a pas-
sage from Derek Walcott’s Another Life (1975):
Is that where it lies,
in the light of that leaf, the glint
of some gully, in a day
glinting with mica, in that rock
that shatters in slate,
in that flashing buckle of ocean?
The skull is sucked dry as a seed,
the landscape is finished.
The ants blacken it, signing.
Round the roar of an oven, the gnats
hiss their finical contradiction.
Nature is a fire,
through the door of this landscape
I have entered a furnace.4
Here again there is the door into the dark, the realization that, from a
different perspective, nothing is as it has seemed; all is more frighten-
ing, more unnerving, than anything for which we have been so carefully
prepared.
The Uncertainty Principle

The question here can be seen in various ways. It can be seen as a question
of what reality, what semblance of the Real, offers itself for our inspection:
a truly postmodern question, one that addresses the issue of the racial-
ised, gendered, acculturated self in all its pomp and panoply, Freud’s ‘His
Majesty the Ego’. Or it can be seen as a question about the nature of
fantasy; there is a sense in which The Butt can be seen as a perverted,
unsuccessful Bildungsroman, as an attempt at education in which nobody
is sure what ‘education’ (Bildung) would really mean: Is education merely
a cover story for its apparent lexical opposite, ‘induction’? If so, then what
is continually proffered to Tom is the possibility of induction, of initia-
tion, of being introduced to what these rival systems of law and belief
might actually mean. But since none of these systems seem to really con-
tain the heritage, the aetiology to which they pretend, then Tom is left
washed up on the shores of a complex world which he will never be able
to understand.
Simple binaries are among those materials among which he is washed
up, becomes the butt of a never-ending (and profoundly ‘un-original’, in
the sense of being without verifiable origin) joke which causes the faces
of other participants in this drama continually to smile, to laugh, within
apparent hearing of a joke which he is too solemn and, in the end, too
oppressed to share. Here he is, our embarrassed and terrified hero (our self
in a foreign land, where we do not understand the language, the signing
of the ants), trying to account for this plight:
The marble pyramid of the casino, the hypodermic spire of the Provincial
State Assembly building, the bulk of the Central Criminal Court – these
were the true actors occupying the proscenium arch of Vance Bay. Naked
makkatas and judges in their underwear, kissing consuls and wifely
doppelgangers – these were the creatures of mere fancy, with no more
substance than the clouds that sailed over the city from the open sea, the
lenticular vanguards of which bore a distinct resemblance to the lenses of
enormous, wrap-around sunglasses. (TB, 151)
Let us leave aside for a moment the issue of the sunglasses, surely a tourist
version of the spectacles which beam down on us ambiguously in Scott
Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925); let us leave aside also these doppel-
gangers, who come trailing clouds of Freud.5 What we are left with is a
stark contrast, which can again be put in two different but related ways.
First, we might say that this prevalence, dominance of the institutions of
state merely re-‘states’ what Louis Althusser told us a long time ago, which
was about the conformity of the ideological state apparatuses (in this case
the processes of the thwarted or all too successful education represented
by Tom and by the presiding pedagogic figure of von Sasser) and the
repressive state apparatuses.6 Second, we might say that we are reminded
here of a notion of the abhuman: whatever the complexities of Tom’s rela-
tions to the makkata, to the tribe which he represents and from which he
(perhaps) comes, or to the Anglo judge in his underwear, to the Honorary
Consul and his curious predilections, all of these can be seen as subor-
dinate to a certain order of, as Michel Foucault put it, ‘things’: it is the
things themselves, the institutions, the buildings rather than the Bildung,
190 Davi d Punter
the incontrovertible facticity of the objects which signify, in tiny capital
cities all across the world, a rule that may appear indigenous but which is
in fact merely the residual inheritance which comes from a radically dif-
ferent way of doing things, it is these that, as Tom senses here, constitute
the Real; as opposed to the ‘mere fancy’ of relationships with creatures of
flesh and blood, over and above those other fantasies which have sustained
colonial rule.7
The Last Word
We had better put the last word into the mouth of ‘Prentice’, even though,
in the novel, there is really no such stable character as Prentice – or Tom:
they are continuingly interchangeable, each apprentice to each other.
However, here is Prentice:
Bloody lazy bing-bongs. The liberals say they’re closer to God – but they’re
hand in paw with the bloody monkeys. I tell you, Brodzinski, the desert
mobs are still worse, naked bloody savages. Only your Tugganarong is
worth a damn, see, because he’s been subjected to a proper colonial power.
Trained up, taught to be a servant to his masters. Without the work we put
into the Tugganarong who’ve now come over here, these Anglos would be
finished already. Kaput. (TB, 170)
Where Brodzinski is bewildered, Prentice is forthright (although these
roles are frequently reversed): what we have here, all too obviously, is a
voicing of the impatience, the exasperation of European colonizers when
confronted with the recalcitrance of human material which they wished
to ‘re-form’ in their (or indeed, as they would often have said, in God’s)
image. On a lighter note, what we also have is a set of unspoken (one
hopes) reflections on the service culture that awaits Western tourists in
many parts of the world, the undeserved response (as it would be seen)
to the largesse displayed by the tourist in coming – or deigning – in the
first place to visit countries which are topographically strange and thus
perceived as inhospitable.
The large question remains, of course: in dealing with these issues in
broadly comedic ways, is Self reducing these issues’ impact for tragedy
and disaster? This is an unanswerable question, because the wider issue
the novel raises is about how the ‘genre’ of one’s own life, or of episodes
within it, can be determined by one’s ‘self ’ or must remain victim to how
that life is accounted by the other, in this case the seriously (yet always rec-
ognisably conspecific) ‘foreign’. What can be said, however, is that these
postmodern questions – if by that we mean questions of indeterminacy,
uncertainty, doubt as to the Real – are here brought into a singular rela-
tion with the other issue of the assaults on our cultural assumptions which
we confront all the time (or, of course, refuse to) during our strange and
estranging sojourns in that distant yet uncannily proximate realm which
can still be quite precisely described as the ‘foreign’.
Notes
1 Will Self, The Butt: An Exit Strategy (London: Bloomsbury, 2008), 258.
Hereafter referred to in the text as TB.
2 See Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 93–101.
3 See H. G. Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau, edited by Brian Aldiss (1896;
London: Dent, 1993).
4 Derek Walcott, Another Life, in Collected Poems, 1948–1984 (1973; London:
Cape, 1992), 199.
5 See also F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, edited by Jeffrey Meyers (1925;
London: Dent, 1993), 18.
6 See Louis Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes
towards an Investigation),’ in ‘Lenin and Philosophy’ and Other Essays, trans.
Ben Brewster (London: NLB, 1971), 127–87.
7 See Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences,
trans. Richard Howard (London: Tavistock, 1970).
P a rt F o u r
Revising Metanarratives
Ch apter 12
White Male Nostalgia in Don DeLillo’s

Underworld
Tim Engles
Contemporary white men in the United States are not what they are
more likely than others to think and feel they are – free-floating individ-
uals without significantly raced and gendered identities. Don DeLillo
has long been lauded for revealing pervasive contemporary threats to
individualism and yet, in his depictions of protagonists who follow the
dictates of middle-class white masculinity, he repeatedly exposes late-
twentieth-century American hyper-individualism as a pathological
sham. In his later novels, DeLillo hones in more intensively on the irony
that sociohistorical forces in the Cold War era contributed to specific
constructions of white male individualism, a conundrum that Daniel
S. Traber succinctly terms the ‘individualism paradox’.1 As legal scholar
Ian Haney López reminds us, ‘Fathoming the content of white identity
requires a shift from thinking about races as categories toward concep-
tualizing races in terms of relationships. [. . .] It is in the elaboration of
these relationships – invariably of domination and subordination, nor-
mativity and marginality, privilege and disadvantage – that white iden-
tity is given content.’2 Perhaps because DeLillo is commonly grouped
with other white male literary postmodernists, whose work tends to be
read as if their own racial status and that of their white characters has no
significance, his intricate depictions of dominant American racial iden-
tities, and the social dynamics that both form and destabilise them, have
gone relatively unexamined. John N. Duvall’s description of DeLillo’s
most commonly lauded ‘postmodern’ novel, White Noise (1985), as ‘a
meditation on postmodernity – what it feels like to live in the age of
media saturation’, holds true for many of DeLillo’s other novels as well.3
In Underworld (1997), DeLillo provides his most extensive dismantling
not only of contemporary modes of American de facto white supremacy,
but also of white male individualism’s interiorised machinations, espe-
cially the fraught feelings that simmer within the discontented core of
hegemonic dominance.
195
196 Ti m Eng les
In this time-hopping novel’s narrative present, DeLillo’s fifty-seven-year-
old protagonist Nick Shay feels a nagging ontological uncertainty, a lonely
sense of ‘quiet separation’ from his ‘phony role as husband and father, high
corporate officer’.4 DeLillo anchors shuttling perspectives among a dizzy-
ing array of characters with a continual return to Nick’s nostalgic longings
for a seemingly pre-whitened and more authentic version of himself. Nick
tries to assuage his emotional distress in part by reestablishing himself as
an Italian-American descendant, in both familial and cultural terms, and
by reaffirming direct ties with the remaining estranged members of his
immediate family, including his wife, mother and brother, as well as his
own descendants.5 However, while DeLillo does embed decidedly mod-
ernist themes and aesthetics in this novel (which he has described as per-
haps ‘the last modernist gasp’),6 he repeatedly dismantles Nick’s longings
for lost time in postmodernist terms, by exposing them as heavily medi-
ated fantasies – partially self-made myths that respond to quasi-historical
events that to a large extent are also mediated fantasies, mostly generated
in the interests of increasingly global capital. As with several of his other
backsliding white male protagonists, DeLillo confronts and counterposes
Nick with characters who embody the projected raced and gendered
otherness that initially helped erect the pinnacled role of constitutively
dependent white male autonomy that has contributed to his malaise.7 In
these and other ways, DeLillo dissects in Underworld the individualism
fetish most fully embodied by mainstreamed white American masculinity;
he diagnoses as well both the external circumstances that account for this
elevated identity status and the commonly resultant emotional states that
not only drive his representative protagonist to reject his current life and
self, but also lull him back into quiescent acceptance of the ‘phony role’ it
constitutes (U, 796).
In sociohistorical terms, continually morphing conceptions of collective
white American identity have depended on countervailing conceptions,
and consequent abuses, of racial others. As nationalistic unity during the
Second World War spurred integration among workers at home and fight-
ing forces abroad, demands of racialised minorities for equality during the
ensuing ‘Cold War’ impelled the white collective’s psychic burial of its
own incriminating and ongoing abuses. Postwar celebrations of white-
and-black reconciliation contributed to a feel-good façade for exceptional-
ist claims to an emerging American Century, but inequitable economic
conditions and segregated residential and work spaces remained the norm.
Underworld’s lengthy opening section, which depicts the eclipsing in the
mainstream American imagination of the Soviet Union’s successful testing
White Male Nostalgia in Don DeLillo’s Underworld 197
of an atomic bomb by a riveting baseball game, establishes the novel as an
ambitious assessment of American life during the ensuing Cold War con-
text. By beginning in 1951 with a lengthy focus on Cotter Martin, a young,
gate-crashing and self-consciously black baseball fan, DeLillo establishes
a probing, insightful depiction of not only a shift in American collec-
tive identity towards a relational self-conception via the emerging Soviet
Union, but also new formations of the anxious and fearful white suprem-
acy that obstinately undergirds domestic demographic arrangements.
Within the idealised ‘communitas’ of a baseball stadium, Cotter can
feel a tenuous cross-racial alliance with a middle-aged white man, Bill
Waterson, but a disciplinary, ever-hovering white gaze intrudes when a
black peanut vendor works his way towards them: ‘Isn’t it strange how
their common color jumps between them? Nobody saw Cotter until the
vendor appeared, black rays phasing from his hands. One popular Negro
and crowd pleaser. One shifty kid trying not to be noticed’ (U, 20).
When Cotter manages to wrench the winning home run ball from the
clutches of Waterson, he realizes, as a necessarily self-aware member of
a subordinated race, that since the white imagination groups him with
other automatically suspicious black people, running in a mostly white
crowd would mark him as a thief. As Waterson then pursues Cotter out-
side of the stadium in an increasingly vicious chase for the ball, DeLillo
allegorises a question succinctly posed about Cold War domestic race
relations by Leerom Medovoi: ‘How could the United States claim to
defend human freedom against its totalitarian enemies abroad while it
waged a totalitarian race war at home every time it terrorized its own
black (and other minority) populations?’8 As Thomas Heise writes,
DeLillo’s focus on the ball itself ‘immediately precipitates racial tension
over the right to property at a pivotal moment in history when the city
is about to fall into a period of steep decline’.9 A subsequent section
depicting Cotter’s family and home life is encased within pages printed
entirely black on both sides, a graphic acknowledgement of not only
‘white flight’, which proportionally darkened so many American cit-
ies in the years following the Dodgers-Giants game, but also of white
America’s defilement-fearing and self-aggrandising consignment of
darker American populations to increasingly underfunded, deindustrial-
ised urban settings.10 Thus, among the novel’s many literal and figurative
subterranean territories is that to which darker, and especially northern
others were increasingly shuttled and contained, the gradually racialised
wastelands later occupied by such make-do figures as Underworld’s graf-
fiti artist Ismael Muñoz and his minions.
198 Ti m Eng les
As Bill Watterson enjoys the ballgame and a pseudo-paternal camara
derie with Cotter, he reveals in reiterated adspeak that he runs his own
business, a construction firm: ‘We’re the people that build the houses that
are fun to live in’ (U, 21). Despite the cozy, border-crossing familiarity
that feels possible in this otherworldly ballpark space, mainstream profes-
sional baseball remained highly exclusionary in terms of race. As Duvall
notes, ‘Although the color bar in the major leagues officially had been
broken by Jackie Robinson in 1947, African American players [in 1951]
are as much interlopers on the field as Cotter Martin is in the stands.’11
Another real-world division between the two races embodied by Cotter
and Waterson also arises in the apparent slogan of Waterson’s business –
these ‘fun’ houses were being built in communities that explicitly excluded
black families like the Cotters:
Between 1945 and 1960, a pervasive iconography of white, middle-class

domesticity circulated widely in various media and became instantiated in
millions of new homes across the United States. . . . [T]extual and visual
representations of those houses continuously and reflexively created,
re-created, and reinforced mid-century notions about racial, ethnic, and
class identities – specifically, the rightness of associating white identities
with homeownership and citizenship.12
As part of a rather fanciful quartet of celebrity baseball fans depicted

attending together the game that became legendary, Frank Sinatra thinks
of America as ‘a country that’s in a hurry to make the future’, a place
where ‘the names attached to the products are an enduring reassurance’
(U, 39). A common feeling prompting this particularly white middle-class
need for reassurance was not only an ongoing postwar sense of instabil-
ity, but also the fear of upcoming change; as the nation seemed to hurtle
into the future, many white Americans felt a racially informed sense that
national stability and security were under threat, not only by the Soviet
Union and its embodied communism, but also by an increasingly restive
domestic African-American population. Again, this future, one that was
promulgated and perceived largely through advertising, but also through
radio, movies, and television shows, did not include nonwhite people like
Cotter, who returns to his predominantly black neighbourhood, which is
soon to become a further underworld-ed ‘ghetto’, and whose family’s story
counterposes the later portrait of the implicitly white, and thus right for
the era’s new suburban dream, Demings. In addition, in a scene in which
Nick’s brother Matt shares memories of the 1950s that differ from those
of a coworker, the adult Eric Deming, DeLillo acknowledges that while
whiteness, Italian-American or not, could well have helped the Constanza-
Shays into a ‘fun’ and exclusively white suburban setting, specific forma-
tions and experiences of whiteness differ, with some aligning less snugly
than do others with notions of all-American-ness, but with all nonetheless
joined in having been extended opportunities and perquisites denied to
racialised others (U, 410).
By setting Underworld’s prologue at the outset of a new phase of col-
lective American self-fashioning, DeLillo emphasises not an impend-
ing shift from some actual reality, but rather the beginnings of certain
heightened feelings – especially as experienced by a particular sector of
the American populace – that the American past was somehow more real.
As newspaper and magazine advertisements, feature articles and photos
rain down on the crowd and playing field, DeLillo registers the begin-
nings of media-fueled nostalgia, a longing that many white middle-class
Americans were already beginning to feel for times when life didn’t seem
‘phony’, as the older Nick says of his own circumstances.13 Having paid
$34,500 for what he believes is the home run ball from the game, which
he listened to on the radio at the age of sixteen, part of Nick’s particularly
white male nostalgia is his casting of the game, and of his own ethnic
past, in glowing racial terms. Unlike the white American writers ana-
lysed by Toni Morrison in her groundbreaking study Playing in the Dark,
who typically use an ‘Africanist presence’ in the form of stereotypically
black characters whose narrative purpose is to serve merely as foils for
white characters, DeLillo unveils the fundamental dependence of white-
ness on figurations of blackness, and thus ‘the parasitical nature of white
freedom’.14 Underworld continually depicts American Cold War forms
of binary thinking, including the mutually constitutive black-and-white
simplifications of racism. As FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover muses during
the game, there ‘is that side to him, that part of him that depends on the
strength of the enemy.’ ‘[A]nd what is the connection between Us and
Them, how many bundled links do we find in the neural labyrinth? It’s
not enough to hate your enemy. You have to understand how the two of
you bring each other to completion’ (U, 28, 51). DeLillo depicts white
supremacy’s ontological symbiosis by depicting Cotter’s ‘American’ story
as a parallel to Nick’s that is more than merely random. In effect, DeLillo’s
depictions of black minor characters amid a cast of mostly white ones dif-
fers in a crucial way from those Morrison critiques in that, in a subdued
metafictional mode, DeLillo’s very point – that ‘black’ completes ‘white’
in both social and literary senses – is basically the same as hers. Later in
the novel, DeLillo depicts another agential black character, Simeon Biggs,
200 Ti m Eng les
who more directly explains that the nostalgia exemplified so expensively
by Nick’s purchasing of the game-winning ball is a specifically white racial
form of memory construction.
As critical whiteness-studies scholars have repeatedly emphasised, centu-
ries of overt American white supremacy morphed in the twentieth century
into more veiled forms of hegemony, to the point where the racial status of
many white Americans, let alone its guiding influences on their own per-
spective, feelings, and behaviours, rarely ever registers for them.15 A com-
mon result is paradoxical and unwitting reactions and behaviour, many of
which are guided by racially informed emotions – feelings that can in turn
warp the formation and reiteration of individual and collective memories.
Having joined a current and historically resonant white movement westward
into ‘the white parts of the map’ (U, 422), the older, putatively successful
Nick remembers longingly a version of himself that is not only youthfully
vigorous and impetuous, but also specifically Italian. Having stepped into
the corporate role of ‘waste manager’, Nick has tried to bury his own psy-
chic garbage, but like the methane gas that must escape from the landfills
he helps to construct, certain unresolved memories resist containment. In
a way that registers both irony and sincerity, Nick imitates Italian gangster
speech for his colleagues, but according to coworker Brian Glassic, any-
thing actually Italian in his background is imperceptible to others (U, 165).
Having been influenced in part by media-generated portrayals to conceive
of Italian ethnicity in aggressively masculine terms, Nick mythologises the
disappearance of his father as a likely mob hit, downplaying the equally
plausible story of disgraceful abandonment by a selfishly negligent father
and husband. Like many descendants of European immigrants, Nick’s
clinging to his ethnic heritage actually reveals his stronger whitened ten-
dencies. ‘I’ve always been a country of one’, he says at one point, ‘There’s a
certain distance in my makeup, a measured separation like my old man’s,
I guess.’ Having raised the spectre of his lost Italian-American father, Nick
then evokes an Italian word (which, in his muddled reconstruction of his
past, he also thinks might be Latin) ‘that explains everything’ about his
own aura and feeling of detachment: ‘lontananza. Distance or remoteness,
sure. But as I use the word, as I interpret it, hard-edged and fine-grained,
it’s the perfected distance of the gangster, the syndicate mobster – the made
man’ (U, 275). In terms of Nick’s unwittingly racialised identity, the irony
here is that a greater individualising ‘distance’ he feels and enacts springs
more from his whitening residential and vocational movement, away from
that which he evokes to explain his psychic and emotional distancing, his
Bronx-Italian heritage.
At the same time, the depressed Nick also sees his current self as flac-
cidly de-ethnicised and dislocated, as evinced by a self-description he
reports having often used by way of introduction: ‘I live a quiet life in
an unassuming house in a suburb of Phoenix. Like someone in a Witness
Protection Program’ (U, 66). DeLillo depicts Nick performing this line
with wry self-effacement, likely because it registers Nick’s longing for a
more impressive, less whitened version of himself, and perhaps as well
because it echoes the ending of a then-recent Hollywood movie about
another discontentedly suburbanised mafia ‘romanticizer’, Henry Hill,
the protagonist of Martin Scorcese’s Goodfellas (1990). In the film’s clos-
ing scene, the character, played by Ray Liotta and based on the actual
‘half-Irish, half-Sicilian’ Henry Hill, opens a suburban ranch-house door
to retrieve a newspaper.16 In voice-over, Hill bemoans having been placed
in the Witness Protection Program for testifying against Italian-American
gangsters because he will have to live the rest of his life ‘like an average
nobody’. The parallel becomes even stronger on realising that Nick is ‘half-
Irish’ as well – his last name is Shay because his Irish-American mother
reverted to her maiden name in response to her husband Jimmy’s abandon-
ment. As I will explain, having moved ever westward and having landed
in Arizona, Nick enacts what David Roediger and others have identified
as a general movement for Southern and Eastern European descendants of
immigrants, a movement towards a seemingly blank middle-class white-
ness that also specifically and ontologically retreats from vividly imagined
figurations of both ethnicity and blackness. By moving his protagonist
in a decades-long trajectory from the formerly Italian-dominated, early-
twentieth-century Bronx, DeLillo effectively evokes and traces the his-
torical mobility of such whitened descendants, an ever-expanding ‘white’
group whose collective, fearful, identity-forming movement has always
entailed a negatively relational ontology, conceiving of themselves less as
white and more as ‘those who are not non-white’.17
As a middle-aged parent, Nick vaguely perceives this common white
process of identity adjustment in his teenaged son Jeff, who in response
to the racially enflamed riots in 1992 Los Angeles adopts various contem-
porary signifiers of urban blackness: ‘an L.A. Raiders hat and an ultralong
T-shirt that had a pair of sunglasses slung from the pocket, . . . the same shy
boy but physically vivid now, a social being with a ghetto strut’ (U, 104–5).
As an unremarkably white resident of suburban Arizona, Jeff appears to
be an indistinct normal boy to any similarly normalised white beholder,
such as his father, who thinks of the Midwestern upbringing of his wife
Marian in similarly relational terms – not merely as normal, and thus
202 Ti m Eng les
only implicitly white, but also and more explicitly as different from urban
and black: ‘Marian in her Big Ten town, raised safely, protected from the
swarm of street life and feeling deprived because of it – privileged and
deprived, an American sort of thing’ (U, 344). The parallel DeLillo draws
in both cases is to Nick’s own identity work, which he too performs in
terms that contrast his currently blank, seemingly lifeless, unremarkably
white suburban life with his more vivid, urban, and supposedly non-white
or less-white past.
The reality of a common fantasised ethnic past like Nick’s is that as
a group, Italian-American immigrants quickly assumed a status that was
more ‘white’ than it ever was non-white; indeed, the first were, in his-
torian Thomas A. Guglielmo terms, already ‘white on arrival’. While
Italian immigrants like Nick’s paternal ancestors were at times perceived
by other white Americans in terms that amounted to racial inferior-
ity, ‘they were white just the same. They were so securely white, in fact,
that Italians themselves rarely had to aggressively assert the point’.18 As
Roediger also explains, mid-twentieth-century Italian-American descend-
ants who sought upward social mobility were encouraged by racially pref-
erential housing loans and job openings to leave ‘stigmatized “mixed race”
areas’ in favour of exclusionary suburban spaces.19 While descendants of
Italy and other (from a white American perspective) provisionally white
European nations did face relatively muted forms of discrimination while
living and working in urban areas, when they joined mass movements
into new, ‘fun’ suburban houses of the sort that Bill Waterson’s company
would have built, they became de facto white people, with ethnic identity
an increasingly and merely personal option. While the racially informed
portion of Nick’s imagination accurately remembers the fact itself of eth-
nic difference, his training into late-twentieth-century suburban, anti-
urban whiteness causes him to gloss over nostalgically not only the white
privilege that he and his ancestors always enjoyed, but also its conceptual
reliance on figurations of an inferior, yet threatening blackness. His mem-
ory of punching a black interloper in the 1950s Bronx is more revealing
of the obedience he already paid as a teenager to the dictates of whiteness
than of any allegiance he felt to Italian neighborhood solidarity; his action
signals how any such solidarity was already informed by white suprema-
cist denigration of blackness, and thus by an Italian-American striving for
full-fledged whiteness that formed itself against, and in many ways acted
against, the spectre of denigrated blackness. This racialised conglom-
eration of fears and anxieties only became a more explicitly motivating
force when ethnic descendants joined anti-urban expansion, as ‘the white
suburb’s need to imagine a black, anti-neighborly, and uninhabitable city
structured perceptions, even as it added to the allure of the often shoddy
and drab suburban working-class subdivision and hastened the forgetting
of who – and what – was left behind’.20
As a roving attempt to capture psychic and emotional states engendered
by late-twentieth-century white American life, Underworld also diagnoses
residents seduced by the well-advertised allure of racially purified sub-
urbs. Depicted in a series of snapshot-like tableaux, the Demings are a
family welcomed, in part by dint of their whiteness, into a place where
the ‘trees at the edge of the lawn were new, like everything else in the
area’, including, in a racial sense, the residents themselves (U, 514). The
mid-twentieth-century suburban white American was a deliberate racial
formation, one characterised as explicitly fresh, pure, and clean not only
by its positioning amid shiny new products and hypoallergenic kitchens
and bathrooms, but also against the excluded conceptual impurity of
urban racial blackness. DeLillo’s emphasis here lies as much or more on
depicting what it feels like to live in this dream, specifically as a middle-
class white person who can thereby fit one of its appointed roles, as it does
on satirising the product-lust of emergent American hyper-consumerism.
As the chapter opens in 1957, wife and mother Erica feels down while
constructing Jell-O parfaits, and she realises later that the source of her
discontent is the looming awareness of Sputnik, the eminence-challenging
satellite recently put into orbit by the Soviet Union: ‘Erica felt a twisted
sort of disappointment. It was theirs, not ours.’ Prior to offering to take
teenaged son Eric out for a Sputnik sighting, husband and father Rick is
stroking his new car in the breezeway, ‘simonizing’ it, which is ‘something,
basically, he could do forever’ (U, 518, 516). DeLillo places the Demings in
a ‘split-level suburban house’, thematically signalling a split between the
staged, superficial level of both their lives and psyches and a subterranean
one, where new, middle-class white anxieties, fears, and excitements lurk.
Eric is hidden away in his bedroom, ‘jerking off’ into a condom that
excites him because its ‘sleek metallic shimmer’ evokes ‘his favorite
weapons system, the Honest John, a surface-to-surface missile that car-
ried yields of up to forty kilotons’. Also exciting for Eric is a photo of
Jayne Mansfield, even though her depicted breasts seem too ‘real’ to him;
the success of consumer capitalism’s efforts to penetrate the middle-class
white psyche and implant an image of one’s potential, all-American and
not-so-incidentally-white staged self, and thus with the desire to become
that self by buying all of the right home-filling products, is manifested
by Eric’s shift in desire from Mansfield’s breasts to her face, which ‘was
204 Ti m Eng les
put together out of a thousand thermoplastic things. And in the evolving
scan of his eros, it was the masking waxes, liners, glosses and creams that
became the soft moist mechanisms of release’ (U, 514, 515). Since the new
suburban life is so heavily conceived and lived in terms informed yet cen-
sored by family-friendly movies, TV shows and the advertising that both
surrounds and suffuses such identity-forming entertainments, sexuality is
both present and sublimated. Accordingly, while Rick is mesmerised in
the act of stroking his new car, Mansfield’s breasts remind Eric of ‘the
bumper bullets on a Cadillac’. Meanwhile, Erica worries in a repressed
way about the potential effects of Eric’s prolonged activities behind doors,
where he probably isn’t hitting his school books like he should be: ‘He was
hitting something too hard but Erica tried not to form detailed images’
(U, 517, 519). Again, none of the three Demings could feel as they do
without being white – properly situated in their roles, but also anxious,
fearful and excited in response to external social narratives that include
people ‘like’ themselves, and thus, themselves.
By the early 1990s, the ever-shifting contours of white supremacy con-
tinued to produce not only new racial attitudes, beliefs and behaviours,
but also new neighbourhoods and work-home pathways; as non-white
residents began moving into suburbs, socially aspirant white Americans
continued the pattern of fearful residential flight, a movement represented
by Nick’s westward relocation of his family to another ‘white space on the
map’ (U, 529). Having been abandoned by his father and having impul-
sively shot a man as a teenager, Nick has personal reasons for attempting
to bury his past, but as a member of the middle-class, ever-westward and
nonwhite-fleeing collective, Nick enacts garbage-burying tendencies that
are common among members of that collective. Since the white American
past generally stinks, as it were, contemplation of it can induce white guilt
and shame in any generation; in response, white-led institutions and thus
most white individuals cover it over, and as they ‘recycle’ selected parts of
the past for necessary self-constitution in the present, they sort through
it, sanitising, organising and burnishing chosen scraps. In the residential
setting in which Nick and his wife meticulously sort through their recy-
clables, he drives through a neighborhood where Native Americans are
only acknowledged via street names. At another point, he and his fam-
ily travel to an ‘ancient ruin’, where even the hired guide seems oblivi-
ous not only to any accurate sense of who the land’s former inhabitants
were, but also to the part that racialisation of aboriginal people as ‘savages’
(and thus of white people as ‘civilised’) may have played in their eras-
ure. Nick finds himself more interested in the ‘protective canopy’ than the
ruins themselves, and any relatively accurate sense of who native peoples
were and the part white supremacy played in their decimation has been
either figuratively or literally paved over, landscaped into what amounts
to a successful landfill that appears pleasantly and forgetfully palatable
(U, 342–43).21
Like Jack Gladney in DeLillo’s White Noise, Nick is fascinated by literal
garbage, but also by the figurative waste of his own past, and any mean-
ings he imposes on it are just that – imposed, and not actual.22 DeLillo
suggests that like the historical recollections of nearly any American
white man, Nick’s are inevitably contaminated by gross abuses and by the
nationalistic fantasies that gloss over and erase them. By incorporating
more racially astute non-white characters, DeLillo also acknowledges that
in broader, collective terms, historical memory reported from a minority
perspective is often not only different, but also more accurate. That Nick’s
whitened perspective is also a typically impervious, resistant one is also
suggested by his friendship of sorts with a black colleague, Simeon Biggs,
whom Nick calls Sims. In 1978 Nick visits Los Angeles, where Sims works
as a ‘landfill engineer’ (U, 278), and the two of them spend an evening
barhopping and avoiding, in a traditionally masculine way, intimate con-
versation about Sims’ current marital difficulties. Having registered for
Nick during a visit to his office the whitening demands of his corporate
role (‘I go to sleep black every night and come back white in the morn-
ing’ [U, 303]), Sims repeatedly tries to discuss racial matters, only to be
derailed by Nick. Recalling a photo of black jazz legend Charlie Parker,
Sims suggestively highlights Parker’s ‘white suit’, but Nick stubbornly
wonders instead what the shoes Parker was wearing are called. Sims also
tells Nick about being repeatedly harassed by police as a black male driver
merely ‘because I resemble a suspect or my tail-light’s out,’ then adds, ‘You
want to be my friend, you have to listen to this’ (U, 326, 327). Again,
though, Nick changes the topic, preferring to talk about his own graying
hair. Later in the evening, when Sims recalls rumours about a barge full
of garbage currently cruising the American coast and repeatedly facing
refusals of entry, DeLillo’s stagings of the common white refusal to address
the ongoing manifestations of the waste and abuses of white supremacy
come full circle. This former young tough who once hit a black kid for
wandering into his ‘Italian’ neighbourhood is now quite willing, during
his time of middle-aged existential crisis, to have dinner at a baseball game
with this black colleague. Nevertheless, he fails to register the significance
to his nostalgic groping towards solace of this man’s more racially cogni-
zant assessment of the collective fantasy that has arisen around the earlier
206 Ti m Eng les
famous ballgame. As Sims, Nick and two other companions discuss the
celebrity touring that a pair of players from that game have been doing
for decades, Sims points out the significance of their whiteness. Even the
losing pitcher can be redeemed by the collective white male nostalgia that
reveres and mythologises baseball lore: ‘Because he’s white’, Sims said.
‘Because the whole thing is white. Because you can survive and endure
and prosper if they let you. But you have to be white before they let you.’
As the night ends, Nick enacts his common white male tendency to resist
the puncturing of racialised nostalgia by harsh truths uttered by one of
America’s subordinated, experienced Others when he remembers instead a
vision of racial harmony – Sims’s earlier reported memory that, as a child,
he too succumbed momentarily to that cozy fantasy, when he ran down
a street ‘waving his arms and shouting that he’s Bobby Thompson’, 1951’s
victorious white home run slugger (U, 98. 100).
In such ways, DeLillo taps into what it often felt like to live as a
middle-class, heterosexual white man in the late twentieth century,
thereby exposing root causes of an ironically obstructed form of privi-
leged agency. In her examination of the difficulties that those who oppose
the abuses of late capitalism face in mounting an effectively collective
critique, Wanda Vrasti asks, ‘How do individuals become emotionally
invested in social formations that betray an obvious propensity towards
socio-economic and ecological crises? . . . What kind of moral legitimat-
ing structures does capitalism rely on to make critique look ridiculous
or exasperating?’ Ultimately, DeLillo’s fiction repeatedly proffers an anti-
individualist strategy similar to one offered by Vrasti: ‘Before we can learn
how to live-in-common, we first need to take a moment to examine our
deepest attachments and remember how easily all the things we do to
improve ourselves and the world around us are absorbed back into moral
regulations and/or consumerist modalities.’23 In a moment that initially
promises an affective rapprochement, Nick physically attacks his cuckold-
ing colleague, Brian Glassic. However, the effort is halfhearted and unful-
filling, and a rumbling conglomeration of powerful feelings continues to
roil within Nick. Like the underground nuclear explosion of post-nuclear
waste that they’ve travelled to Russia to witness, Nick’s slapping around
of Brian fails to result in an above-ground, truly satisfying explosion. As
a white male ‘waste analyst’, a role that metaphorises his gendered and
racialised training, Nick’s ‘waste’ remains internalised, its release thwarted.
When he ponders and relishes the chance to wreak vengeance on Brian,
he more explicitly contrasts an earlier, ethnic version of himself with a
current middle-class and white version of himself; he imagines he could
‘crush’ Brian’s face ‘with five earnest blows’ while emphasising the pheno-
typically ‘white’ features of his colleague: ‘But we don’t do that anymore,
do we? This is a thing we’ve left behind. Five dealt blows to the pinkish
face with the paling hair’ (U, 796).
As Nick roams his house, sardonically located in Phoenix, he fondles
his gathered, nostalgia-inducing relics, enacting again his deeper invest-
ment in objects than in people: ‘I rearrange books on the old shelves and
then I stand there looking . . . [I] look at the things we own and feel the
odd mortality that clings to every object. The finer and rarer the object,
the more lonely it makes me feel, and I don’t know how to account for
this.’ Nick’s efforts to reestablish emotional and psychic connections from
his past have failed, because the ‘waste’ of his past that he sorted through
was a fantasised version, an interpretation that he imposed on it: ‘They
are making synthetic feces in Dallas’, he repeatedly thinks (U, 804, 805).
In this sense, Nick’s racialised identity is also exposed as that of a con-
structed, script-following white person, not unlike the Demings; his fealty
to ad-driven constructions of the stage-set of his life, and of his role in it,
has meant attaching more meaning and value to props and well-acted roles
than to anything that might feel more real. At the same time, Nick pon-
ders a ‘desperate crisis, the intractability of waste’, and more specifically,
how ‘conference reports and newspapers’, interpretations not unlike those
he imposes on the waste of his own past, fail to account for the real thing
and to deal with it adequately; the sheer global mass of human waste ‘is
not otherwise touchable somehow, for all the menacing heft and breadth
of the material, the actual pulsing thing’ (U, 805). As Renato Resaldo has
pointed out, historically decontextualised nostalgia from a privileged per-
spective ‘makes racial domination appear innocent and pure’.24 For many
middle-class white American men who follow the sentimental training
that encourages ‘containment’ of realities that would challenge a sense of
self as disconnected from its other selves and innocent of their abuse, they
fail to realise the fantasy of their own autonomy and the injury they do by
maintaining such tight ‘containment’ of their emotions and their socio-
historical awareness.
In this postmodern dramatisation of numerous forms of reconstituted
Cold War American subjectivity, DeLillo animates not only the mutu-
ally constitutive binaries that formed racialised identity construction,
but also the emotions that prompted the deflection and denial of such
social realities by those who benefitted the most from them as a group. In
these terms, Underworld’s urban-dwelling nun, Sister Alma Edgar, seems
to reach a better resolution, when she takes off her disinfectant gloves
208 Ti m Eng les
and embraces the unwashed urban residents from whom she has habitu-
ally distanced herself, the people who have gathered to view the angelic
apparition on a billboard of a murdered girl, whose death causes some-
thing approaching a communal paroxysm. Having banished himself to an
emotionally deserted wasteland in the western desert, Nick instead feels
‘a loneliness, a loss’, which is clearly more than that of his father. As he
recalls touring a waste management facility with his granddaughter, Nick
thinks, ‘Maybe we feel a reverence for waste, for the redemptive quali-
ties of the things we use and discard. Look how they come back to us,
alight with a brave kind of aging’ (U, 822, 808, 809). In racial terms, the
subsumed white collective commonly seeks an illusory redemption in self-
serving, identity-bolstering nostalgia, repressing the potentially remedial
truths of white supremacist slaughter, forced labor-extraction and exclu-
sion. Having receded into a state of numbed alienation, Nick remains
representatively ‘lonely’ in more ways than one, an emotional exile who
has failed to appreciate and develop his intricate connections to others,
including his white-male clan’s racialised others.
Notes
1 In his study of ‘straight white male’ American protagonists ‘who choose other-
ness to divorce themselves from a dominant “white” culture’, Traber explicates
a common pattern of depicted identity construction via rebellion that ironi-
cally seeks individualising marginalisation by identifying with racial otherness,
thereby replicating prevailing ideologies of the dominant order. See Daniel S.
Traber, Whiteness, Otherness, and the Individualism Paradox from Huck to Punk
New York (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 2.
2 Ian Haney López, White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race (New York:
New York University Press, 2006), 116.
3 John N. Duvall, ‘White Noise, Postmodernism, and Postmodernity’ in Tim
Engles and John N. Duvall (eds.), Approaches to Teaching DeLillo’s White Noise
(New York: Modern Language Association Press, 2006), 116–25 [117].
4 Don DeLillo, Underworld (New York: Scribner, 1997), 796. Hereafter referred
to in the text as U.
5 For extensive treatment of nostalgia in Underworld, see Damjana Mraović-
O’Hare, ‘The Beautiful, Horrifying Past: Nostalgia and Apocalypse in Don
DeLillo’s Underworld’, Criticism 53/2 (Spring 2011), 213–39; Jennifer Ladino,
‘“Local Yearnings”; Re-Placing Nostalgia in Don DeLillo’s Underworld’,
Journal of Ecocriticism 2/1 (January 2010), 1–18. For studies of ethnicity and/
or race in Underworld, see John N. Duvall, ‘Excavating the Underworld of
Race and Waste in Cold War History: Baseball, Aesthetics, and Ideology’ in
Hugh Ruppersburg and Tim Engles (eds.), Critical Essays on Don DeLillo
(New York: G. K. Hall, 2000), 258–81; Fred L. Gardaphé, From Wiseguys
to Wise Men: The Gangster and Italian American Masculinities (New York:
Routledge, 2006); Josephine Gattuso Hendin, ‘Underworld, Ethnicity,
and Found Object Art: Reason and Revelation’ in Stacey Olster (ed.), Don
DeLillo: Mao II, Underworld, Falling Man (London: Continuum, 2011),
99–115; Thomas Heise, Urban Underworlds: A Geography of Twentieth-Century
American Literature and Culture (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press,
2010); David Noon, ‘The Triumph of Death: National Security and Imperial
Erasures in Don DeLillo’s Underworld’, Canadian Review of American Studies
37/1 (2007), 83–110.
6 ‘I don’t see Underworld as post-modern. Maybe it’s the last modernist gasp.
I don’t know.’ Quoted in Richard Williams, ‘Everything under the Bomb’,
Guardian, 10 January 1998, http://www.theguardian.com/books/1998/jan/10/
fiction.dondelillo. Accessed 7 January 2014.
7 See Tim Engles, ‘‘‘Who Are You, Literally?”: Fantasies of the White Self in
White Noise’, Modern Fiction Studies 45/3 (Fall 1999), 755–87.
8 Leroom Medovoi, ‘The Race Within: The Biopolitics of the Long Cold War’
in Steven Belletto and Daniel Grausam (eds.), American Literature and Culture
in an Age of Cold War: A Critical Reassessment (Iowa City: University of Iowa
Press, 2012) 163–8 [177].
9 Heise, Urban Underworlds, 233.
10 As Eric Avila explains regarding ‘white flight’, as ‘black’ became increasingly
synonymous with ‘urban’ during and after the Second World War, emphasis
on suburban development conversely
sanctioned the formation of a new ‘white’ identity. . . . The collusion of public policy
and private practices enforced a spatial distinction between ‘black’ cities and ‘white’
suburbs and gave shape to what the Kerner Commission, a presidential commission
appointed to assess the causes of the 1965 Watts Riots in Los Angeles, identified as ‘two
societies, one black, one white – separate and unequal’,
Eric Avila, Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in
Suburban Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 5.
11 Duvall, ‘Excavating the Underworld’, 268.
12 Dianne Harris, Little White Houses: How the Postwar Home Constructed Race
in America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 1.
13 The year 1951 also included publication of a milestone novel in the depiction
of American white male identity formation, in which a signature expression
of the narrating protagonist was also the word ‘phony’, J. D. Salinger’s Catcher
in the Rye (New York: Little, Brown, and Company, 1951).
14 Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination
(New York: Vintage, 1993), 6, 57.
15 As Woody Doane explains, ‘The central component of the sociology of
whiteness is the observation that white Americans have a lower degree of self-
awareness about race and their own racial identity than [do] members of
other racial-ethnic groups.’ Woody Doane, ‘Rethinking Whiteness Studies’
in Ashley ‘Woody’ Doane and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (eds.), White Out: The
Continuing Significance of Racism (London: Routledge, 2003), 3–20 [7].
210 Ti m Eng les
16 As Hill’s New York Times obituary notes, ‘A native New Yorker of half-Irish,
half-Sicilian parentage, Mr. Hill was involved with the Luchese family, con-
sidered the most powerful of the city’s original five Mafia families, from his
youth in the 1950s until 1980.’ See Margalit Fox, ‘Henry Hill, Mobster and
Movie Inspiration, Dies at 69’, New York Times, 13 June 2012, http://www.
nytimes.com/2012/06/14/nyregion/henry-hill-mobster-of-goodfellas-dies-
at-69.html?_r=1&. Accessed 12 January 2014.
17 Haney López, White by Law, 20.
18 Thomas A. Guglielmo, White on Arrival: Italians, Race, Color, and Power in
Chicago, 1890–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 6.
19 David R. Roediger, Working Toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants
Became White: The Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs (New York:
Basic Books, 2005), 231.
20 Roediger, Working Toward Whiteness, 234.
21 For an argument that takes DeLillo to task for being unable in Underworld ‘to
fully imagine the consequences of the cold war for . . . Native American com-
munities in the nuclear West’, see Noon, ‘The Triumph of Death’, 83.
22 Don DeLillo, White Noise (New York: Viking, 1985), 258–9.
23 Wanda Vrasti, ‘“Caring” Capitalism and the Duplicity of Critique’, Theory
and Event 14/4 (2011), Project Muse, n.p.
24 Renato Tenato Rosaldo, ‘Imperialist Nostalgia’, Representations, 26 (Spring
1989), 107–22 [107].
Ch apter 13
Postmodern Revisions of Englishness

Rushdie, Barnes, Ballard
Nick Bentley
In Julian Barnes’s 1998 novel England, England, Martha Cochrane, the

main character, has a childhood memory of working with her father on
a jigsaw puzzle made up of all the counties of England. She remembers
especially the way in which her father would hide one of the pieces and
then supply it at the end to enable her to complete the puzzle. When her
parents separate and her father leaves the family home she imagines him
taking the missing piece with him, leaving the puzzle forever incomplete.
This image of a once united construction of England, now frustratingly
out of reach operates as a commentary not only on Martha’s psychosocial
development into adulthood, but also as an irritant to any fixed sense of
Englishness that is no longer available in the contemporary world. Barnes
makes it clear that Martha cannot, in fact, be sure of the accuracy of her
childhood memory about the jigsaw, which is described as ‘a memory of
a memory of a memory, mirrors set in parallel’, the originating moment
remaining as elusive as the final piece in the puzzle.1
Barnes’s novel is one of a series of works during the last forty years or so
that use postmodern techniques to engage with national identity. Although
this chapter is primarily concerned with Englishness, a similar engage-
ment with cultural narratives of the nation can be seen in the constituent
nations of the United Kingdom. In Scotland, Irvine Welsh, Alasdair Grey,
A. L. Kennedy and Alan Warner, among others, have grappled with tra-
ditional and contemporary constructions of Scottish identity. The same
could be said of Emyr Humphreys and Niall Griffiths in a Welsh con-
text. In terms of England, novels such as Adam Thorpe’s Ulverton (1992),
and much of the historiographic metafiction of the period, in particular
the neo-Victorian variety, can be said to be in part engaging with images
and articulations of past (and lost) Englishness in contrast with a changed
present, for example: John Fowles’s French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969),
A. S. Byatt’s Possession: A Romance (1990), Peter Ackroyd’s Dan Leno and
the Limehouse Golem (1995), Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus (1984) and
211
212 Ni ck Bentley
T. J. Lustig’s less well-known but superb novel Doubled-Up, Or My Life
as the Back End of a Pantomime Horse (1990). This concentration can be
seen, in part, to be a response to changing notions of Englishness due to
the dismantling of the British Empire during the decades after the Second
World War. Indeed, the postmodern and the postcolonial in terms of lit-
erary and cultural theory are more or less coterminous, and the scrutiny of
traditional constructions of national identities in the wake of the empire,
as well as the advent of discourses of multiculturalism and the establish-
ment of communities in many parts of Britain, have fuelled an interroga-
tion of the ethnic and cultural constitution of Englishness. The increased
democratisation of English literature in the period after the Second World
War has also questioned the forms of Englishness established by writers of
an earlier generation such as Evelyn Waugh, P. G. Wodehouse and E. M.
Forster. Much of this reconfiguration of national identity can be seen to be
in reaction to the attempt in the 1980s and 1990s to celebrate a set of nos-
talgic images in political discourse from Margaret Thatcher’s invocation of
a return to Victorian values to John Major’s view of Englishness as watch-
ing cricket on the village green whilst supping pints of warm beer. Many
left-leaning writers were constructing their own vision of the nation, for
example the three writers discussed at length in this chapter, against this
very selective construction of Englishness based on underlying assump-
tions about class, ethnicity and (most often a rural) location. But what
is Englishness, and how can literary engagements with national identity
serve to celebrate, reconstruct or interrogate traditional discourses?
One way to approach this question is to identify Englishness as one
of the grand narratives to be challenged by Jean-Francois Lyotard’s con-
ception of the postmodern as an incredulity towards such totalising dis-
courses.2 Englishness thus conceived emphasises the way in which stories
about the nation, heroic or otherwise, contribute to the way it is evoked in
the popular imagination. As Benedict Anderson has shown, this imagined
construction of the nation has powerful material and ideological effects
explaining for him why so many people are ‘willing to die for such lim-
ited imaginings’.3 Eric Hobsbawm also conceives the nation as ‘invented’
and it is a feature of much Marxist-influenced criticism.4 Robert Colls
and Philip Dodd have extended this sense of national invention by see-
ing Englishness as a narrative construction which has developed through
an engagement between literary representations and cultural and polit-
ical discourse.5 Homi Bhabha has picked up this sense of the nation as
narration and, following Anderson, has discussed the idea of the trad-
itional nation as a realist novel.6 One way of challenging a traditional
Postmodern Revisions of Englishness 213
narrative of Englishness, then, might be to disrupt those realist conven-
tions. Postmodernist narrative techniques in particular can be seen to be
employed not only to engage with past and received discourses, but with
the very constructions on which narrative modes such as classic realism
have been given a national inflection. If realism can be seen to represent
a traditional sense of English identity, as many of the writers and poets in
the 1950s attempted to argue, including several of the Movement poets and
novelists associated with them such as Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis and
William Cooper, then both modernism and consequently postmodernism
can be seen as formal challenges to a literature grounded in an English
empiricism, as John Brannigan has noted.7 This chapter discusses three
writers who look outside of England for narrative influences and styles as a
way of interrogating and reconstructing narratives of Englishness. Salman
Rushdie deploys techniques drawn from Latin American magic realism;
Barnes’s well-documented Francophilia leads him to a variety of influ-
ences from Gustave Flaubert to Alain Robbe-Grillet; while J. G. Ballard’s
engagement with American science fiction and, as Andrzej Gasiorek has
noted, the experimentalism of William Burroughs, results in his distinct-
ive style of affectless psychogeography.8
The relationship between postmodernism and postcolonialism was
a cause for much debate over the decades that saw the formation and
development of critical discourses in both areas. In discussing the impor-
tance of Latin American magical realism for British and American post-
modern writers, Nelly Richard suggests that in its reaction to Western
modernity’s desire to ‘synthesize its progressive and emancipatory ide-
als into a globalizing, integrative vision of the individual’s place in his-
tory and society’, postmodernism offers ‘to inject its areas of opacity and
resistance with the potential for new, as yet undiscovered, meanings’.
However, this apparently liberating inversion of periphery and centre
belies a deeper aspect in which ‘postmodernism defends itself against the
destabilizing threat of the “Other” by integrating back into a framework
which absorbs all differences and contradictions’.9 Similarly, Simon
During argues that ‘the concept [of ] postmodernity has been constructed
in terms which more or less intentionally wipe out the possibility of
post-colonial identity’.10 Where postmodernism’s desire to undermine
any position of power lends itself greatly to similar debunking of the
ideological frameworks that uphold the colonial centre in hierarchical
power frameworks against a colonial periphery, its simultaneous ques-
tioning of any fixed set of ideological world views means that a practical
politics of postcolonialism cannot find an easy philosophical ground on
214 Ni ck Bentley
which to launch its resistance. This is similar to the relationship between
positions in postcolonial discourse that want either to challenge the con-
cept of nations and national identity completely, or those that carry out
their politics of resistance within a framework that wishes to hold on
to the idea of discrete nations, even where those nations may have been
constructed on terms that adhere to Western models. This is an argu-
ment Sara Upstone picks up in Spatial Politics in the Postcolonial Novel,
where she identifies those theorists who hold on to a sense of the nation
as a way of renegotiating postcolonial shifts in power, such as Timothy
Brennan, Laura Chrisman and Kanishka Chowdhury.11 For Upstone,
‘clinging to the nation as the site of political significance is something
open to critique’.12
Similarly, Ian Baucom challenges the continued usefulness of the con-
cept of the nation after postcolonialism. Baucom talks of ‘England’s impe-
rial confusion’: that it is a construct that is exported to the colonial spaces
but remains in confusion when located at home. England is defined by
metaphors of place such as the Victoria terminus at Bombay, a cricket
field or a ruined country house as ‘synecdoches of the nation’s space’, so
that ‘locale [. . .] serves as a disciplinary and nostalgic discourse on English
national identity by making the past visible, by rendering it present [. . .]
that purports to testify the nation’s essential continuity across time’.13 The
issue of national nostalgia identified by Baucom is also an area of inter-
est in much postmodern theory. Fredric Jameson, for example, writes of
the importance of nostalgia in contemporary culture, and in particular
what he calls the nostalgia mode in film exemplified, for him, by Star
Wars. Jameson sees this desire for the comforting certainties of a return to
older plot lines as an indication of the effects of the consumer frameworks
under late capitalism, but this sense of nostalgia can also be identified with
respect to traditional constructions of Englishness in a postcolonial con-
text, and indeed Jameson refers to this trend as an ‘aesthetic colonization
of the past’.14 As Upstone notes ‘there pervades in contemporary society a
“nostalgia” which [. . .] is revealed to be a longing for the colonial myth’.15
Similarly, Doreen Massey contends, ‘There is an attitude, a cosmology,
reflected in all those nostalgic responses to globalisation which mourn the
loss of old spatial coherences.’16 The trend for neo-Victorian and neo-Ed-
wardian fiction and popular culture can, in this sense, be partly attributed
to a longing for Englishness as an ‘old spatial coherence’, even when such
texts also display, to a certain extent, a kind of critical nostalgia for the
pre-postcolonial times. After all, how else to explain the Downton Abbey
phenomenon?
Engagement with discourses of Englishness in postmodern fiction
can be seen partly to interrogate a nostalgic longing; however, the slip-
pery ambivalence of postmodernism often results in a coterminous and
often paradoxical re-inscribing of those very elements of nostalgia often as
genuine feelings of loss, even when it is made clear that it is a hankering
for a nation that never actually existed. In postmodern texts, nostalgia is
thus embedded in the very notion of Englishness; because it can never be
defined or located in the present (in any present, however far back you
go), it is always already anterior. This paradox can be worked through
in relation to what Jean-Francois Lyotard sees as the difference between
modernism and postmodernism whereby:
modern aesthetics is an aesthetic of the sublime, though a nostalgic one. It
allows the unpresentable to be put forward only as the missing contents;
but the form, because of its recognisable consistency, continues to offer the
reader or viewer matter for solace and pleasure. . . . The postmodern would
be that which, in the modern, puts forward the unpresentable in presenta-
tion itself; that which denies itself the solace of good forms.17
The postmodern deconstruction of narratives of Englishness is unsettling

not because it champions one version of the nation over another, but
because it undermines the very concept of national identity itself. It is the
play between a postmodern revision of Englishness and a radical challen-
ging of the very idea of the nation that forms an interesting tension in the
three authors I discuss in this chapter.
Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (1988)

One of the recurring themes in Salman Rushdie’s fiction is an interroga-
tion of the way in which national identity is formed, suggesting that it is
highly constructed, manipulated and implicated in discourses of power.
As Timothy Brennan has noted in the three novels central to his career,
Rushdie revisits this theme with respect to India, Pakistan and England
in Midnight’s Children (1981), Shame (1983) and The Satanic Verses (1988)
respectively.18 In Shame, for example, Rushdie is keen to emphasise the
constructed nature of national identity in his playful moulding of his own
nation, Peccavistan, which we are told: ‘is not Pakistan, or not quite’.19 The
construction of national identity is continued in The Satanic Verses where
the focus shifts to England and Englishness. Upstone has argued that the
value of Rushdie’s work lies in detaching the individual from affiliation to
nations, especially in his focus on rootlessness in postcolonial writing.20 As
216 Ni ck Bentley
Rushdie suggests, ‘if writing turns repeatedly towards the nation, it just as
repeatedly turns away’.21 Postmodernism, then, is crucial in this context as
it can be deployed in deconstructing models of the colonial nation, without
replacing them with alternative fixed (post)colonial alternatives. The con-
testation of the true nature of Englishness is replaced by a foregrounding
of the very artificial nature of any national construction. As for Benedict
Anderson, the nation is imagined for postmodernism, each rendered imag-
ining as problematic as the next. This, of course, also undermines the pos-
sibility of forming a postcolonial politics, one of the criticisms that have
been attached to Rushdie, for example by Aijaz Ahmad. Rushdie’s fiction,
Ahmad notes, cannot be seen as a straight-forward postcolonial challeng-
ing of the centre, due in part to the novelist’s ‘ideological moorings in the
High Culture of the modern metropolitan bourgeoisie’. Ahmad’s main
focus is Shame; however his emphasis on Rushdie’s identification with the
romantic, cosmopolitan vagrant rather than the forced exile also applies
to The Satanic Verses. Consequently, Ahmad sees Rushdie’s postmodern-
ism as distinctive in its identification of ‘the productivity, rather than the
pain, of dislocating oneself from one’s original community, as well as the
idea [. . .] of multiple belongings’.22 In this sense, the drive against national
identity is grounded in a privileged (Western) celebration of the rights of
the individual as well as a cosmopolitanism recumbent on a certain level
of economic privilege. Rushdie’s aim therefore is an interrogation of the
claims that nations might have over their citizens, rather than a postcolo-
nial inversion of the centre/periphery.
Rushdie’s association with postmodernism is perhaps most acutely
seen in his adoption of techniques associated with Latin American magic
realism. He has commented on The Satanic Verses as being, ‘about . . . the
transformation of its two central characters Saladin Chamcha and Gibreel
Farishta, the former into Shaitan and the latter into the angel Gibreel,
when they arrive in England’ and that represents one of the key magic
realist aspects of the novel.23 This approach to character, then, dovetails
with the novel’s representation of Englishness as constructed, while at the
same time, stressing that ideologies that invoke national identity have real
impact on individuals that encounter it as a lived ideology. The physical
metamorphosis of Saladin and Gibreel as they tumble from the sky onto
English soil is clearly a metaphor for the way in which immigrants are con-
structed in the xenophobic imaginations of authority figures that uphold
constructions of Englishness. This can be seen when the police officers
who arrest Saladin as an illegal immigrant make fun of his outlandish
appearance and repeatedly beat him. Eventually, he is taken to a detention
centre that contains several other fantastical individuals, physical manifes-
tations of the perception of the immigrant other in the eyes of the author-
ities. Here, a figure in the shape of a manticore informs Saladin, ‘There are
businessmen from Nigeria who have grown sturdy tails. There is a group
of holidaymakers from Senegal who were doing no more than changing
planes when they were turned into slippery snakes.’ As the manticore goes
on to explain, these metamorphoses reflect the physical manifestations of
the perception of the immigrant other in the eyes of the authorities: ‘They
describe us. . . . That’s all. They have the power of description, and we suc-
cumb to the pictures they construct.’24 This demonisation of the immi-
grant comes as a shock to Saladin who has always regarded England as a
tolerant nation: ‘“This isn’t England,” he thought, not for the first or last
time. How could it be, after all; where in all that moderate and common-
sensical land was there room for such a police van in whose interior such
events as these might plausibly transpire?’ (SV, 158).
It is not only, then, from the perspective of the indigenous popula-
tion that England is a constructed imaginary, but also for the immigrant,
whose experience defamiliarises the distance between the perceived con-
struct and the reality of direct experience. For Saladin, England holds a
special place in his imagination as an ideal to be attained as Pamela, his
upper-class English wife, explains, ‘She had woken up one day and realized
that Chamcha was not in love with her at all, but with that voice stink-
ing of Yorkshire pudding and hearts of oak, that hearty, rubicund voice
of ye olde dream-England which he so desperately wanted to inhabit.’
Saladin bases his love of England on the colonially exported narratives
of Englishness. As she explains to Jumpy Joshi, her lover after she has left
Chamcha, ‘Him and his Royal family, you wouldn’t believe. Cricket, the
Houses of Parliament, the Queen. The place never stopped being a picture
postcard to him. . . . I was bloody Britannia. Warm beer, mince pies, com-
mon-sense and me.’ Saladin is not presented as unique in this context;
John Mslama, an ‘Indian from Guyana’ who Gibreel meets on the train
also adopts a constructed image of Englishness through his exaggerated
attire: ‘the bespoke tailoring of his three-piece pin-stripe, the gold watch
with its fob and chain, the Italian shoes, the crested silk tie, the jewelled
links at his starched white shirt’ all identify the performance of ‘an English
milord’ (SV, 180, 175, 191). Imperial Englishness has been written back
here not as a subversive unsettling, but as a hyperreal homage.
In The Satanic Verses, then, constructions of national identity are located
specifically in the projected imaginings of individual characters, and for
Rushdie character is always in flux: as he explained in an interview at the
218 Ni ck Bentley
time the novel was published ‘the sense of a homogenous, self-contained
character is something I can’t accept anymore’.25 This indeterminacy of
character washes up against an understanding of national identity as fluid,
creating an encounter between two entities that are both in flux. It is clear
that, as Ahmed notes, a politics of postcolonialism is difficult to con-
struct in these circumstances, other than one that is ultimately grounded
on a Western liberal humanism. Despite the foregrounding of certain
racist attitudes in 1980s Britain, as revealed in the actions of the immi-
gration officers, and the description of the ‘race’ riots in Rushdie’s fic-
tional inner London area of Brickhall, the novel also mocks certain forms
of postcolonial politics that are predicated on a desire for retribution. In
one section of the novel, Gibreel dreams that he is the postcolonial aven-
ger inverting the old colonial relationships between centre and periphery:
‘These powerless English! – Did they not think their history would return
to haunt them? – “the native is an oppressed person whose permanent
dream is to become the persecutor” (Fanon) . . . Native and settler, that
old dispute. Continuing now upon these soggy streets, with reversed cat-
egories’ (SV, 353). Rushdie’s invocation of Frantz Fanon’s militant post-
colonial politics in The Wretched of the Earth is introduced here, but is
ultimately ironised in Gibreel’s plan to tropicalise London as a way of
reversing the colonial power relationships, thus undermining the very
myths of Englishness on which the empire had been constructed:
No more British reserve; hot-water bottles to be banished forever, replaced

in the foetid nights by the making of slow and odorous love. Emergence of
new social values: friends to commence dropping in on one another with-
out making appointments, closure of old folks’ homes, emphasis on the
extended family. . . . Disadvantages: cholera, typhoid, legionnaires’ disease,
cockroaches, dust, noise, a culture of excess. (SV, 355)
This imaginary reversal of colonial power is manifest in the realistic frame-

work of the text as a series of inner-city riots, which are given concrete
political importance, but reject some of the larger ambitions of postco-
lonialism to overcome completely the neocolonial continuation of the
forces of globalisation on predominantly Western terms. Despite the nov-
el’s ambitious politician Hanif Johnson’s hope that the riots represent real
change – ‘We’re talking about history: an event in the history of Britain.
About the processes of change’ – the mediated eye of the camera offers
perhaps an ominous indication of the reimposition of established power
hierarchies: ‘This is what a television camera sees: less gifted than the
human eye, its night vision is limited to what klieg lights will show. A hel-
icopter hovers over the nightclub, urinating light in long golden streams;
the camera understands this image. The machine of state bearing down
upon its enemies’ (SV, 469, 454). Despite the attempt to deconstruct an
Englishness located in a mythical past, the implication in the novel is that
the lived ideology of institutional racism and xenophobia is a much more
difficult (grand) narrative to outmanoeuvre.
Julian Barnes, England, England

The practical application of a grand narrative of Englishness is also the
subject of Barnes’s England, England. In Chris Turner’s translation of Jean
Baudrillard’s 1986 book Amérique, that nation is described in the follow-
ing terms: ‘America is neither dream nor reality. It is a hyperreality. It
is a hyperreality because it is a utopia which has behaved from the very
beginning as though it were already achieved.’26 For Baudrillard, America
is a simulacrum, metonymically represented by Disneyland, and it is
something of this treatment of national identity that Barnes adopts in
his 1998 novel. Exporting a postmodern reading of America to England,
the novel describes the creation of a holiday theme park on the Isle of
Wight devoted to the idea of Englishness and designed to attract both
the indigenous population and overseas tourists. The ultimate aim of this
scheme, however, is not to crystallise and preserve a sense of fading, post-
imperial national identity, but to package a viable cultural commodity
appropriate for a late capitalist economy. In constructing the park, the
very nature of Englishness is rendered into a series of products and images
that can be sold to a willing public. To identify the marketable aspects of
Englishness, Sir Jack Pitman, head of Pitco Industries – the novel’s char-
acterisation of a typical Thatcherite entrepreneur – commissions a market
research questionnaire to discover ‘Fifty Quintessences of Englishness’.
The resulting report identifies such objects and characteristics as the Royal
Family, Robin Hood and his merrie men, cricket, imperialism, a robin in
the snow, hypocrisy, emotional frigidity and flagellation/public schools –
some of which are clearly more marketable than others.27
England, England thus negotiates two central aspects in postmodern-
ist theory: Jean Baudrillard’s emphasis on simulations and simulacra and
Fredric Jameson’s identification of postmodernism as ‘the cultural logic of
late capitalism’. The former position is most obviously addressed in the
incorporation in the novel of a French intellectual, Sir Jack, invited to
220 Ni ck Bentley
speak to the team who are planning the theme park. In his speech, the
intellectual identifies the contemporary preference for the simulacra: ‘It is
well established . . . that nowadays we prefer the replica to the original . . .
the world of the third millennium is inevitably, is ineradicably modern,
and . . . it is our intellectual duty to submit to that modernity, and to dis-
miss as sentimental and inherently fraudulent all yearnings for what is
dubiously called the “original.”’28 The theory adopted here is a paraphras-
ing of Baudrillard’s third order of simulacra, and is delivered in a context
that encourages us to mock the situation in which it is presented: after
delivering his captivating and intense exegesis of high critical theory, the
great philosopher stops off in London to buy fishing gear and a quantity
of aged Caerphilly with his conference fee, before jetting off to his next
international conference.29 However, the content of the speech remains an
unsettling set of ideas in a novel that evades straightforward satire – this
is not an attack on (foreign) intellectual theory that you might get in a
novel by Kingsley Amis. The core of the French intellectual’s theory is
corroborated by ideas expressed elsewhere in the novel on the unreliability
of memory and the impossibility of recovering an original or authentic
past, despite the longing to do so. It is the easy commercial relationship
between high academic theory and the corporate world that is being sati-
rised, rather than the theories themselves.
Barnes’s novel is a satire, but satire itself, of course, is problematic in
a philosophical system in which any grounding or right state of affairs
can be assumed against which the target of the satire is meant to be
distanced. This is why Barnes is best described as a reluctant postmod-
ernist; he can see the flaws in the consumerist policies of a monetarism
that exploits national identity not for any authentic longing for the past,
but as a commodity to be repackaged and sold to a consuming public; but
he recognises that the main grounding of resistance to those policies is
also redundant. This position is best represented in the figure of Dr Max,
the historian hired by Pitman to add credibility to some of the historical
themes adopted in the park. Although Dr Max is seen at one level to be
a corrective balance to the postmodernism of the French intellectual, the
former is far from an advocate of rationalist empiricism:
is it not the case that when we consider such lauded and fetishized concepts
as, oh, I throw a few out at random, Athenian democracy, Palladian archi-
tecture, desert-sect worship of the kind that still holds many in thrall, there
is no authentic moment of beginning, of purity, however hard their devo-
tees pretend. . . . What we are looking at is almost always a replica, if that is
the locally fashionable term, of something earlier.30
This discussion between Dr Max and the main character Martha Cochrane
is precipitated by observing a particularly natural-looking English land-
scape that is shown to be an artificial construction that parallels the build-
ing of Sir Jack’s ‘England, England’. The theme park in Barnes’s novel
stands in relation to the ‘real’ England, as Disneyland does to America
for Baudrillard. For Barnes, the power of Englishness does not reside in
the accuracy of a verifiable list of (commodifiable) objects and symbols,
but in the nostalgic longing by individuals for a past sense of belonging
to a shared culture. The fact that memory itself is put under scrutiny in
the text, especially in Martha’s case, does not detract from the emotional
power of those memories. As James J. Miracky argues: ‘Just when one
suspects that Barnes is validating postmodern theory, he incorporates ele-
ments that reach for an authentic human experience of the real ultimately
leaving the novel positioned somewhere between homage and parody of
the dominance of the “hyperreal.’’31
J. G. Ballard, Kingdom Come (2005)

One unsettling aspect of Barnes’s novel is its silence on issues of empire,
colonial heritage and contemporary multiculturalism. This can, in part,
be seen as a consequence of its central focus on a frustrated longing
for a lost England that is conceived in mono-cultural and mono-racial
terms. You might expect Barnes, however, to address these issues in his
interrogation of Englishness in the last decade of the twentieth century.
The ethnic diversity of England is, in contrast, picked up in Kingdom
Come, J. G. Ballard’s final novel before his death in 2009. For Ballard,
Englishness is defined in its most crystallised form in the suburbs, and
particularly in those suburbs on the M25 ring road that circles London.
For Ballard’s narrator and central character, Richard Pearson, here is ‘the
real centre of the nation’. The suburbs, however, are presented as being far
from the stereotypical, banal and mundane locations of ease and mod-
est privilege. As the opening of the novel tells us: ‘The suburbs dream of
violence. Asleep in their drowsy villas, sheltered by benevolent shopping
malls, they wait patiently for the nightmares that will wake them into a
more passionate world.’ Kingdom Come is the last in a group of four nov-
els that Ballard produced in the decade or so before his death that imagine
violent subcultures embedded in what appear to be relatively privileged
communities. Of the four, it is the one novel in which this violence is
associated most clearly with discourses of Englishness. As in Barnes’s
novel, contemporary national identity has been subsumed into consumer
222 Ni ck Bentley
culture; Brooklands, the suburban Thames Valley town in the novel, is
described as ‘the end state of consumerism . . . where the deepest moral
decisions concerned the purchase of a refrigerator or washing machine’.32
In this sense, Ballard’s vision chimes well with Fredric Jameson’s view that
‘the emergence of postmodernism is closely related to the emergence of
this new moment of late, consumer or multinational capitalism’.33 At
the heart of Ballard’s novel, physically and thematically, is a vast shop-
ping mall called the Metro-Centre, a postmodern citadel of shopping that
acts as a synecdoche for contemporary Englishness in the way that for Ian
Baucom colonial architectural locations stand for more traditional forms
of Englishness. The emphasis here is on the amalgamation of simulations
and pastiche that builds up this postmodern space; for example, the centre
contains a Holiday Inn hotel complete with terrace, artificial beach and
wave machine, and the whole place is ‘bathed in a light more healing than
anything on offer from the sun’.34 Ballard’s form of ‘psychogeography’ has
always been interested in the ways in which highly technologised public
spaces affect the emotional behaviour of the people that populate those
spaces, and in this novel the depthless architecture of the shopping mall
has contaminated the emotional reactions of the centre’s faithful to such
an extent that, after a mass shooting at the mall in which Pearson’s father
has been killed, the locus for the reaction to the trauma is the Centre’s
mascots: three giant teddy bears that Pearson notes have been festooned
with flowers and messages of support.
The novel adopts the form of a detective murder mystery, and in his
quest to discover the circumstances leading to his father’s death, Pearson
identifies signs of an underlying violence permeating the town that reveals
itself most visibly in the rise of nationalistic sports group members decked
out in St George’s crosses. The implication is that this kind of violent reac-
tion represents the antidote to the dehumanising effects of late capital-
ism. As Pearson’s father’s Asian neighbour, Nihar Kumar, explains when
discussing the Metro-Centre: ‘It is more than a shop, Mr Pearson. It’s an
incubator. People go in there and they wake up, they see their lives are
empty. So they look for a new dream.’35 This is territory covered in many
1990s and postmillennial fictions, especially in an American context such
as Fight Club (1996), and American Psycho (1991), but what is different
in this novel is the context of English nationalism that forms the locus
for this violence. The form of Englishness presented in the novel is not
representative of nostalgia for a vibrant and authentic cultural life, but
has been reduced to a series of empty signifiers located primarily in the St
George’s Cross as emblazoned on flags, banners and T-shirts, and which in
turn fuels acts of racially motivated attacks. This is a form of Englishness
that is appropriate to postmodernity and is thus identified in the novel as
a kind of costume or performance that can be adopted when necessary.
In one scene, Pearson finds a St George’s shirt in his father’s flat, holds it
up to his chest, and looks at the image produced in the mirror. This don-
ning of the garb of the nationalist transforms Pearson’s outward appear-
ance: ‘I seemed more aggressive [. . .] on the more cerebral style of the
lawyers, doctors and architects who had enlisted in Hitler’s elite corps [. . .]
a violence of the mind.’36 The psychological aggression that accompanies
the active street violence of the sports clubs is reflected here as part of a
uniform and performance that affects the individual internally as well as
externally. It is significant that Pearson is also trying to become closer to
his lost father at this point in the novel, and the connection with national
identity here is telling – the father becomes emblematic of an individual
attaching himself to a master signifier combined in the figure of the father
and the nation. It is not a great leap from here to the novel’s interest in
the idea of ‘soft fascism’, an ideology drawing on the same psychological
influences that produced Nazi rhetoric in the 1930s and 1940s – the search
for the father and for a fatherland coalescing at this point. Pearson’s affect-
less narrative leaves the attraction to this ideology open, suggesting that
the contemporary English middle class is susceptible to the lure of fascism
in the same way that Hitler’s rise to power in Germany relied on tacit
middle-class support.
As with many Ballard novels, one character is designated as the mouth-
piece for the philosophical musings and in Kingdom Come this is the
psychiatrist Tony Maxted, who Pearson meets through investigating his
father’s murder. Maxted explains his theories directly to Pearson and these
include his idea of a ‘soft fascism’ embedded in the ideological frame-
works of contemporary society. This involves a racially discriminatory
form of group behaviour, but does not have the visible manifestations
associated with fascisms of the mid-twentieth century – the jackboots
and storm troopers – although the marshals at the Metro-Centre and
sports clubs fans represent a less organized version with similar practi-
cal effects. Maxted appears to have in mind a fascism that is promoted
through the ideological apparatuses rather than a visible repressive state,
or a sense in which racism is endemic across public institutions and pri-
vate clubs that remain unchallenged by the authorities. It is fear of the
rise of these groups that persuades Maxted and a number of others to
form a plot to kill David Cruise, a second-rate actor who has become
the media face of the Metro-Centre, and who Maxted feels is a potential
224 Ni ck Bentley
quasi-führer of soft fascism. Pearson eventually discovers that it was this
plot to assassinate Cruise that had gone awry and resulted in his father
being accidentally murdered.
Jeanette Baxter has discussed the way in which Ballard’s 2000
novel Super-Cannes resonates with Georges Bataille’s 1933 essay ‘The
Psychological Structure of Fascism’, and this connection is perhaps even
more appropriate for Kingdom Come in the psychosocial contexts that
lead to the promotion of David Cruise as the Metro-Centre’s figurehead.37
Bataille argues that transgressive and violent behaviour (what he calls the
heterogeneous) can represent an ideological challenge to a dominant soci-
ety that enforces obedience and discipline (the homogenous): ‘Violence,
excess, delirium, madness characterize heterogeneous elements to varying
degrees: active as persons or mobs, they result from breaking the laws of
social homogeneity. . . . Heterogeneous reality is that of a force or shock . . .
[and] takes on the form of a challenge to reason.’ Bataille goes on to
identify two forms of the heterogeneous: the ‘impure’, which celebrates
the ‘excretions’ of society as a potentially liberating and revolutionary
force; and the ‘imperative’, which relates more to ‘noble’, ‘superior’ and
‘individual’ drives, which tends towards fascism.38 The imperative form
of the heterogeneous tends to identify a leader or figurehead on which to
project its desires, hence, for Bataille, the rise of Hitler in the 1930s. It is
this latter form that Ballard adopts in his description of the rise of David
Cruise in the novel. That Cruise is a media figure who uses television to
promote himself as a ‘soft’ führer of consumerism in part satirises the alli-
ance of media technologies and contemporary capitalism which facilitate
such a rise. Pearson’s sense of disillusion and midlife identity crisis (which
as Philip Tew has noted becomes the subject in a number of Ballard’s
late novels) results in him helping Cruise’s rise to power.39 Pearson’s back-
ground in advertising makes him the ideal adviser and media consultant,
a kind of postmodern Goebbels to Cruise’s Hitler.
The ambivalent narration, subject positions and the play of ideologies
the novel puts forward makes the satirical impulse of Ballard’s writing
problematic, and reveals the complexities of adopting postmodern tech-
niques in what is ostensibly a critique of postmodernity. Ballard’s work
has always been influenced by Marxist critiques of contemporary soci-
ety, but an advocacy of a removal of false consciousness becomes difficult
to identify due to Ballard’s style of adopting narrators who appear to be
lacking emotional involvement in the events and people they observe and
describe. Fredric Jameson talks of the waning of affect in late capitalism,
produced by the depthless-ness and lack of real human emotion in post-
modern culture, and Ballard’s narrators seem to dramatise this outlook.40
Pearson, in Kingdom Come, appears as a character whose emotional
responses have been blunted by his previous personal relationships and
his exposure to several years in advertising, where human emotions are
reduced to quantifiable data from market research and customer surveys.
The cold descriptive analysis of a man, who is, after all, trying to locate
the causes of his father’s murder appears to be uncannily emotionless.
As Graham Matthews writes: ‘Ballard’s meticulously affectless prose is
reconfigured in order to shift focus from individual (and by implication)
containable acts of deviancy to a broader assessment of violence and the
community.’41 The text ends with Pearson not coming all that far from his
opening wish that the suburbs erupt into violence as a form of resistance
to the stultifying dehumanisation of the shopping mall, and it is diffi-
cult to discern how much ironic distance the reader should feel towards
Pearson’s sentiments here.
Ballard’s view of contemporary Englishness, then, is of a culture satu-
rated in consumerism, and although the immediate middle-class rebellion
is averted, the ominous presence of a return to violence is projected at the
end of the novel. Ballard’s view that the ideological forces of late capital-
ism have produced a society that is only different from fascist Germany
in matters of degree – the shift to soft fascism as opposed to a hard vari-
ety – is clearly more extreme than Barnes’s wistful nostalgia for an older
Englishness and Rushdie’s desire to reconfigure English national identity
and culture in a post-imperial Britain. But what each of these novelists is
addressing is the way in which Englishness in the postwar, post-imperial
period undergoes a crisis of identity that runs with other decentrings
within cultural politics. In this sense, postmodern techniques and styles
of writing are deployed as the ideal form by each writer in order to reflect
this sense of a national consciousness in flux and in the presentation of
alternative contestations that respond to the general scepticism towards
any grand narrative of Englishness.
Notes
1 Julian Barnes, England, England (London: Jonathan Cape, 1998), 6.
2 Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge,
trans. R. Durand, G. Bennington and B. Massumi (Manchester: Manchester
3 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1983), 7.
226 Ni ck Bentley
4 Eric Hobsbawm, ‘Inventing Traditions’ in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence
Ranger (eds.), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1983), 1–14 [14].
5 Robert Colls and Philip Dodd, Englishness: Politics and Culture, 1880–1920
(London: Croom Helm, 1986)
6 Homi Bhabha, ‘Introduction: Narrating the Nation’ in Homi Bhabha (ed.),
Narrating the Nation (London: Routledge, 1990), 1–7.
7 John Brannigan, Literature, Culture and Society in Postwar England, 1945–1965
(London: Edwin Mellen Press, 2002).
8 See Andrzej Gasiorek, J. G. Ballard (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 2005).
9 Nelly Richard, ‘Postmodernism and Periphery’, Third Text 2 (1987–8),
5–12 [11].
10 Simon During, Textual Practice 1:1 (1987), 32–47 [33].
11 Sara Upstone, Spatial Politics in the Postcolonial Novel (Farnham: Ashgate,
2009); Timothy Brennan, Salman Rushdie and the Third World (London:
Macmillan, 1989); Laura Chrisman, Postcolonial Contraventions: Cultural
Readings of Race, Imperialism and Transnationalism (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 2003); Kanishka Chowdhury, ‘Interrogating “Newness”:
Globalization and Postcolonial Theory in the Age of Endless War’, Cultural
Critique 62 (2006), 126–61.
12 Upstone, Spatial Politics, 32.
13 Ian Baucom, Out of Place: Englishness, Empire and the Locations of Identity
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 4–5.
14 Fredric Jameson, ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’ in E. Ann Kaplan
(ed.), Postmodernism and Its Discontents (London: Verso, 1988), 19.
15 Upstone, Spatial Politics, 30.
16 Doreen Massey, For Space (London: Sage, 2005), 65.
17 Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 81–2.
18 See Brennan, Salman Rushdie.
19 Salman Rushdie, Shame (London: Jonathan Cape, 1983), 29.
20 See Upstone, Spatial Politics.
21 Rushdie, ‘Notes on Writing and the Nation’ in Step Across This Line: Collected
Nonfiction 1992–2002, (London: Jonathan Cape, 2002), 64–8 [67].
22 Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Class, Nations, Literatures (London: Verso, 1992),
127, 134.
23 Lisa Appignanesi and Sara Maitland (eds.), The Rushdie File (London: Fourth
Estate, 1989), 8.
24 Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (1988; Dover: The Consortium, Inc.,
1992), 68. Hereafter cited in the text as SV.
25 Appignanesi, The Rushdie File, 9.
26 Jean Baudrillard, America, trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, 1988), 28.
27 Barnes, England, England, 83–5.
28 England, England, 53–5.
29 Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton and Philip
Beitchman (New York: Semiotext[e], 1983) 4.
30 Barnes, England, England, 132.
31 James J. Miracky, ‘Replicating a Dinosaur: Authenticity Run Amok in the
“Theme Parking” of Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park and Julian Barnes’s
England, England ’, Critique 45/2 (2004), 163–71.
32 J. G. Ballard, Kingdom Come (London: Harper Perennial, Ballard, 2007), 4,
3, 8.
33 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
(London: Verso, 1991), 179.
34 Ballard, Kingdom Come, 37.
35 Kingdom Come, 59.
36 Kingdom Come, 56.
37 Jeanette Baxter, ‘Visions of Europe in Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes’
in Jeanette Baxter (ed.), J. G. Ballard: Contemporary Critical Perspectives
(London: Continuum, 2008), 94–106.
38 George Bataille, ‘The Psychological Structure of Fascism’ in Allan Stoekl
(ed.), Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939, (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1985), 142–4.
39 Philip Tew, ‘Situating the Violence of J. G. Ballard’s Postmillennial Fiction:
The Possibilities of Sacrifice, the Certainties of Trauma’ in Phillip Tew (ed.),
J. G. Ballard: Contemporary Critical Perspectives (London: Continuum, 2008),
105–19.
40 See Jameson, Postmodernism.
41 Matthews, Graham, ‘Consumerism’s Endgame: Violence and Community in
J. G. Ballard’s Late Fiction’, Journal of Modern Literature 36/2 (2013), 122–39
[123].
Ch apter 14
The Whiteness of David Foster Wallace

Samuel Cohen
Because of David Foster Wallace’s vexed relationship with postmodernism

and the complicated ways that we think and talk about race in contempo-
rary U.S. culture, thinking about Wallace in terms of postmodernism and
race is hard. I will try to do so anyway, through examination of a number
of works of fiction and nonfiction Wallace wrote over his twenty-five-year
career, including the under-examined Signifying Rappers: Rap and Race in
the Urban Present (1990), ‘Authority and American Usage’ (2001), Infinite
Jest (1996), ‘Getting Away from Already Being Pretty Much Away from It
All’ (1994) and The Pale King (2011). Reading Wallace in this way is worth
doing, in part, because of the sense that many readers have that his work
speaks for them and for its time, and that it is motivated by a desire to
connect to its readers across the barriers that divide individuals from each
other. It is well known that Wallace wanted to get out of his own skull (as
he put it) and meet readers outside theirs,1 to reject what he believed was
postmodernism’s cynicism about the ability of contemporary humanity to
connect and feel and believe, and to create work that showed people that
others felt and believed as they did, regardless of who they were and how
they lived. That one of the differences his work had to contend with was
that of race is (perhaps understandably) under examined. This essay is a
first step towards a more sustained treatment of Wallace and whiteness.
Both Pomo and Not: Wallace & Postmodernism

The issue of Wallace’s relationship to postmodernism is already well-trod
scholarly ground, in large part because he kept talking about it, in his
essays and even in his fiction. His early fiction is often seen as preoccu-
pied with the influence of the high postmodernists, such as Pynchon,
Gaddis and DeLillo. Wallace’s first novel, The Broom of the System, is
heavily influenced by Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), down to
its incomplete final sentence. The influence was so pronounced, and the
228
The Whiteness of David Foster Wallace 229
desire to be clever so strong, that Wallace would later remark that Broom
read like it had been written by ‘a very smart fourteen-year-old’.2 In his
long story from The Girl with Curious Hair (1989), ‘Westward the Course
of Empire Takes Its Way’, Wallace confronts the legacy of 1960s metafic-
tion in the form of John Barth’s story ‘Lost in the Funhouse’, construct-
ing a metafictional funhouse to rival Barth’s and to expose its emptiness.
Wallace later described this attempt to out meta-metafiction as ‘a perma-
nent migraine’.3
In ‘E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction’, a long essay origi-
nally published in 1993 in the Review of Contemporary Fiction, Wallace
does more than try to escape the influence of postmodern writers on his
own work: he attempts to describe the postmodern condition as he saw it
in contemporary American culture and to prescribe a cure. Here Wallace
argued that postmodern irony had become part of mainstream culture and
so had lost its effectiveness as a vehicle for representing and understanding
life. The statement has been taken by some as a sort of post-irony move-
ment manifesto (or at least a post-irony moment), one which finds irony,
in Wallace’s words, ‘Singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing
anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks’ and so advocates a return to
sincerity.4 Wallace’s argument runs into trouble when it becomes clear that
the programme for surpassing ironic critique is to critique it, to detach
from its detachment – the trouble being that this replicates the loop that
‘Westward’ got stuck in when Wallace tried to surpass Barth’s story.
The artistic success of Infinite Jest is often seen as made possible by the
success of these earlier works’ attempts to move beyond postmodernism,
but I think it more accurate to say that the novel is the culmination of
this struggle, one that is not entirely successful on those terms but whose
failure, again on those terms, is what makes it an artistic success. A book
Wallace had great difficulty writing, as evidenced by its interruption by a
struggle with depression and a short stint at Harvard’s graduate program
in philosophy, Infinite Jest can be profitably read as being about these
struggles. Reading it as a kind of künstlerroman allows us to see the ges-
tures towards an un- or post-postmodern sincerity and the continued reli-
ance on irony, encyclopedic form, and many of the other characteristics
of postmodern fiction it shares not as contradictions but as evidence of
Wallace’s vexed relationship with the postmodern.
This relationship makes the inclusion of Wallace in Postmodern Literature
and Race an awkward one. His aesthetic and intellectual program, to move
beyond the postmodern in its fictional manifestations and in its world
view, make him in one sense ‘post’, as he is often labelled – post-ironic,
230 Sa muel Cohen
ost-postmodern – and in other ways, and depending on how you judge
p
the success of his program, still pretty postmodern. That is, to continue
being reductive: if the salient characteristic of postmodern fiction is a
relentless self-consciousness and that of postmodern ideas is the ironi-
sation of all of the old truths, and if in your writing and thinking you
attempt to be conscious of your self-consciousness and to ironise irony –
even if the attempt is in the service of sincerity – then it is difficult to say
whether you are postmodern.
Postmodernism and Race I: Both Flesh and Not

Whether Wallace was postmodern is the kind of question that has proven
itself a rut for critics, one that it can be argued Wallace himself spun
his wheels in for a while. One of the key things at stake in this essay is
whether race is another rut question for Wallace. The state of race-think-
ing at the time that Wallace was beginning his career throws important
light on this issue. The 1980s were a bleak time for race relations in the
United States, in particular as an outcome of the eight-year presidency of
Ronald Reagan. The gains of the Civil Rights era were under attack from
multiple angles, from legal attacks on affirmative action, to biased presi-
dential appointments, to influential posts like the Equal Employment
Opportunity Commission, to a packing of federal judgeships with
rights-hostile conservatives, to Reagan’s own rhetoric of ‘welfare queens’
and railing against ‘quotas’. The culture wars saw a struggle pitting Lee
Atwater–style dog-whistle politics against multiculturalism and assertions
of African roots. This was the time when the melting pot became the gor-
geous mosaic, when the celebration of Kwanzaa became mainstream, and
when a groundswell of calls for respect for African-American Vernacular
English (AAVE) or what came briefly to be called Ebonics (starting in the
late 1990s) was heard, all developments that were met with hostility on
the right. The end of the Cold War only encouraged the culture warriors,
who found an easy replacement for the threat of Red Menace in the vari-
ous manifestations of the domestic left. As the confirmation hearings of
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and the L.A. riots amply illus-
trated, things were not getting better.
Perhaps not coincidentally, the late 1980s and early 1990s also saw a
rethinking of the nature of race among African-American intellectuals.
While the efforts of the 1980s to reconnect to African roots and empha-
sise Pan-African heritage hardly squared with the postmodern emphasis
on anti-essentialism and social constructionism (just as postcolonialism
assertion of racial pride didn’t, as captured in Kwame Anthony Appiah’s
‘Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial?’), this later turn
in thinking took some inspiration from postmodern thought. Appiah and
other thinkers, including Henry Louis Gates, Houston Baker and bell
hooks, produced work in the early 1990s that questioned the presence of
an essentialist foundation of race-thinking in much of the work about
African-American identity, work that in some cases explicitly invoked
postmodern notions and in other cases simply followed the same lines
of thought. Framing race in terms of its social construction, this work
insisted on its social reality as it undercut assumptions about its biologi-
cal nature, instead promoting a view of African-American identity Gates
called ‘blackness without blood’.5
That this turn in the discussion about race happened in part in reaction
to what Appiah and Gates called ‘the holy trinity of literary criticism’ is
important.6 Uncomfortable with the critical dominance of race, class and
gender, Appiah and Gates wanted to think about what it meant to resort
so regularly to these categories, and in particular what it meant to read
through race without thinking more about what race was. In the context
of a decade in which the federal government seemed inclined to roll back
Civil Rights, and multiculturalism seemed to respond to those efforts by
asserting an essential Pan-Africanist identity, this postmodernism-inflected
challenge to race-thinking opened up thinking in English departments
and elsewhere. It is hard to imagine that Wallace did not encounter this
turn during his years of schooling and in his own reading; it is not at all
hard to imagine that this encounter informed his writing, as well as the
work of writers Wallace saw as significant precursors and of the group of
writers he was often connected with.
Postmodernism and Race II: The Pale Kings

In The Anxiety of Obsolescence, Kathleen Fitzpatrick reflects on the white-
ness of Wallace and his cohort in connection to that of his literary fore-
bears, in particular DeLillo and Pynchon. She reads the latter two – despite
the expressly antiracist elements of their novels and nonfiction (such as
Pynchon’s 1966 essay ‘A Journey Into the Mind of Watts’) – as inadvert-
ently expressing ‘a set of repressed anxieties about race and ethnicity’. An
example is her reading of DeLillo’s White Noise, in which she locates these
repressed anxieties beneath the surface of the more plainly evident anxi-
eties caused by the presence of media and technology in late-twentieth-
century America. The white noise of the title, usually taken to refer to the
232 Sa muel Cohen
static these things cause in daily life, is taken here to refer to a different
kind of whiteness: ‘the noise, just out of the range of conscious hearing,
made by the novel’s white males as they are surrounded and displaced by
members of other races’.7
This is a very particular take on a much-noted phenomenon: the white-
ness of postmodern fiction generally. Whether understood as a fact of
publishing bias or aesthetic preference, critics from the 1960s to today
have noted the whiteness of postmodernist fiction, or what in an attempt
to distinguish between various strands of contemporary fiction, Mark
McGurl calls ‘technomodernism’, this in distinction to the ‘high cultural
pluralism’ of Philip Roth and Toni Morrison and the ‘lower-middle-class
modernism’ of Raymond Carver or Joyce Carol Oates. While the map-
ping is not exclusively about race, the writers McGurl labels ‘technomod-
ernist’ are, overwhelmingly, white men.8
As Fitzpatrick notes, a similar observation has often been made about a
number of writers of Wallace’s cohort, a group that has included Jonathan
Franzen, Jeffrey Eugenides, Donald Antrim, Rick Moody, Dave Eggers,
and others. What these writers have in common, in addition to achieving
critical acclaim, is their 1960s birth, their maleness, and their whiteness.
Wallace’s accidental cohort thus has had to bear the weight of their white-
ness, or been made to feel that they have had to, and have been some-
times scrutinized for their focus on characters like them, as many writers in
the cultural majority and minority both have sometimes been. The ‘New
White Guys’, then, were seen as reinscribing their privilege in their work.9
Wallace himself noted (secondhand) the whiteness of many of his con-
temporaries in ‘Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young’, an essay
originally published in the Atlantic in 1987. While he refers to the group
and himself as Conspicuously Young or C.Y., he cites without comment a
review from the Village Voice that calls them ‘Y.A.W.N.S. (Young Anomic
White Novelists)’.10 In a note to (and quoted by) Jonathan Franzen,
Wallace also reflected the felt difficulty of expressing normal human feel-
ings of alienation as a member of a privileged group:
I think the guys who write directly about and at the present culture tend to
be writers who find their artistic invalidation especially painful. [. . .] And
it’s not an accident that so many of the writers in the shadows are straight
white males. Tribal writers can feel the loneliness and anger and identify
themselves with their subculture and can write to and for their subculture
about how the mainstream culture’s alienated them. White males are the
mainstream culture. So why shouldn’t we be angry, confused, lonely white
males who write at and against the culture?11
Franzen makes the complicated stance here explicit when in his essay he
writes, after quoting Wallace, ‘White men are a tribe too.’ Fitzpatrick
summarizes her take on these ‘New White Guys’:
this generation’s writerly anxiety about exclusion from ‘the culture’ seems
to circulate around their whiteness and maleness; in their unmarkedness,
in finding themselves the New White Guys, these writers feel themselves
excluded from a culture of exclusion, marginalized by a culture that is
finally paying attention to the voices originating on the margins.12
Wallace then, like DeLillo and Pynchon and many white male writers
before him and contemporary to him, wrote out of an anxiety surrounding
race that despite his best intentions may have expressed itself in his work.
The Unbearable Whiteness of Being: Signifying Rappers

In summer 1989, David Foster Wallace and Mark Costello wrote a twen-
ty-page essay that the Missouri Review published the next summer under
the title ‘Signifying Rappers’. Costello and Wallace were living together
in Cambridge, former college roommates reunited months earlier after
Wallace’s long stay with his parents, some ninety miles east on Interstate 90.
Wallace was back east to study in the graduate program in philosophy at
Harvard; Costello was working as a lawyer in Boston. In his preface to the
2013 reissue of the 1990 book version of the essay, Costello claims that the
essay and book grew out of the confluence of a number of factors including
the 1988 publication of a collection of Lester Bangs’s rock criticism, Psychotic
Reactions and Carburetor Dung, which became a part of ‘the central chunk
of reading’ in the apartment; the crashing at their apartment by a friend
who arrived with two rap mix tapes and the beginnings of crossover success
for rap in the figures of Tone Loc and, of all people, Bobby Brown (whose
music Costello notes ‘is or isn’t rap’); and what Costello calls ‘an eruption of
gun violence’ in the summer of 1989 that made it ‘the bloodiest in Boston’s
history’. More immediate factors were Wallace’s failure to write an essay on
porn he’d been working on and his unplanned defense of rap as an art form
at an author event early that summer.13
The result was a book that met with mixed responses from professional
music critics. There were a few more-or-less embarrassing errors with lyrics
(easier to make in the pre-Internet era), which Robert Christgau gleefully
presented, writing that ‘their analysis is adequate to ignorant to barmy’.14
Wallace was reported to have not been especially proud of it, and it is
the only one of his books to have gone out of print.15 Quality aside – and
234 Sa muel Cohen
there are actually some pretty good bits in it, even if most readers have to
agree that it should be of interest only to Wallace completists – it is fasci-
nating for thinking about Wallace and race.
If Signifying Rappers were to be described as having two main emo-
tional tones, they would be enthusiasm and apology. If these tones could
be traced to their sources, the enthusiasm comes out of the project’s birth
from Bangs’s oppositional passion, the amateurism of the mix tape, and
its authors’ being ‘dorked-out’ students of a new genre.16 The apology
stems from the violence of Boston’s summer of 1989 and from the authors’
anxiety concerning their whiteness. In alternating chapters, Wallace and
Costello investigate the poetry of rap lyrics and the social contexts out
of which it comes, but at all times they are aware of the fact that they are
outsiders looking in at something profoundly not theirs. And they are
self-consciously, almost proudly conscious of this. From Section 1’s title –
‘Entitlement’ – Signifying Rappers is anxious to announce its anxiety, as
Wallace does on the first page of his first section: ‘Please know we’re very
sensitive to this question: what business have two white yuppies trying
to do a sampler on rap.’ The book obsessively returns to this concern, as
Costello explains in the preface:
We need to know why we feel a certain thing, or anything at all. . . .

Celebrating feeling is a good Bangsian oink, but the nervous asker, why
and why and why and why, is self-inspecting Dave failing to escape the
planetary orbit of his doubts. . . . The reader’s pupils, moving left to right
along each line of type two decades later, seem to pace the floor alongside a
worried, yearning, baffled, battling David Wallace.17
The battle is to express knowledgeable appreciation of an art form born

out of an experience to which the authors feel themselves alien and to
do so without falling into the numerous pitfalls that await the bumbling
anthropologist with his notebook and earnest desire to understand. Read
as an early example of the New Sincerity with which Wallace is often con-
nected, Signifying Rappers can be seen as the product of Wallace’s deter-
mination to risk ridiculousness in order to connect with others. When
these others are Others – that is, when the task is not just the connecting
of humans, as Wallace often framed his project, but the connecting of
different kinds of people, Others whose alterity must, in good late-1980s
fashion, be respected while being respectfully explored, the problem is not
just earnestness but an almost unbearably irresolvable tension. It is a ten-
sion that also shows up in less obviously ‘othered’ settings in Wallace’s
work – an example is his essay on the Illinois State Fair.
White Illinoise: ‘Getting Away from Already Pretty

Much Being Away from It All’
‘Getting Away from Already Pretty Much Being Away from It All’ appeared
originally in Harper’s in July 1994 as ‘Ticket to the Fair’ and was Wallace’s
first major magazine story. Though it is sometimes claimed that Signifying
Rappers launched Wallace’s journalistic career, it is more accurate to say
that it was this essay that unleashed the flood of nonfiction assignments.18
What it is not, as is also sometimes claimed, is Wallace’s first (in the words
he uses to imagine Harper’s thinking in making the assignment) ‘pith-
helmeted anthropological reporting’, if Signifying Rappers is understood
properly. It is not the report of a journey into the dark heart of Boston
but rather a dispatch from what Wallace imagines the editors of the
‘swanky East-Coast magazine’ calling ‘something rural and heartlandish’.19
However, for Wallace this is not someplace exotic and other: it’s home.
To complicate things further, it’s a home to which he was in some ways
always alien, as is evident in this essay and others he has written about his
home state. A faculty brat (his father was a philosophy professor and his
mother an English professor) and repeat exile to the East, Wallace was and
was not of Illinois. He even has a local guide for his trip to the fair, who
he refers to throughout as ‘Native Companion’.
This ambivalence plays itself out in the essay’s hyperattention to group
identity, to Us vs Them, in Wallace’s words: ‘The State Fair is rural IL’s
moment of maximum community, but even at a Fair whose whole raison
is For-Us, Us’s entail Thems, apparently.’20 The Thems here are either the
carnies, who the farmers and otherwise agricultural citizens see as white
trash (or ‘traish’), or the ‘city people’ from metropolises like Springfield
and Champaign. What they are not is black people. As Wallace notes, after
observing that there are no black people in the fair’s Twilight Ballroom
during the clogging competition, ‘There’s an atmosphere in the room –
not racist, but aggressively white. It’s hard to describe. The atmosphere’s
the same at a lot of rural Midwest public events. It’s not like if a black
person came in he’d be ill-treated; it’s more like it would just never occur
to a black person to come in here.’21
But to Wallace, they’re all Thems – the ag-people, as he calls them, the
carnies, those he identifies as ‘Kmart People’, adding, ‘Farther south they’d
be a certain fringe-type of White Trash’, even the absent black people.22
Wallace’s distaste for the Kmart People and the carnies, and his conde-
scension for the rural ag-people, is interwoven with repeated references to
his assignment for the swanky East Coast magazine and self-mockery for
236 Sa muel Cohen
the high-flown conclusions he is inclined to reach from his observations,
but it is not balanced out: the anthropological approach he takes depends
on the same Us and Themness he anatomises in the fairgoers, and aware-
ness of that fact, like his self-consciousness in Signifying Rappers, doesn’t
exactly solve the problem.
Dark Logics: Infinite Jest

Wardine say her momma aint treat her right. Reginald he come round
to my blacktop at my building where me and Delores Epps jump dou-
ble dutch and he say, Clenette, Wardine be down at my crib cry say her
momma aint treat her right, and I go on with Reginald to his building
where he live at, and Wardine be sit deep far back in a closet in Reginald
crib, and she be cry.23
Thus opens the ‘Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar’ section of Infinite Jest.
The passage it is part of takes up five paragraphs and slightly less than two
pages, yet it has offended many readers of the novel. It is about a young
girl’s abuse at the hands of her mother and her mother’s boyfriend, ren-
dered in an attempt at a black urban voice. Infinite Jest, in telling three
barely convergent stories, those of a student at a tennis academy, of a resi-
dent at a halfway house, and of Québécois separatists, has little time to
focus on African-American characters, but the few moments that it does
have attracted outsized negative attention.
In the case of the Wardine section, criticism could be made on the
grounds that the dialect is poorly (or even insultingly) done and/or on
the grounds that Wallace chooses not to present the dialogue or internal
monologue of other characters who might speak in something other than
standard English in that dialect but rather presents their speech through
his own distinctive voice. Wallace (or his narrator) remarks on his use of
this common fictional technique in a number of endnotes, e.g. ‘137. None
of these are Don Gately’s terms’.24 But Wallace chose to present this sec-
tion not only from Clenette’s point of view but also in what he imagines
his created character’s voice might be. Given the problematic history of
black dialect in American fiction, it is not unreasonable that attention has
been drawn to the passage, though there is nothing inherently objectiona-
ble in presenting characters using their own language (if done well, which
Clenette’s voice is, to most ears, not). The question is why these characters
and not others.
The only other extended instance of a kind of dialect use in Infinite
Jest comes in the seven-page ‘yrtruly’ section, which tells the violent and
unsettling if largely free-floating story of a group of junkies. Interestingly,
this dialect is sometimes mistaken by readers for black, but it is clearly a
created voice cobbled together from real and apparently invented street
slang with none of the usual markers of AAVE – in tense and aspect, for
example. When recognised for what it is, it seems not to cause offense to
readers the way the Wardine section does. While equally if not more non-
standard than that earlier section, it is not perceived in its incorrectness to
indicate a cognitive deficit. This is partly because of the inventiveness of
its slang and partly because of persistent misconceptions about the origins
and relative sophistication of AAVE, but it may also be partly because the
Wardine section is badly done in a particularly simplistic way, with its
repetition of ‘Wardine be cry’, its near refusal to use a pronoun when a
proper name can be repeated, and its largely unpunctuated parataxis.
Wallace’s bad AAVE passage is no proof of racism. It may only be evi-
dence of a flaw in the technique of a still-young writer and maybe an
inherent absence of sprachgefühl or innate feeling for a language, or in
this case a dialect. In contrast to Signifying Rappers and ‘Getting Away’,
the problem here may paradoxically be a lack of self-consciousness about
whiteness and othering, or a failure of that self-consciousness to lead to a
more successful representation of black speech. For later evidence of that
self-consciousness, we have to turn to ‘Authority and American Usage’.
Standard White English: ‘Authority and American Usage’

In his 2001 review of Bryan Garner’s A Dictionary of Modern American
Usage, Wallace claims that the US is ‘in the midst of a protracted Crisis of
Authority in matters of language’ as the result of the war between prescrip-
tivists, or what he calls SNOOTS (an acronym either for ‘Sprachgefühl
Necessitates Our Ongoing Tendance’ or ‘Syntax Nudniks Of Our Time’)
on one side and on the other the ‘doctrinaire positivists’ of descriptivism.25
Trying to stake a claim to some middle ground, Wallace comes to the sub-
ject of dialect. He introduces the subject with a hypothetical situation:
imagine that two hard-core young urban black guys are standing there
talking and I, who am resoundingly and in all ways white, come up and
greet them with ‘Yo’ and address one or both as ‘Brother’ and ask ‘s’up,
s’goin’ on,’ pronouncing on with that NYCish [. . .] diphthong that Young
Urban Black English deploys for a standard o. Either these guys are going
to think that I am mocking them and be offended or they are going to
think I am simply out of my mind. No other reaction is remotely foresee-
able. Q: Why?26
238 Sa muel Cohen
The answer is formulated by Wallace around the idea of dialect. Pointing
out that SWE (Standard Written English) is only one dialect among many,
even for individuals, Wallace explains, ‘This is because there are – as you
and I know and yet no one in the Usage Wars ever seems to mention –
situations in which faultlessly correct SWE is not the appropriate dia-
lect.’27 The implication, of course, is that there are situations when it is.
The classroom is one of these, for Wallace, and it is in the section of the
essay devoted to a defense of teaching SWE in his own classroom – against
claims that it is more Standard White than Standard Written and so sup-
presses the equally valid dialect of AAVE – that we can see another piece
of the picture of Wallace’s relationship to race. It is sympathetic, to some
readers, and further evidence of insensitivity to others, but it is certainly
self-aware. He introduces his own practice, in almost two pages of smaller
typeface, with this:
Because the argument for SWE is both most delicate and (I believe) most
important with respect to students of color, here is a condensed version of
the spiel I’ve given in private conferences with certain black students who
were a) bright and inquisitive as hell and b) deficient in what US higher
education considers written English facility.
In the spiel, he explains that the language that the student has been
writing in, what he calls SBE (Standard Black English), is like a foreign
language and that although it is just as good a language as SWE, it is
not the language of success in the US. Wallace acknowledges that this is
problematic:
This is just How It Is. You can be glad about it or sad about it or deeply
pissed off. You can believe it’s racist and unfair and decide right here and
now to spend every waking minute of your life arguing against it, and maybe
you should, but I’ll tell you something – if you ever want those arguments
to get listened to and taken seriously, you’re going to have to communicate
them in SWE, because SWE is the dialect our nation uses to talk to itself.
He goes on to provide a list of famous African Americans noted for their
masterful use of language, noting that they too used SWE because they
realized this last fact, and ends his spiel, ‘And [STUDENT’S NAME],
you’re going to learn to use it, too, because I am going to make you.’28
It is perhaps not surprising that Wallace received complaints about this
approach. His response is that doing otherwise would amount to ‘pus-
syfooting around’ the realities of racism and elitism, and that contrary to
popular belief among SNOOTS and proponents of what he calls PCE or
Politically Correct English, language does not determine behaviour: ‘This
is PCE’s core fallacy – that a society’s mode of expression is productive of
its attitudes rather than a product of those attitudes – and of course it’s
nothing but the obverse of the politically conservative SNOOT’s delusion
that social change can be retarded by restricting change in standard usage.’
It is the attitudes, he argues, that need changing. Wallace bolsters his
argument with accusations of self-serving righteousness among the PCE-
wielding Left: ‘PCE functions primarily to signal and congratulate certain
virtues in the speaker – scrupulous egalitarianism, concern for the dignity
of all people, sophistication about the political implications of language –
and so serves the self-regarding interests of the PC far more than it serves
any of the persons or groups renamed.’29 Readers of this passage who are
careful about this kind of language use themselves could be excused for
feeling a little accused and – if they, like many readers, expect from pres-
tige writers not only aesthetic but moral and political rightness (that is to
say, agreement with them) – a little let down.
White Collar/White Trash: The Pale King

The Pale King is a Reagan-era novel about boredom and taxes that was
put together by Wallace’s longtime editor Michael Pietsch from materials
left by Wallace when he committed suicide. It is incomplete, put together
on Pietsch’s best guesses of Wallace’s intentions, but even in its unfin-
ished state it is a fascinating book. It is also, as the title could be taken to
imply, a white book – that is, a book not just practically devoid of traces
of African Americans but also interested in whiteness itself.
In a review, Lee Konstantinou argues that, if the novel has a thesis,
it is that modern life is meaningless and terror (one possible source of
the novel’s title being ‘the pale king of terrors’, a nineteenth-century
phrase for ‘the melancholy fear of death’), might best be dealt with not
by the mask of boredom but rather by the ecstasy of routine, surpassing
boredom through the heroic exercise of care. Konstantinou writes: ‘We
can summarize the book’s arguments in this way, and we would not be
mistaken to do so, but Wallace’s fiction, though informed by argument,
is always also about the process of discovering these views. The reason
Wallace’s arguments require the form of fiction is that they’re arguments
about how to live.’30
In fact, The Pale King is more historically specific than this, positioned
against Reaganesque anti-government neoliberalism, and also more par-
ticularly racialised. Aside from a very few references to ‘blacks’ (always)
fishing, or seen receiving welfare checks in documentaries or remembered
240 Sa muel Cohen
holding radios to their ears in the 1970s, this is a book filled with white
people (which may of course perfectly reflect its 1980s-IRS-office-in-Peoria
setting). One thing that is interesting about the whiteness of the characters
in The Pale King, however, is that although the majority are white-collar
workers, there are a few moments where the gaze shifts to people who the
‘ag people’ in ‘Getting Away’ might have called ‘white trash’. In particular,
there are the relatively brief Toni Ware sections of the book, which focus
mainly on her terrifying poverty- and violence-filled girlhood. There is
also a working-class white man among the large cast of main characters
with the unmistakably white name Lane A. Dean, Jr. (imagine the flat
Midwestern vowels), a devout Christian whose earnest reflections on his
girlfriend’s pregnancy are given their own chapter (originally published
as ‘Good People’ in The New Yorker). Both of these characters are treated
with sensitivity and sympathy; both of their stories are about the struggle
to find a way to live amid more and less trying circumstances.
Both characters are also arguably as distant from Wallace’s own expe-
rience as rappers and other speakers of AAVE are. Neither, however, is
subject to reproduction of their dialect but is rather given what is at this
late stage of his career a much-toned-down Wallace voice. It could be
argued that sections treating these characters provide evidence of Wallace’s
increasing inclination to use a more subtle free indirect discourse in his
fiction – there is a weird, intermittent ‘baroqueness’ to Ware’s and a sim-
plicity to Dean’s – but for now it seems more important to ask whether
these passages indicate a continued tendency to treat as other only those of
different races or rather a renewed interest in investigating different kinds
of whiteness (or perhaps both). As whiteness studies have pointed out
and Faulkner knew long before that genre existed, ‘white trash’ is a special
kind of raced whiteness; similarly, the Caucasian evangelical Christian is a
special kind of white person, in the historical ascendant and worthy of fic-
tional attention. And the attention paid to them in The Pale King is reso-
lutely non-ironic, displaying earnestness not unlike Dean’s in screwing up
the courage to speak honestly with his girlfriend or Ware’s in preemptively
defending her dogs against a neighbour. These are characters who believe
in things, things outside of themselves, and they are presented without
caricature and also without the self-consciousness attendant to Wallace’s
attempts to do the same with African-American characters.
The Water Is White: Conclusion

Borrowing from the old folk song, the water between the races is wide,
and can keep people from crossing over. Exploring Wallace’s relationship
to race in his work, we can see that he had a difficulty writing about
African-American characters and experience that stemmed in some large
measure from his having been born on the other side of the river. Seven
months after Wallace’s death, Little, Brown published the text of his 2005
Kenyon commencement speech, which had been enjoying an active life
on the Internet, under the title This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on
a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life. In it, Wallace
retells what he calls ‘a didactic little parable-ish story’ to which he had
alluded in Infinite Jest (putting it in the mouth of a biker named Bob
Death), the punch line of which (in the slightly cleaned-up speech’s ver-
sion) is ‘What the hell is water?’ The title alludes to the story’s message,
which Wallace admits is banal but nonetheless true, like many of the
beliefs his work seems to profess in spite of their awareness of this banal-
ity: the most important truths of life are right before our eyes, but we’re so
used to what’s there that we have to work ‘unimaginably’ hard to achieve
what he calls ‘awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain
sight all around us’.31
To risk a multiple-metaphor collision: the water that Wallace tried to
see in his work was white. In addition to the wide water dividing white
and black experience that he could not cross over, then, there is the white
water of This Is Water, the everyday experience he lived, his family and
friends lived and the overwhelming majority of the characters in his work
lived. That he was still looking for ‘essential’ truths, despite his thoroughly
ironised awareness of the dangers of thinking essentially, indicates how his
thinking was not postmodern, at least in this way. That (paradoxically post-
modern) anti-essentialist thinking about race was part of the intellectual air
he breathed, that he recognised the social construction of race not just in
language but in everything, we can see without interpretive violence in the
small portions of his work in which race was a subject. That these encoun-
ters were less than wholly successful, we should be able to admit; whether
we are able to maintain our respect for the work and the man while rec-
ognising this fact is an individual choice. What we ought to grant is that,
like seeing the water, thinking about race in America is not only hard, it
is a daily effort, like the practice of Infinite Jest’s Alcoholics Anonymous,
and it is, in the speech’s closing words, an education that is ‘the job of a
lifetime’.32 As Christoph Ribbat has noted, Wallace’s urging his listeners
to try to understand the woman screaming at her toddler in the checkout
line in This Is Water can be favorably compared to his treatment of the
‘Kmart people’ in ‘Getting Away’ and so taken as evidence of his having
learned something about how to see people who are different from him.33
One wonders how Wallace’s education might have further progressed.
242 Sa muel Cohen
Notes
1 Larry McCaffery, ‘An Interview with David Foster Wallace’, Review of
Contemporary Fiction 13/2 (Summer 1993), 127–50 [127].
2 D. T. Max, Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace
(New York: Viking, 2012), 48.
3 McCaffery, ‘An Interview with David Foster Wallace’, 142.
4 David Foster Wallace, ‘E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction’ in A
Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments (New York:
Back Bay, 1997), 21–82 [64].
5 Henry Louis Gates Jr., ‘Blackness without Blood’ in Nicolaus Mills (ed.),
Culture in an Age of Money: The Legacy of the 1980s in America (Chicago: Dee,
1990), 109.
6 K. Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., ‘Editor’s Introduction:
Multiplying Identities’, Critical Inquiry 18 (Summer 1992), 625.
7 Kathleen Fitzpatrick, The Anxiety of Obsolescence: The American Novel in the
Age of Television (2006; Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1967), http://
www.anxietyofobsolescence.com (chap 3, para 31).
8 Mark McGurl, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative
Writing (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 27, 56, 63.
9 See Fitzpatrick, The Anxiety of Obsolescence for a convincing refutation of the
idea that Wallace ever uttered this phrase attributed to him (chap 5, para 4).
10 David Foster Wallace, ‘Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young,’
Review of Contemporary Fiction 8/3 (1988), 36–53 [41, 38].
11 Quoted in Fitzpatrick, The Anxiety of Obsolescence (chap 5, para 7).
12 The Anxiety of Obsolescence, (chap 5, para 8).
13 David Foster Wallace and Mark Costello, Signifying Rappers: Rap and Race in
the Urban Present (New York: Back Bay, 2013), vi, x.
14 Robert Christgau, ‘But Seriously, Folks’, http://www.robertchristgau.com/xg/
bkrev/rbsignif-90.php [1990].
15 Max, Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story, 125.
16 Wallace and Costello, Signifying Rappers, xix.
17 Signifying Rappers, 21, xix.
18 See Marshall Boswell, Understanding David Foster Wallace (Columbia:
University of South Carolina Press, 2003), 7.
19 Wallace, ‘Getting Away from Already Pretty Much Being Away from It All’ in
A Supposedly Fun Thing, 83–137 [83].
20 ‘Getting Away’, 110.
23 David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest (Boston: Little, Brown, 1996), 37.
24 Foster, Infinite Jest, 1026.
25 David Foster Wallace, ‘Authority and American Usage’ in Consider the Lobster
and Other Essays (New York: Little, Brown, 2005), 66–112 [75, 69, 81].
26 Wallace, ‘Authority and American Usage’, 102.
27 ‘Authority and American Usage’, 102.
28 ‘Authority and American Usage’, 108–9, 120.
29 ‘Authority and American Usage’, 109–13.
30 Lee Konstantinou, ‘Unfinished Form – review of The Pale King.’ Los Angeles
Review of Books, https://lareviewofbooks.org/review/unfinished-form (6 July
2011).
31 David Foster Wallace, This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant
Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life (New York: Little, Brown, 2009),
5, 4, 135, 131.
32 Wallace, This Is Water, 136.
33 Christoph Christophe Ribbat, ‘Seething Static: Notes on Wallace and
Journalism’ in David Hering (ed.), Consider David Foster Wallace (Los Angeles:
Sideshow Media Group Press, 2010), 187–98 [194].
P a rt Fi ve
Postracial Futures?
Ch apter 15
After the First Decade

Revisiting the Work of Zadie Smith
Philip Tew
At a point fourteen years after the first publication of White Teeth (2000),
this essay revisits both Zadie Smith’s first novel and her other subsequent
literary output in order to propose that her writing constitutes an aesthetic
and intellectual project that is often radically misread variously by many
readers, critics and scholars. Certainly examples of such misapprehension
abound, often initially, interestingly enough, with regard to her ethnicity.
According to an early anonymous profile entitled ‘The Transformation of
Zadie Smith’, ‘in the past year Smith, who comes from a working-class
Jamaican family, has become a darling of the literary world both in Britain
and in the United States’,1 while Garrett Ziegler manages to erroneously
situate Smith among ‘a notable craze for young, photogenic South Asian
writers’ [my emphases].2 And as for an exaggeration of the postcolonial
struggle as a key element in Smith’s work, consider Phyllis Lassner, for
whom Smith becomes by 2004 ‘Britain’s most celebrated postcolonial
prodigy’. Lassner insists that ‘neither she nor her characters will accept
their places as objects of an interminable and global racist plot’.3 A lit-
tle more accurately, in 2006 Clifford Thompson commented on Smith’s
first novel that: ‘rather than putting positive faces on “underrepresented”
groups, Smith achieved the democratizing effect that is the real aim of
multiculturalism by revealing the not-always-pretty mugs of everybody,
and in place of the solemnity and earnestness of so much literature given
the multicultural label, she brought her much-noted exuberance.’4 Smith
seemed somewhat diminished by such a view and in 2007 H. Adlai
Murdoch commented: ‘Smith herself seemed to embody all too easily the
multiracial, multicultural Britain of which she wrote; as a member of this
immigrant population’s second generation, the object of her discourse was
not just herself, in a way, but was also the illumination of an experience
radically different from that of her precursors.’5 In a similar but less posi-
tive vein, Bruce King in an early review reflected ‘I am also uncomfort-
able when minorities are portrayed as non-stop foolish’ a response which
247
248 Phi li p Tew
fails to address or even comprehend the full scope of the multiple targets
of Smith’s ironies, which would surely include many of King’s own crit-
ical presumptions.6 Notably for someone so fervently hailed by so many
as almost a ‘poster’ girl for multiculturalism, hybridity and postcolonial
identity, Smith interrogates rigorously the shibboleths of such discourses.
She is a self-conscious writer concerned with society in general in many
ways, responsive to both traditional and avant-garde aesthetic ideas which
she co-opts in her attempts to extend the practices of realism.
In her collected essays Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays (2009),
in a revised version of ‘Two Directions for the Novel’, Smith reflects on
and quotes an exponent of the nouveau roman: ‘Robbe-Grillet imagined
a future for the novel in which objects would no longer “be merely the
vague reflection of the hero’s vague soul, the image of his torments, the
shadow of his desires.”’7 Taking this insistence as a starting point, and
extending Madhu Dubey’s important awareness of the radical limits of
postmodernism in addressing the lives of racial minorities, this essay
explores reservations concerning reading texts, or lives, through the
prisms of either British postcolonial and diasporic identities or postmod-
ernism. Arguing that such interpretative strategies risk largely essentialist
and autotelic readings, it seeks to produce an account of Smith which
on the one hand questions the validity of a deconstructive, postmod-
ernism critique per se, and on the other, draws attention to Smith’s own
radical questioning of whether postcolonial identities are capable of ever
providing either a legitimate aesthetic framework or suitable understand-
ing of identity in the life-world. For Zygmunt Bauman in Modernity
and Ambivalence (1991) a postmodern condition encompasses an impli-
cit ambivalence, a theoretical and cultural contradiction derived from
enlightened modernity:
It remains to be seen to what extent the widespread aversion to grand social
designs, the loss of interest in absolute truths, privatization of redemptive
urges, reconciliation with the relative – merely heuristic – value of all life
techniques, acceptance of irredeemable plurality of the world, in short all
these worrying yet nevertheless exhilarating trends which are usually sub-
sumed under the name of postmodernity, are a lasting consequence of that
abolition of strangerhood which has been attained through raising it to the
status of a universal human condition.8
Smith engages in a far more heterogeneous version of what Dubey calls
‘racial representation’ where, in Dubey’s terms, one potentially ‘questions
the assumption [per se] that highbrow culture is inherently humanizing’.9
After the First Decade 249
Certainly Smith incorporates such innate doubts that Bauman and Dubey
raise, but not in terms solely of an intellectual experience, rather more
as part of a quotidian understanding of life’s ‘irredeemable plurality’ to
adopt Bauman’s terminology. And, as we will see, Smith celebrates every-
day profundities, suggesting that neither of the framings outlined above
can offer a sufficient mode of understanding for a complex genre – the
socially aware novel in which contemporary communities are made up of
complicated families, friends and strangers. And this I will argue is evi-
dent in all her work, including NW (2012) where proximity and abutment
become crucial to the lives (and to the death in one case) of the various
characters – some interconnected formally, others not, but all linked by a
contemporary, fragmented urban existence.
I think it timely to suggest that Smith’s fiction ought to be reread
precisely in terms of exploring familial, personal and wider issues of
identity from a range of perspectives that have eluded many critics
and commentators. In so doing I will draw on all four of her novels
published to date, and other public pronouncements including vari-
ous journalistic pieces, not only to demonstrate the tensions between
Smith’s roots in multiple cultures understood variously – and these
would include English, Caribbean, that of Cambridge University, of
British intellectuals, aesthetic, streetwise London, youth and so forth –
but also her strong sense of an intellectual individualism that is highly
resistant to many of the essentialisms and generalisations that underpin
notions of a ‘black’ or postcolonial culture and identity, which in turn
inform many quotidian and theoretical concepts of ethnicity. Her scep-
ticism mirrors that of Aijaz Ahmad, found for instance in the latter’s
reference to ‘people who live in metropolitan countries for professional
reasons but use words like “exile” or “diaspora” – words which have
centuries of pain and dispossession inscribed in them – to designate
what is, after all, only personal convenience’.10 And importantly, Smith
has demonstrated palpably a critical hostility to post-structuralism and
postmodernism as dogmas resistant to her notions of transcendence,
personal freedom and the transcendent nature of art, all of which for
Smith may inform and nourish the individual ethically and person-
ally. Finally she seems to suggest that all such positions ought to be
eschewed rather than embraced.
Certainly in formal terms Smith’s fictional trajectory is not aligned with
postmodern interrogations of and opposition to authorship/authority, for
as Paul Dawson indicates along with a number of other contemporary
250 Phi li p Tew
writers, Smith has produced work characterised by a fundamental omnis-
cience, fictions:
which exhibit all the formal elements we typically associate with literary
omniscience: an all-knowing, heterodiegetic narrator who addresses the
reader directly, offers intrusive commentary on the events being narrated,
provides access to the consciousness of a range of characters, and generally
asserts a palpable presence within the fictional world.11
In Smith’s novels there are a series of common frames of reference, often
not fully articulated but rather implied, which are those cultural and
ontological experiences that pertain to what might be described as a post-
modern condition, about which she remains sceptical. In White Teeth this
is certainly not intended to endorse an ideological perspective. Smith sets
out to variously incorporate, then critique, and next mock the assump-
tions underlying a set of critical practices that were already in decline by
the time the novel had been published. If postmodernism had long been
a vexed term, most particularly troubling in the last decade of the twenti-
eth century, then Smith’s work directs us to wonder what it was about this
cultural form that held sway over so many academics and intellectuals for
so long.
Steve Connor in Postmodernist Culture: An Introduction to Theories of
the Contemporary claims that ‘the clearest place to start in examining the
relationship between modernism and postmodernism is in architecture’.12
This is perhaps primarily because the transition from modernism to post-
modernism seems obviously exhibited in ‘the “postmodernist” reactions
against the International Style’ which for Connor involved a critical epiph-
any concerning modernism, a recognition of ‘its refusal to acknowledge
the iconography of power that underpins it’.13 Connor’s curiously worded
claim that the ‘theory of postmodernist architecture has penetrated its
object, to the point where there is no possibility of the object or the the-
ory standing wholly distinct from each other’ seems to imply a building’s
physical coherence and viability might be dependent on an appropriate
cultural critique, a logical absurdity, the kind of intellectual posturing
and pomposity that Smith undermines throughout The Autograph Man
(2002), where protagonist Alex-Li Tandem – half-Jewish, half-Chinese and
a dealer in philography, a profession plagued by forgeries and inauthen-
ticity – seems to believe in very little, even the celebrity or fame in
whose traces he trades.14 Suffering horrifies him. Sitting by the bedside
of a dying fellow autograph trader, Brian Lovelear, Alex ‘would be any-
where but here. He was unable to take his mind or eyes off the man in the
next bed, who was much, much too young to be in this place. [. . .] It was
obscene.’15 Alex refuses most affiliations apart from childhood friendships
forged on the day his father died at a wrestling match. ‘His instinct was
to detest groupings of all kinds – social, racial, national or political – he
had never joined so much as a swimming club.’16 Alex’s malaise is offered
as a postmodern symptom, with his avoidance of multiple realities, a
radical disenchantment with meaning and traditional affiliations that is
dysfunctional.
In 1971 Ihab Hassan had, in cavalier fashion, attempted severally to
define the meaning and/or significance of postmodernism within the
literary-critical field:
And here are some leitmotifs of that criticism: the literary act in quest and
question of itself; self-subversion or self-transcendence of forms; popular
mutations; languages of silence.
[. . .]
The most complicated examples of twentieth-century literature . . . are more
than contemptuous of their own formal and stylistic elaborateness.
[. . .]
Postmodernism may be a response, direct or oblique, to the Un-imaginable
which Modernism glimpsed only in its most prophetic moments. Certainly
it is not the Dehumanization of the Arts that concerns us now; it is rather
the Denaturalization of the Planet and the End of Man.17
For Smith, reflexivity does not abolish form or function, rather it becomes
part of a process of degradation of both meanings and sustainable identi-
ties. Alex reflects, ‘He was twenty-seven years old. He was emotionally
underdeveloped, he supposed, like most Western kids. He was certainly
suspicious of enlightenment. Above all, he liked to be entertained. He
was in the habit of mouthing his own personality traits to himself like
this while putting his coat on – he suspected that farm boys and people
from the Third World never did this, that they were less self-conscious.’18
In light of such anti-realist ideological negativity as Hassan’s that curiously
elevates an aesthetic perspective that can reject the whole of nature and
experience, I would argue that Smith’s novels are not symptoms of any
such postmodern condition or set of denaturalizing perspectives. Rather
her texts offer a consistent if subtle set of objections to such irrealist pro-
pensities; in fact, her narratives avow a re-humanisation of fiction through
a reassertion of a material understanding of social conditions, while not
taking her project too seriously.
Certainly Smith can be playful, and according to Stephen Moss in an
early review in The Guardian, was ambivalent and seemingly negative
252 Phi li p Tew
concerning her own first book, even to the point of undercutting its
intensity of narrative style. There was one less than ecstatic review, in the
literary magazine Butterfly:
This kind of precocity in so young a writer has one half of the audience
standing to applaud and the other half wishing, as with child performers of
the past (Shirley Temple, Bonnie Langford et al), she would just stay still
and shut up. White Teeth is the literary equivalent of a hyperactive, ginger-
haired tap-dancing 10-year-old.19
The review, according to Sam Wallace in the Daily Telegraph, was written
by Smith herself. Attempts to reposition Smith’s first novel are inhibited
by its co-option by so many postcolonial critics, their analysis founded on
an underlying essentialist framing of identity. Significantly in this light,
many postcolonial categories – on which very many commentators of
Smith’s work have so often relied – can be regarded as deficient, capable
of being applied in a contentious, conservative and limiting manner, posi-
tioning and interpreting texts as representing marginalised racial identi-
ties, which are primarily understood as implicitly offering a coherent and
radicalised cultural critique. To read texts by identifying ideological mark-
ers of ethnicity is in effect to prejudge such texts through the perspective
of a particular set of sociocultural elements which may well obscure their
many other cultural and aesthetic issues. Rather, Dawson describes Smith’s
particular sense of omniscience as involving
the pyrotechnic storyteller. For me this would include Zadie Smith’s White
Teeth. . . . The pyrotechnic narrator is typically humorous or satirical, and
relies less on moral introspection or historical research than on a flourish-
ing and expansive narrative voice, a garrulous conversational tone, to assert
control over the events being narrated.20
The significant point to be added to this observation is Smith’s ambition
to embrace the width and depth of a contradictory culture, where indi-
viduals remain innately contradictory themselves. For what seems even
clearer is that Smith’s various narrative strategies incorporate a general
opposition to any essentialist notions of identity. She comments on a cen-
tral problem facing some of the characters central to On Beauty (2005) in
‘A Conversation with Zadie Smith’ where she is absolutely emphatic about
the burdens identity politics places on contemporary life and indicates its
innate contradictions, its inauthenticity:
The Belsey children don’t struggle to find an identity because they’re mixed
race, they struggle because they are ‘of Modernity’, and the product of a
twentieth century that invented and patented this piece of claptrap called
‘finding an identity’, and it drives everybody nuts, mixed race or no. The
search for an identity is one of the most wholesale phony ideas we’ve ever
been sold.21
And yet this disavowal of the essential does not necessitate recourse to
postmodern identities. Drawn to the apparently mundane qualities of eve-
ryday existence that often prove comic, challenging and so full of mean-
ing, Smith often avows an intuitive world view which is ‘commonsensical’
and not informed by the prevailing intellectual debates, with opinions
articulated by relatively uneducated characters such as Archie Smith in
White Teeth and Kiki Belsey in On Beauty, both of whom possess a clar-
ity and instinctual judgment that Smith both foregrounds and supports.
Clearly, Smith’s impulses appear to be far more intuitive and less pro-
grammatic in her aesthetic than most postcolonial and postmodern read-
ings imply. In the ‘Acknowledgements’ to White Teeth she includes and
addresses her future husband: ‘Nicholas Laird, fellow idiot savant’, a term
which emphasises the explicit, yet mysterious, acquisition of knowledge
and the capacity to deliver exactitude in a particular area instinctually and
viscerally.22
In ‘The Death of Postmodernism and Beyond’, Alan Kirby indicates an
essential perspectival difference in the world after postmodernism, a set of
parameters Smith intuited and to which she has responded. Kirby claims
Postmodernism conceived of contemporary culture as a spectacle before
which the individual sat powerless, and within which questions of the real
were problematised. It therefore emphasised the television or the cinema
screen. Its successor, which I will call pseudo-modernism, makes the individ-
ual’s action the necessary condition of the cultural product.23
Certainly both ordinary people’s powerlessness and conversely the power of
the cinematic haunt Smith’s novels on many levels, but such people also
serve as the basis for an experiential vocabulary of which White Teeth is
exemplary. Smith uses specificity in a humanistic fashion, but informed by a
subtle, yet innovative refashioning of perspective, as becomes evident at the
beginning of her narrative in White Teeth. Here intending to both indicate
and parody a grandiose (tentatively postmodern) jest, Smith commences
with the failed suicide of her protagonist, Englishman Archie Jones:
Early in the morning, late in the century, Cricklewood Broadway. At 06.27
hours on 1 January 1975, Alfred Archibald Jones was dressed in corduroy
and sat in a fume-filled Cavalier Musketeer Estate face down on the steer-
ing wheel, hoping the judgement would not be too heavy upon him. He
lay forward in a prostrate cross, jaw slack, arms splayed either side like some
254 Phi li p Tew
fallen angel; scrunched up in each fist he held his army service medals (left)
and his marriage license (right), for he had decided to take his mistakes
with him. (WT, 3)
The implicit ironies of the first chapter are variously bleak yet hilarious,
dismissive of established values, populist, but always thoroughly steeped
in the mundane, the detail of being alive in among the realities of the
world. Certain stylistic, tonal qualities adopted by Smith in this episode,
as Dawson observes, are designed ‘to prevent us from reading Archie’s
escape from suicide as some sort of profound statement about the fragility
of human existence’.24 And as Ronald N. Jacobs and Philip Smith indi-
cate, as a genre, irony has ‘neither fixed referents nor solid boundaries’,
but its flexibilities and distortions partake of the concretion of the social
reality in which individuals are firmly embedded.25 Importantly in light of
this aspect Smith takes time to contextualise her setting in Cricklewood as
an apparently anonymous area, ‘a place a man came in order to go other
places via the A41’ (WT, 3).
Immediately this narrative presumption is proved fallacious, for as the
narrative shifts its focus away from Archie, who is at ‘almost-death’, he
impacts on the obsessional routine of Mo, the owner of ‘Hussein-Ishmael,
a celebrated halal butchers’ (WT, 4–5). Mo detests pigeons and upholds
the parking restrictions of the delivery area outside his establishment with
a proprietorial fervour:
‘No one gasses himself on my property,’ Mo snapped as he marched down-
stairs. ‘We are not licensed.’
Once in the street, Mo advanced upon Archie’s car, pulled out the towels
that were sealing the gap in the driver’s window, and pulled it down five
inches with brute, bullish force.
‘Do you hear that, mister? We’re not licensed for suicides around here.
This place halal. Kosher, understand? If you’re going to die round here, my
friend, I’m afraid you’ve got to be thoroughly bled first.’ (WT, 7)
Much is compacted in this scene (and its setting); the fervour of Mo’s sense
of ownership of space; the macabre qualities of bloodletting; the affinity
of both Jewish and Islamic rituals concerning killing animals for food; the
emphatic nature of public space; the text’s self-consciously dark humour.
Later Smith retrospectively outlines the tail end of Archie’s doomed mar-
riage to Ophelia Diagilo (an Italian met after the war in spring 1946, a
decidedly Woolfian allusion on Smith’s part, one of many such literary
points of reference or influence used exuberantly rather than with anx-
iety), part of his trajectory towards the attempt at suicide, which is:
for heroes and martyrs, truly vainglorious men. Archie was none of these.
He was a man whose significance in the Greater Scheme of Things could be
figured along familiar ratios:
Pebble: Beach.
Raindrop: Ocean.
Needle: Haystack. (WT, 11)
The marriage seems to have failed in part because of Archie’s inability to
achieve or even become anything but the ordinary, offering the reader a
contemporary everyman, but ironically it also faltered in large part because
of the genetic inheritance of his wife: ‘No one told Archie that lurking in
the Diagilo family tree were two hysteric aunts, an uncle who talked to
aubergines and a cousin who wore his clothes back to front. So they got
married and returned to England, where she realized very quickly her mis-
take, he drove her very quickly mad’ (WT, 8). Smith’s comic aside refer-
ences not identity, but inheritance as a predetermining factor. One senses
similar points of reference in On Beauty with a pugnacious, narrow and
stubborn left-liberal intellectualism shared by academic Howard Belsey and
his daughter, student, Zora. In White Teeth Archie might appear inconse-
quential, his epiphany may be bleakly comic, and his saviour unlikely, but
Smith understands and incorporates another crucial aspect of contempo-
rary life that is decidedly un-postmodern, one highlighted by Jacobs and
Smith: ‘Engagement in public life can never be denuded of ideal inputs;
it is always grounded in cultural forms that are always already situated
within particular concrete historical settings.’26 In effect, the apparent void
that Archie perceives as Cricklewood proves otherwise, as the lives there
are as full of beliefs (some erroneous or misguided), opinions and pat-
terns of behaviour as insistent as all of the various environments that the
novel cartographises, often in terms of human (in)activities. And in a dou-
ble irony, despite the initial desolation of Archie’s life, any unbelonging
appears to be more the purview of Archie’s wartime friend and comrade
in White Teeth, Samad Iqbal, but the irony is that despite the latter’s long-
ing for a lost home, for Bangladesh, he is quintessentially suburban in so
many ways. In reality he exists in a self-discovered comfort zone that bores
him and seduces him, literally so in case of his children’s primary school
teacher, Poppy Burt-Jones.
As Smith explains in ‘Two Directions for the Novel’ neither modernism
nor subsequent experimentation in the novel overturned everything that
was conventional: ‘The novel is made out of language, the smallest units
of which still convey meaning, and so they will always carry a trace of the
256 Phi li p Tew
Real. But if literary realism survived the assault of Joyce, it retained the
wound.’27 In Smith’s work each life is replete with overlapping and often
very contradictory meanings (and messages sent and received). And yet
throughout White Teeth, for instance, Smith is compelled by what Hassan
describes as a ‘preference for continuities’, the very factor that for Hassan
disallows Frank Kermode as a critic from being considered fully aware
of the historical and cultural rupture that is postmodernism.28 Equally,
Smith’s incorporation of history and its continuities and unexpected links
are legion in her work, variously on personal, cultural and transnational
levels. As Kirby comments, the world has progressed beyond the parodic,
self-satisfied, self-referential knowingness of the postmodern:
Whereas postmodernism favoured the ironic, the knowing and the playful,
with their allusions to knowledge, history and ambivalence, pseudo-
modernism’s typical intellectual states are ignorance, fanaticism and
anxiety: Bush, Blair, Bin Laden, Le Pen and their like on one side, and the
more numerous but less powerful masses on the other.29
Smith celebrates the suburban mass as a range of individuals, a series of
quirky, opinionated individuals, replete with just such qualities: ignor-
ance, anxiety, extreme beliefs, fanaticisms and so forth. The unexpected
happens, in mundane circumstances. At a New Year’s party, for instance,
to which Archie is not invited, the forty-seven-year-old meets his soon-
to-be second wife immediately after his suicide attempt, nineteen-year-
old Clara Bowden from ‘Lambeth (via Jamaica)’, who as Smith insists
has roots. ‘Archie did not pluck Clara Bowden from a vacuum’ (WT,
27) Smith tells her reader, detailing on personal and cultural historicity,
albeit eccentric, unpredictable and often comic versions of the past that
in their amusement actually render acute social observations, as with the
arrival of Clara’s father in Britain:
A mysterious illness had debilitated Darcus Bowden. An illness that no
doctor could find any physical symptoms of, but which manifested itself
in the most incredible lethargy, creating in Darcus – admittedly, never the
most vibrant of men – a lifelong affection for the dole, the armchair and
British television. (WT, 31)
Samad is obsessed with his familial past, specifically his Hindu great-
grandfather Mangal Pande who was hanged because of his part in firing
the first shot of the Great Indian Mutiny in 1857, a cause of debate and
argument between Samad and Archie.
If history is central to Smith’s narrative, the other paradigm she includes
is scientificity, a set of beliefs and practices expounded by the Chalfen
family, in particular the father, Marcus, who manipulates the DNA of
mice so as to potentially influence and change human existence itself, act-
ing ‘always with the firm belief in the perfectibility of all life, in the possi-
bility of making it more efficient, more logical’. Smith adds tellingly:
If you were arguing with a Chalfen, trying to put a case for these strange
French men who think truth is a function of language, or that history is
interpretive and science metaphorical, the Chalfen in question would hear
you out quietly, then wave his hand, dismissive, feeling no need to dignify
such bunkum with a retort. (WT, 312)
And through the Chalfens with whom she is so enamoured, Archie and
Clara’s daughter Irie discover bourgeois life, marking class as among the
major social determinants of identity (and change) for Smith: ‘She’s never
been so close to this strange and beautiful thing, the middle class, and expe-
rienced the kind of embarrassment that is actually intrigue, fascination. It
was strange and wondrous’ (WT, 321).
As indicated above, Smith’s cultural interrogations are continued in
all of her fiction, and with a particular vigour and refusing to pull any
punches in both The Autograph Man and On Beauty. In the first Smith
weaves her narrative around the series of cultural obsessions of Alex-Li
Tandem. In the novel Smith foregrounds even more determinedly sub-
urban inconsequentiality and ennui, familiarity and belonging than in
White Teeth (as she will later in NW). Alex struggles in terms of finding a
viable sense of identity. His malaise allows Smith to explore another sub-
culture with its own set of bizarre obsessions and practices. As I suggest
elsewhere,
A strong sense of familiarity grounds her narrative, but there is more than
habituation that informs her concept of community that subtends her
descriptions of people in suburbia. Location signifies and is reflected in
people’s consciousness. Eventfulness and action are also reflected in the
myriad symbols that surround them, but in The Autograph Man Alex’s
life is literally awash with such points of reference, an oceanic swelling of
the possibilities of meaning which are in excess of any individual’s visceral
understanding.30
A deconstructionist critique has failed Alex’s generation, leaving them
in utter uncertainty, but tradition seems equally devoid of meaning. For
instance, Alex seems horrified by the cultural ritual of Jewishness, but is
finally persuaded to go through the Kaddish to celebrate his dead father.
Previously he has preferred and opted for the cult of Hollywood celeb-
rity, identifying with an ageing star, Kitty Alexander. Such projected
258 Phi li p Tew
transference allows him to avoid his own failings, such as his unfaith-
fulness. Only by meeting his idol, Kitty, and finding that his own lately
recovered letters to the star (hidden by her agent) concerning her life have
moved her, can he find some sense of self and direction. Although origin-
ally it might seem so, his world is not finally provisional, full of powerless-
ness or simply spectacular, but ultimately transcendent.
In On Beauty, the interactions are sombre in their significations. In
what might be regarded as a mild parody of négritude, the search for
a black authenticity becomes absurd when sought by upper-middle-
class Levi, Howard’s mixed-race son. One of his fellow workers at a media
store confronts him about his bourgeois origins, his very emphasis literally
marked out in the text: ‘Don’t – act – like – a nigger – with – me – Levi,’
said Bailey in a whisper, each word with a momentum of its own, like
darts he was throwing at a target. [. . .] ‘Let me tell you something. I know
where you’re from, brother.’31 Certainly one of the most perceptive critics
of Smith’s work, Catherine Lanone, states that Levi’s search for such an
ethnic identity is undercut in the narrative, and not celebrated, quoting
the novel to support her analysis: ‘Clearly, for Smith, Levi’s attempt to
become more black is a mistaken quest, a “comic tautology”’: the ‘“search
for identity” is a pointless, misery-inducing concept.’32 Identity and the
search for one is for Smith one of the absurd shibboleths of a postmodern
age, despite many postmodernist claims that such a critique deconstructs
identity and power, given the latter in particular reformulates itself multi-
ply often through the fragmentation of the former. Moreover, throughout
Smith’s writing an individualistic independence is seen as an embattled
bulwark against all kinds of prejudices, some of them stemming precisely
from those who assume themselves enlightened and liberal.
Howard Belsey in On Beauty argues with his wife Kiki about such
matters, adopting a deconstructionist stance against her humanistic one.
Saliently she reminds him ‘“This life. We’re really here – this is really hap-
pening. Suffering is real. When you hurt people. It’s real.”’33 He also recon-
firms this confrontation with his appalling (if unrecognised on his part)
treatment of a young student inspired by classical art, Katherine (Katie)
Armstrong whose delight in art Smith traces in great detail as a back-
drop to Howard’s lecture. Clearly it is Katie’s perspective that is warded
authorial approval, her emotional reading adding depth and mirroring
the interpretation by Simon Schama found in his study of the artist that
Smith acknowledges in her ‘author’s note’, Rembrandt’s Eyes (1999), where
Schama contextualises and analyses the life and paintings in great and
exact detail.34 In contrast, in Howard’s first lecture on Rembrandt, after
outlining his concept of a critical privileging of the artist’s perspective of
which he disapproves, Howard counters every idea Katie has prepared,
effectively undermining her confidence. He attends only to that group of
voluble students (including his daughter, Zora) who echo his own decon-
structionist agenda. Among the other notable aspects of the novel are two
identified by Christian Lorentzen: first, its avowedly humanistic influences
so at odds with anything Howard would believe in, and second the fact
that although Smith was writing it while resident in the States; curiously,
‘being in America occasioned a retreat into Englishness’ for ‘E. M. Forster
was the guiding spirit of On Beauty, though it was set in the US’.35 For
Frank Kermode, Howard’s wife offers something amply Forsterian: ‘Kiki
Belsey, the fat black wife of the inadequate white professor who does art
history, is magical as well as substantial, funny as well as beautiful – beau-
tiful because she understands families and is unaffectedly a moral being.’36
Moreover, as Smith suggests in ‘E. M. Forster, Middle Manager’ her own
set of influences and contexts exemplifies her commitment to a ‘middling’,
somewhat muddled (and not really hysterical) humanistic realism.37 If one
can so easily contextualise the influence of both E. M. Forster and Elaine
Scarry alongside that of Zora Neale Hurston, no such positioning would
seem to credibly support or suggest there being any deep-seated approval
of a postmodern perspective in Smith’s fiction. Nor in this context would
highlighting any intertextual overlapping really be sufficient grounds for
assuming a postmodern disposition in Smith’s fiction since nearly all lit-
erature is and has been so influenced. It would be to as Mary Orr says ‘dis-
regard tradition as plural [which] will close down change and ultimately
bring satisfaction with cultural stagnation and its simulacra’.38
Formally NW seems far more experimental than any of Smith’s previ-
ous novels, at least topographically so, seemingly gesturing more towards
a postmodern style. I think again issues of contestation and of parody
are at the heart of the relation Smith has to postmodern aesthetics. Even
though it could be argued that this narrative represents a shift in direc-
tion for Smith, an ultimate eschewal of fictional authority, nevertheless
to me it seems she is seduced back to such concretions as the importance
of issues of class, of location and eventfulness. Admittedly NW incorpo-
rates the almost panoptic sense Smith intuits as one of the possibilities of
art, with its landscapes of pain, confusion and ultimately of conscience,
and certainly it incorporates oblique allusions to literary coordinates such
as Dickens, together with other postwar neo-realist experimentalists such
as Rayner Heppenstall and B. S. Johnson, all of which indicates a synthe-
sis of a complex of avant-garde influences, many rooted in a firm sense of
260 Phi li p Tew
anchored urban reality, an insistence on the city and its bedrock of social
relations within its urban geography. If in White Teeth Irie is fascinated by
bourgeois mores, much later in NW, two of the central female characters,
friends from childhood Natalie (formerly Keisha) Blake and Leah Hanwell,
resist multiply and in very different ways their own personal transition
from an existence grounded in childhood and adolescent experiences on a
council estate to different levels of adult bourgeois-respectability achieved
in part through education. Such a view of class has no postmodern per-
spective, however fluid its boundaries might seem. The elements of the
novel are complex, neo-modernist in ways that evoke both Joyce and
Woolf in particular (perhaps as much part of a reinvention of modernist
discourse as a distancing from a postmodern postcolonialism), but these
often fragmented elements also reference other writers of the British and
American postwar avant-garde, and as Christian Lorentzen notes they
offer something that aesthetically ‘is less a plot than a set of hooks on
which Smith can hang her portrait of North-West London and sketches
of characters from various points on the class spectrum. She’s interested in
the way people become estranged from their homes even when they stay
put.’ Lorentzen adds that the central characters ‘are overwhelmed by the
two things that unite the book: North-West London and an assorted but
all-pervading set of class anxieties’, two concrete settings exuding a firm
aesthetic sense of the quotidian as a real and located experience.39
So to begin to conclude: in a sense at least superficially because of
issues of periodisation and those of identity framed by ethnicity, Smith’s
novels are seen by many to exhibit an apparent – but highly debatable –
‘postcoloniality’. However, unfortunately, when so interpreted, and set-
ting aside issues of accuracy, their status may finally not be critically
robust. They are left at risk of being subsumed into a set of overarching
postmodern discourses. I would argue, rather, that given my analysis and
contextualisation above, surely a better strategy is finally to conclude that
Smith variously references and foregrounds versions of a complex realism
in her fictions, one that has become progressively darker, with an increas-
ing play on and intersection with literary techniques. However, equally,
in an important sense her aesthetic dynamics are rooted in a sense of
solid external materiality, in the world, in reality, for as she explains in
‘Two Directions for the Novel’ both aesthetically and also perhaps in life
one requires:
a perverse acknowledgement of limitations. One does not seek the secret,
authentic heart of things. One believes – as Naipaul had it – that the world
is what it is and, moreover, that all our relations with it are necessarily
inauthentic. As a consequence, such an attitude is often mistaken for lin-
guistic or philosophical nihilism, but its true strength comes from a rigorous
attention to the damaged and the partial, the absent and unspeakable.40
So finally, perhaps, one ought to regard Smith as a champion of both a
neo-individualism and what might be described as a meta-realist aesthetic,
accepting the lacunar nature of knowledge within a world in excess of
human understanding. One needs to recognise that she opposes subtly
many of Western contemporary intellectual culture’s ideological orthodox-
ies, challenging a variety of its entrenched cultural shibboleths, including
those with an essentialist view of the postcolonial and of ethnic identity
as well as those intellectuals propounding an ersatz and overarching post-
modernism as explaining how things function.
Notes
1 ‘The Transformation of Zadie Smith’, The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education
31 (Spring 2001), 65.
2 Garret Ziegler, ‘East of the City: Brick Lane, Capitalism, and the Global
Metropolis’, Race/Ethnicity: Multidisciplinary Global Contexts 1/1 (Autumn
2007), 145–67 [147].
3 Phyllis Lassner, Colonial Strangers: Women Writing the End of the British Empire
(New Brunswick, NJ, and London: Rutgers University Press, 2004), 193.
4 Clifford Thompson, ‘On, Zadie’, The Threepenny Review 107 (Autumn 2006),
15–16 [15].
5 Adlai H. Murdoch, ‘“All Skin’ Teeth Is Not Grin”: Performing Caribbean
Diasporic Identity in a Postcolonial Metropolitan Frame’, Callaloo 30/2
(Spring 2007), 575–93 [588].
6 Bruce King, ‘White Teeth by Zadie Smith’, World Literature Today 75/1 (Winter
2001), 116–17 [117].
7 Zadie Smith, ‘Two Directions for the Novel’ in Changing My Mind: Occasional
Essays (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2009), 71–96 [79].
8 Zygmunt Bauman. Modernity and Ambivalence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1991), 97–8.
9 Madhu Dubey, Signs and Cities: Black Literary Postmodernism (Chicago and
London: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 46, 37.
10 Aijaz Ahmad. In Theory: Nations, Classes, Literatures (London and New York:
Verso, 1992), 85. As Ahmad suggests, Rushdie’s myth of ‘unbelonging’ can be
regarded ultimately as a great convenience for (multi) transnational capital-
ism, whereby ‘History, in other words, is not open to change, only to nar-
rativisation. Resistance can only be provisional, personal, local, micro, and
pessimistic, in advance’ (130–1).
262 Phi li p Tew
11 Paul Dawson, ‘The Return of Omniscience in Contemporary Fiction’,
Narrative 17/2 (May 2009), 143–61 [143].
12 Steve Connor, Postmodernist Culture: An Introduction to Theories of the
Contemporary (Oxford and Cambridge, MA.: Blackwell, 1989), 66.
13 Connor, Postmodernist Culture, 69, 71. And surely Connor’s position sim-
ply begs the question of whether postmodern architects offer just a different,
more kitsch iconography which is still in the main funded primarily by a dif-
ferent generation of the exceedingly rich and powerful.
14 Connor, Postmodernist Culture, 79.
15 Zadie Smith, The Autograph Man (London: Hamish Hamilton), 370.
16 Smith, The Autograph Man, 167.
17 Ihab Hassan, ‘POSTmodernISM’, New Literary History 3/1 (Autumn 1971),
5–30, 15, 22–23.
18 Smith The Autograph Man, 63–4.
19 Stephen Moss, ‘White Teeth by Zadie Smith’, The Guardian, http://www.
theguardian.com/books/2000/jan/26/fiction.zadiesmith (26 January 2000).
Accessed 12 January 2012.
20 Dawson, ‘The Return of Omniscience in Contemporary Fiction’, 153.
21 Zadie Smith, ‘A Conversation with Zadie Smith’, Reading Guides: On Beauty,
https://www.bookbrowse.com/author_interviews/full/index.cfm/author_
number/344/zadie-smith
22 Zadie Smith, White Teeth (London: Penguin, 2001), ix. Hereafter referred to
in the text as WT.
23 Alan Kirby, ‘The Death of Postmodernism and Beyond’, Philosophy Now 5,
http://philosophynow.org/issues/58/The_Death_of_Postmodernism_And_
Beyond (November/December 2006, n.p.). Accessed 12 January 2012.
24 Dawson, ‘The Return of Omniscience in Contemporary Fiction’, 154.
25 Ronald N. Jacobs and Philip Smith, ‘Romance, Irony, and Solidarity’,
Sociological Theory 15/1 (March 1997), 60–80 [61].
26 Jacobs and Smith, ‘Romance, Irony, and Solidarity’, 63.
27 Smith, Two Directions for the Novel, 18.
28 Hassan, ‘POSTmodernISM’, 16.
29 Kirby, ‘The Death of Postmodernism and Beyond’, n.p.
30 Philip Tew, ‘Celebrity, Suburban Identity and Transatlantic Epiphanies:
Reconsidering Zadie Smith’s The Autograph Man’ in Philip Tew (ed.),
Reading Zadie Smith: The First Decade and Beyond (London and New York:
Bloomsbury, 2013), 53–68 [55].
31 Zadie Smith, On Beauty (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2005), 191.
32 Catherine Lanone, ‘Mediating Multi-cultural Muddle: E. M. Forster Meets
Zadie Smith’, Études Anglaises: Revue du Monde Anglophone. The Contemporary
British Novel: 1996–2007 60/2 (April–June 2007), 185–97 [192].
33 Smith, On Beauty, 394.
34 See Simon Schama, Rembrandt’s Eyes (London: Allen Lane, 1999).
35 Christian Lorentzen, ‘Why Am I So Fucked Up?’ London Review of Books
34/21, 21–22; http://www.lrb.co.uk/v34/n21/christian-lorentzen/why-am-i-so-
fucked-up (8 November 2012). Accessed 12 December 2012.
36 Frank Kermode,’ Here She Is’, London Review of Books 27/9; http://
www.lrb.co.uk/v27/n19/kerm01.html (6 October 2005), n.p. Accessed 12
December 2012.
37 Zadie Smith, ‘E. M. Forster, Middle Manager’, Changing My Mind: Occasional
Essays (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2009), 14–27 [14].
38 Mary Orr, Intertextuality: Debates and Contexts (Cambridge: Polity, 2003), 93.
39 Lorentzen, ‘Why Am I So Fucked Up?’, 25.
Ch apter 16
Racial Neoliberalism and Whiteness in

Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow
Sue J. Kim
Antiracialism marks the moment that a society is accepted into (or

even as a momentary moral leader of ) the world. It marks, in a word,
the moment of globalization’s relative (and repeated) triumph. To be
of the world, in the world, a worldly society, racism nominally has
been rejected. Now the category of race must be erased. But we are
being asked to give up on race before and without addressing the leg-
acy, the roots, the scars of racisms’ histories, the weights of race. We
are being asked to give up on the word, the concept, the category,
at most the categorizing. But not, pointedly not, the conditions for
which those terms stand. In the beginning was the deed; in the end,
to undo the deed, the word should not be uttered.
David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on
Racial Neoliberalism (2009)
They were not aristocrats, no Slothrop ever made it into the Social
Register or the Somerset Club – they carried on their enterprise in
silence, assimilated in life to the dynamic that surrounded them thor-
oughly as in death they would be to churchyard earth. Shit, money,
and the Word, the three American truths, powering the American
mobility, claimed the Slothrops, clasped them for good to the coun-
try’s fate.
Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (1973)
Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow exemplifies the postmodern novel,

both formally and thematically.1 The version of postmodernism that I am
most concerned with in this essay, however, is that of the ‘cultural logic’
of late capitalism and the neoliberal ideology that underpins it.2 Despite
some optimism about the liberatory potential of postmodern art and
thought, postmodernism has proved not only politically ambiguous but
also ideologically malleable.3 In this sense, Fredric Jameson’s critique of
postmodernism as the dangerous flattening of history seems sadly accur-
ate.4 But if we approach postmodern novels as less of a break than a
264
Racial Neoliberalism in Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow 265
developing aesthetic and epistemological configuration within larger his-
torical narratives – such as anti-racist and anti-imperialist struggles – we
can see both continuities and developments with these previous histories.
Pynchon’s novels present the racial formation of Anglo-American white-
ness as inextricable from modern European colonialism and the develop-
ment of global capitalism, but Gravity’s Rainbow does not only explore
origins and legacies. Whiteness haunts the text, in white bodies as well
as institutions establishing and maintaining white supremacy; but as the
novel progresses, whiteness is increasingly delinked from bodies, even as
the privilege and power of white power structures continue. Through these
strange developments, I argue that the novel predicts the development of
what Goldberg has termed ‘racial neoliberalism,’ or a new, ostensibly post-
racial order that denies continuing structures of racist and capitalist domi-
nation and exploitation.
In The Threat of Race: Reflections on Racial Neoliberalism, Goldberg
argues that, at least in cosmopolitan public rhetoric, a liberal-conserva-
tive consensus has arisen that has embraced antiracialism at the expense
of antiracism. Goldberg distinguishes ‘antiracialism’, or a rejection of
racial categories altogether, from ‘anti-racism’, which seeks to remedy
injustices tied to race. Whereas antiracism requires ‘remembering and
recalling’, antiracialism advocates ‘forgetting, getting over, moving on,
wiping away the terms of reference’ and ‘at best (or worst) a commercial
memorializing’.5 Antiracialism denies continuing structures of inequal-
ity and exploitation, hampering our ability to recognize ‘institutionalized
inequality’ and change the systems in which racial categories continue to
constitute a repressed (and sometimes not-so-repressed) term. Although
he does not use the term ‘antiracialism’, Ramón Saldívar concurs with
Goldberg’s description: ‘what characterizes the nature of race and proc-
esses of racialization today are post civil rights racial apathy, color-blind
racism – racism without racists, or new racialized ethnicities’.6 Goldberg
calls it ‘[b]orn again racism’, or ‘racism without race, racism gone private,
racism without the categories to name it as such’ (TR, 23).
In neoliberalism, crude, direct racism is cast as premodern, private/
individual, and ‘merely’ affective, and such old-fashioned racism is denied
as a central aspect of global capitalism; the new world order claims to be
color-blind. The understanding of race has moved from the ‘broadly insti-
tutional’ to ‘the micro-relational of everyday interactions’; antiracialism
casts racism as merely an individual attitude. Goldberg writes, ‘Success in
doing away with the legal superstructure of racial subjugation gave way
(or in) quite quickly to concerns not so much over differential economic
266 Sue J. K i m
or social access and possibilities as considerations of racial categorization
and classification, racial preferences and group-conceived possibilities’
(TR, 25, 19). At the same time, large geopolitical racialism continues apace
in the form of ‘culture wars’, e.g. Islamophobia, or rhetorics of develop-
ment that see certain nations and cultures as developmentally and socially
backward. Antiracialism works well with neoliberalism and globalisation,
purporting to embrace formal legal and economic equivalence but leaving
the conditions of racism – the unequal distribution of resources within
and between nations – unchanged. Thus, on the Right and the Left, neo-
colonial foreign policy can go hand-in-hand with public declarations of
antiracism.
Antiracialism, then, is a kind of formalism that denies the structures
of oppression and exploitation, which operate by logics of purportedly
race-blind ‘private preference, policed boundaries, and policy restraints’
(TR, 23). Thus, Goldberg argues,
As an end in itself, antiracialism, it turns out for the most part, is white-
ness by another name. . . . Antiracialism is about decategorization, a gesture
necessarily by the racially dominant towards those they racially suppress.
Antiracism, by contrast . . . seeks to remove the condition not indirectly
through removal of the category in the name of which the repression is
enacted. Rather it seeks to remove the structure of the condition itself.
This ‘turn to formalism’ is a response to ‘impending material shifts of

potentially immense proportion’, resulting from anticolonial and antira-
cist struggles as well as globalisation (TR, 22).
The historical moments captured by Gravity’s Rainbow’s narrative (the
end of the Second World War) as well as its composition (the late 1960s/
early 1970s) speak to these shifts in antiracism, anticolonialism, and glo-
balisation that are key in the development of racial neoliberalism. The
end of the Second World War held the seeds of the neoliberal era: ‘the
closing of that global war opened up the movements making neoliberal
strategies of political economy, its regimes of truth and governmentality,
ultimately conceivable’ (TR, 340). This moment marked the rise of anti-
colonial and social movements, restructuring states and economies in the
context of the Cold War and decolonisation. It heralded the fluctuating
importance of the nation-state and the rising power of multinational enti-
ties (e.g. corporations, the International Monetary Fund, World Bank).
These various histories are directly treated in Gravity’s Rainbow.
The context of the novel’s writing marks another critical moment, one
of transition from older conceptions of race and antiracism to new ones.
Goldberg identifies three general phases of antiracist organising: ‘aboli-
tionism throughout the nineteenth century; anticolonialism and the Civil
Rights Movements from roughly the 1920s through the 1960s; and the
anti-apartheid and the multicultural movements of the 1970s to the 1990s’
(TR, 10). Gravity’s Rainbow emerges from and speaks to the transition
between the second and third phases of antiracist movements. While the
second phase is characterised by the nationalist and cultural nationalist
movements of the mid-century, the late twentieth and twenty-first century
witnesses the rise of corporate multiculturalism and racial neoliberalism,
or the institutional embrace of antiracialism in order to deny continu-
ing inequality and exploitation. As David Witzling, Joanna Freer, Michael
Harris, myself, and others have discussed, Pynchon was deeply affected
by Civil Rights, Black Power, and the history of colonialism.7 Witzling
explains that ‘Pynchon [. . .] recognizes that a multidirectional process
of transculturation is already central to the experience of the West’. But
Witzling argues that Gravity’s Rainbow is politically pessimistic, ‘strongly
implying that the formal deconstruction of literary authority and a com-
mitment to critical multiculturalism, transnational border-crossing, and
cultural heterogeneity do not necessarily lead to political justice’.8 My
argument here is that – somewhat depressingly – Gravity’s Rainbow is pre-
scient in its pessimism that such changes in discourses of race will actually
lead to structural change. One indicator of this transition is Major Duane
Marvy, who exemplifies the ‘premodern’ version of blatant racism. He is
figuratively rejected by Slothrop and literally ejected from a moving train
by Enzian.9
Gravity’s Rainbow stages an emerging new world order and racial
order, in which the category of race is rejected as irrelevant yet neverthe-
less haunts the structures of oppression and exploitation. I focus here
not on the marginal characters, the clearly marked bodies and groups,
but rather the novel’s treatment of whiteness. The novel depicts white
bodies as well as institutions related to – if not solely focussed on –
establishing and maintaining white supremacy. The novel is strewn with
white hands, white faces and other white body parts, and yet images
of whiteness become increasingly detached from bodies. Particularly in
later sections of the novel, in the Zone, physical whiteness and individ-
ual white people’s actions and attitudes are increasingly delinked from
the privilege and power of (rich) white people over others. The power
structure becomes more mechanised, disarticulated from individual voli-
tion, and suffused into the logic of the various systems of order. Through
these motifs of whiteness, Gravity’s Rainbow shows race disassociating
268 Sue J. K i m
from bodies even as the structures, institutions and processes of white
supremacy continue.
Particularly in its first half, the novel abounds with white body parts
and clothes, drawing attention to embodied whiteness. We see the ‘white
faces’ of Pointsman, Swanlake, Slothrop (GR, 52, 127, 552), Scorpia
Mossmoon, and, pointedly, Greta Erdmann (GR, 37, 458). Greta is a Nazi,
the mother of Bianca (another white motif ), and is a porn star in mov-
ies such as the one filmed at ‘Weisse Sandwüste von Neumexiko’, or the
‘White Sand Desert of New Mexico’. Greta is married to Thanatz, whose
name is a play on Thanatos, or ‘death’, and she is associated with Blicero,
the Lord White Death (GR, 482, 485–8); McHugh, in fact, refers to her
as ‘Weissman’s female counterpart’.10 Other white body parts include
white hands (GR, 29, 38, 203), ears (GR, 45), hair (GR, 440, 532, 695) and
Katje/Domina Nocturna’s ‘white buttocks’ (GR, 235). Katje’s skin, we are
told, ‘is whiter than the white garment she rises from’, and ‘the moon-
light only whitens her back’ even further (GR, 196). Slothrop wears white
linens, ‘white wingtip shoes with golf cleats, and white socks’ (GR, 253,
244), ‘white blazers’ in college (GR, 267) and most notably, a ‘white zoot
suit’ (GR, 245, 253, 261). In Zurich, ‘Slothrop is known to them, all right,
among all the somber street faces and colors only he is wearing white,
shoes zoot ‘n’ hat, white as the cemetery mountains here’ (GR, 259).
Slothrop’s white zoot suit refers both to the previous Roseland Ballroom
scene in which he meets Malcolm X as Red, where ‘white college boys’
with ‘Eastern prep-school voices’ make obnoxious spectacles of themselves
and where, concomitantly, Slothrop becomes self-conscious of ‘his own
white face’ (GR, 62). The novel thus renders whiteness hyper-visible, par-
ticularly in bodies, to scrutinize the implications of that whiteness.
In Gravity’s Rainbow, the valence of whiteness as indicator of the West’s
colonialism, racism, patriarchy and psycho-sexual obsession with domina-
tion is sometimes not subtle. A photo of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima
is described as a ‘giant white cock’, ‘a sudden white genital onset in the
sky’, ‘dangling in the sky straight downward out of a white pubic bush’.
The Rocket, although named ‘Schwarzgerät’, is itself white. In the
‘Pre-Launch’ of the Rocket, the sacrificial Gottfried is clothed in ‘white
lace’, ‘white satin slippers’ and ‘white bows’, and gagged ‘with a white kid
glove’; the hair on his back runs from ‘pale yellow to white’ (GR, 693,
297, 750). His sacrificer is the Nazi Weissman, the ultimate ‘white man’,
whose code name Dominus Blicero is a variation on ‘White Death’ or
‘Lord Death’. Weissman’s sadistic relationships with Enzian, Katje and
Gottfried and his lust for the rocket’s power inform the novel’s entire story
world (GR, 100). Greta Erdmann, a Nazi, describes ‘the Kingdom of Lord
Blicero’ as a ‘white land’ (GR, 486). Conditioned by Jamf, Slothrop’s sexu-
ality is ‘wired by Them into his body as a colonial outpost here in our raw
and clamorous world, another office representing Their white Metropolis’.
Squalidozzi, the Argentinian anarchist, tells Slothrop, ‘We tried to extermi-
nate our Indians, like you: we wanted the closed white version of reality we
got’ (GR, 285, 264).
Pynchon’s novels present the construction of ‘whiteness’ as racial cat-
egory as inextricable from modern European colonialism and the develop-
ment of global capitalism. Regardless of and even in spite of individual
attitudes and bodies, white characters are shaped by what George Lipsitz
has dubbed the ‘possessive investment in whiteness’, in which domination
takes place not only through discourse and culture, but also – and perhaps
more tenaciously – through unbalanced economic and political struc-
tures.11 Gravity’s Rainbow’s treatment of whiteness helps to denaturalise
and historicise it as a racial formation within various political projects.12
Yet even as the novel critiques this legacy, white supremacy becomes
delinked from overt racism. That is, the older racial orders of Weissman
and Marvy are marginalised or overthrown, and white privilege is dis-
persed into institutions and processes of hierarchical economic, political
and imperial power that seem to have disavowed or at least rendered irrel-
evant the likes of Nazis and racists. The white characters are ensconced
and entrapped in a new world order – which also implicates racial minori-
ties and Third World peoples – in positions of (relative) privilege not by
racial categories or individual attitudes, but rather by logic and rules that
reproduce and maintain hierarchies, such as the Rocket Cartel. Individual
white persons – in the same way as individual non-white persons – feel
personally helpless to resist the new logic, regardless of personal feel-
ings. These changes, I argue, forecast the changing valences of race and of
whiteness in the neoliberal era.
Gravity’s Rainbow is not subtle either about the extent to which white
people have profited from and been formed by histories of colonial-
ism, enslavement, exploitation, exclusion and domination. Slothrop is
the most obvious example of the novel’s critique; as McHugh puts it,
‘Unquestioned in Gravity’s Rainbow is the need for white guys to change.’13
Descended from Puritans and a family that ‘actually made its money kill-
ing trees’ (GR, 203, 552), Slothrop realises his complicity with ‘the patriar-
chal power of the Rocket’.14 The central narrative of Gravity’s Rainbow – if
there could be said to be one – is of Slothrop’s realisation of his imbrica-
tion in existing structures of power and his desire to change, resist and/or
270 Sue J. K i m
escape. Likewise, Katje Borgesius, whom we initially meet as an operative
of the White Visitation, has been as shaped by Weissman’s domination as
Enzian and Tchitcherine (GR, 658–60). Unlike the half brothers, however,
Katje initially becomes assimilated into his power structure, working for
the Nazis and the Visitation.
A relatively conventional subplot otherwise, the romantic triangle
between Jessica Swanlake, Roger Mexico and Jeremy ‘Beaver’ is likewise
embedded in institutions of war, bureaucracy and class; Jessica and Roger’s
doomed romance is coded in terms of institutional privilege. Jessica is a
British ‘young rosy girl’ with ‘pale nape’ (GR, 30), volunteering for the
British war effort, who begins an ill-fated romance with Roger. But he
despairs of being able to ‘keep’ her from Jeremy:
Damned Beaver/Jeremy is the War, he is every assertion the fucking War
has ever made – that we are meant for work and government, for austerity:
and these shall take priority over love, dreams, the spirit, the senses and
the other second-class trivia that are found among the idle and mindless
hours of the day. . . . Damn them, they are wrong. They are insane. Jeremy
will take her like the Angel itself, in his joyless weasel-worded come-along,
and Roger will be forgotten, an amusing maniac, but with no place in the
rationalized power-ritual that will be the coming peace. She will take her
husband’s orders, she will become a domestic bureaucrat, a junior partner,
and remember Roger, if at all, as a mistake thank God she didn’t make.
(GR, 178)
As predicted, she abandons Roger for Jeremy: ‘Her future is with the
World’s own, and Roger’s only with this strange version of the War he
still carries with him. He can’t move, poor dear, it won’t let him go. Still
passive as he’d been under the rockets. Roger the victim. Jeremy the firer’
(GR, 629). Jeremy ‘Beaver’ incarnates the new world, civilised and person-
ally inoffensive, but part of the apparatus of economic and political domi-
nation by bureaucracy, the depersonalised rules of maintaining hierarchies.
The novel’s critiques of imperialism, masculinity and militarism also
use motifs of whiteness that go beyond bodies. Gravity’s Rainbow depicts
how multinational corporations (IG Farben, Shell Oil and DuPont) col-
lude in the production of ‘Imipolex G’, the plastic ‘of the future’ used in
the Rocket. Imipolex is a hybrid plastic, ‘an aromatic heterocyclic poly-
mer’ (GR, 488, 249), and is explicitly linked to whiteness, both as a color
and in relation to the racial purity ideology of Nazis: ‘The target property
most often seemed to be strength – first among Plasticity’s virtuous triad
of Strength, Stability and Whiteness (Kraft, Standfestigkeit, Weiße: how
often these were taken for Nazi graffiti, and indeed how indistinguishable
they commonly were on the rain-brightened walls.’ Slothrop encounters
Imipolex at one point as a ‘white object [. . .] watching him’. It turns out
to be a ‘white knight’ (GR, 249, 435, 436), the knight an ironic nod to
Western dominance and masculinity. In fact, so many possible vectors and
interests come together through Imipolex G – and of course the Rocket –
that Slothrop becomes increasingly paranoid: ‘There is even more being
zeroed in on him from out there than he’d thought, even in his most para-
noid spells.’ Regardless of his own intentions, Slothrop feels the ‘stare [of
Imipolex G] before he spots it finally’ (GR, 436, 435). Not only is Slothrop
being watched by Imipolex G, but also, as we learn, his very psycho-sexual
being is conditioned by and tied to the plastic.
In addition to corporations, there are institutions of Western power
that literally include the term ‘white’ in them: Whitehall and the White
House. At Peenemünde, one bomb technician tells another, ‘some type-
writers in Whitehall, in the Pentagon, killed more civilians than our lit-
tle A4 could have ever hoped to’ (GR, 453–4). The US president appears
in the ruins of Berlin, littered with corpses – ‘[t]he emptiness of Berlin
this morning is an inverse mapping of the white and geometric capital
before the destruction’ – when Slothrop recognises a face beside Stalin
and Churchill, hovering over the destruction, ‘far higher than a man’, like
Hitler at Nuremberg (GR, 372, 373). While waiting in a bread line, Säure
informs Slothrop that Roosevelt has died and Truman is now president.
During the Potsdam conference, looking for Bodine’s hashish, Slothrop
wanders into a house with a sign ‘The White House’, where Truman
and ‘somebody [who] look[s] a bit like Churchill’ hobnob with celeb-
rities, surrounded by wealth and decadence. This meeting of the Allied
Powers – one of the only three mentions of the phrase ‘White House’
in the entire novel – contrasts starkly with the devastation and starva-
tion in Slothrop’s previous run-in with Truman, ‘the dapper, bespectacled
stranger who gazed down the morning’ in Berlin (GR, 380, 381). These
images of whiteness help the novel shift the significance of white power
from bodies to institutions – e.g. corporations, imperial and neo-imperial
nations – while never fully severing the link between racialised power and
racialised bodies.
Slothrop’s paranoia develops in recognising secret collaborations
between entities both fictitious (PISCES) and real (Royal Dutch Shell,
British Petroleum, Great Britain and the United States). The Rocket’s
‘propulsion system bears an uncanny resemblance to one developed by
British Shell at around the same time’ but not only this, it also ‘just occurs
to Slothrop now where all the rocket intelligence is being gathered – into
272 Sue J. K i m
the office of who but Mr. Duncan Sandys, Churchill’s own son-in-law,
who works out of the Ministry of Supply located where but at Shell Mex
House, for Christ’s sake’ (GR, 250–1). Slothrop’s moment of paranoia
neatly ties together Whitehall, Shell, BP and the rocket cartel. Vaslav
Tchitcherine, who like Slothrop becomes disaffected and increasingly
paranoid, has these invisible, global power structures pointed out to him
by a white finger:
‘Say, there.’ It appears to be a very large white Finger, addressing him. Its
Fingernail is beautifully manicured. [. . .] Right now, joints moving with
soft, hydraulic sounds, the Finger is calling Tchitcherine’s attention to –
A Rocket-cartel. A structure cutting across every agency human and paper
that ever touched it. Even to Russia [. . .] Russia bought from Krupp, didn’t
she, from Siemens, the IG. [. . .] Are there arrangements Stalin won’t admit
[. . .] doesn’t even know about? (GR, 566)
In these ways, the novel transitions from a configuration that contrasts

white versus non-white bodies to one of disembodied whiteness that is
nevertheless linked to racialised structural power. The best example of this
shift is ‘The White Visitation’, which is a fictional amalgam of everything
the novel critiques: warfare, sexual aggression, ideological conditioning of
desire (a la Marcuse), imperialism and international rocket cartels. It is the
location of PISCES – Psychological Intelligence Schemes for Expediting
Surrender – and a place ‘devoted to psychological warfare’, harboring ‘a
Behaviorist here, a Pavlovian there’. A former mental institution, it is the
home base for Jamf ’s condition experiments on baby Slothrop (GR, 35,
73, 85). Operation Black Wing, the hunt for the Zone Hereros, is launched
there, and it is where Slothrop, ‘to help illuminate racial problems in his
own country’, undergoes hypnosis that results in his Roseland hallucina-
tion. During the war, ‘blacks, Indians, Ashkenazic Jews speaking dialects
you never heard in Harley Street’ take shelter after ‘they have been bombed
out, frozen, starved, meanly sheltered’. Although located in Britain, at the
White Visitation ‘they all talk effectiveness, an American heresy, perhaps
overmuch’ (GR, 75, 170, 75), reflecting the new rhetoric and logic of effi-
ciency. The work being done there focuses on multiple targets; PISCES
seeks surrender but ‘[w]hose surrender is not made clear’, suggesting the
all-inclusiveness of racial ideology. It is the site of ‘Death’s white Gymanfa
Ganu’ (GR, 34, 171), a folkloric dance homage to death.
As the war progresses, however, the White Visitation starts to fall apart.
‘Weekly briefings’ are abandoned and the halls become ‘demobbed’ and
marked by ‘emptiness’ (GR, 227, 533). The disaffection of Retired Brigadier
Ernest Pudding speaks to its decline. Pudding is assigned to work at the
White Visitation, expecting ‘intelligence work’ and finding instead ‘a dis-
used hospital for the mad, a few token lunatics’, and an entire host of
technicians and scientists whose focus is on ‘funding’. Pudding is put off
by this emphasis on funding, regardless of goal, and opposes Pointsman’s
plans to ‘[m]eddl[e] with [Slothrop’s] mind’ (GR, 77, 83). On his late-
night rendezvous with Domina Nocturna at the White Visitation, he
sings a First World War trench song about how he will be ‘whiter than
the whitewash on the wall’, and shortly thereafter he ‘shiver[s] with fear,
and his face is whiter than whitewash’ (GR, 230, 231). He submits to the
coprophiliac domination of Katje, as Domina Nocturna, with her ‘white
body and black uniform-of-the-night’ (GR, 232). A benevolent version
of Major Marvy, Pudding symbolises old Western military power and
imperial paternalism, which puts him at odds with the new rationality.
Realising the extent of both his and Katje’s subjugations to Pointsman
and the new rational order Pointsman represents, Pudding, after dying of
an E. coli infection, joins the Counterforce. Katje is herself one of the last
to leave (GR, 714, 535). Eventually even Pointsman, whose obsession with
Slothrop proves him insufficiently impersonal, falls ‘officially in disgrace’,
his decline beginning on ‘White Sunday’ (GR, 614, 273).
But while the bodies may recede, the structure and acts of white domi-
nation continue. The abandoned White Visitation is replaced by the more
ambiguous politics of the Zone. The Zone is, as many critics have noted, a
site of both potential hope and despair.15 On the one hand, it is a moment
of unstructured possibility; on the other hand, the institutions and pow-
ers-that-be continue on their merry way. For instance, Milosz Thanatz’s
sado-anarchism is a putatively formal anarchism that enables sadists to
exploit the powerless and weak (GR, 736). The apparent formal equality –
or at least lack of clear hierarchy and organization – of the Zone has ren-
dered it partially a zone of hope, but this hope is belied by the continuing
institutions, structures and processes of power and exploitation that the
novel’s famous paranoia can never let alone. This contradiction between
apparent individual equality and continuing structural inequality speaks
to the heart of racial neoliberalism.
Initially, Slothrop’s disavowal of the US military and his American her-
itage, so colorfully described as ‘shit, money, and the Word’ in the second
epigraph to this essay, signals an optimistic freedom:
Could he have been the fork in the road America never took, the singu-
lar point she jumped the wrong way from? Suppose the Slothropite heresy
274 Sue J. K i m
had had the time to consolidate and prosper? Might there have been fewer
crimes in the name of Jesus, and more mercy in the name of Judas Iscariot?
It seems to Tyrone Slothrop that there might be a route back – maybe
that anarchist he met in Zürich was right, maybe for a little while all the
fences are down, one road as good as another, the whole space of the Zone
cleared, depolarized, and somewhere inside the waste of it a single set of
coordinates from which to proceed, without elect, without preterite, with-
out even nationality to fuck it up. (GR, 556)
The possibility of being ‘without elect, without preterite, without even
nationality’ reflects Pynchon’s integration of the ideals of the New Left
and Civil Rights, a kind of John Lennon–esque imaginary. The Zone
is where Tchitcherine can finally peacefully encounter Enzian, the half
brother Tchitcherine has been trying to destroy, and they can ‘talk broken
German’ with one another and even trade for supplies. ‘This is magic’
(GR, 734), the novel suggests, the kind of place where people of different
races can meet, literally brothers, on terms of equal and peaceful footing.
But another side of the Zone speaks to a much harsher reality, one that
can be seen in the narrative of Ludwig, a ‘fat young lunatic’ searching for
his lemming, Ursula, whom Slothrop meets while wandering in the Zone.
Slothrop’s later meeting with Ludwig comes embedded in an episode that
focuses primarily on the Zone-Hereros, who are under siege by ‘hostiles
[who] were white’ (GR, 553–6, 730). Ludwig, resonating with whiteness
both as motif and race, is halfheartedly spying on the Herero for a mys-
terious white force:
The fat boy Ludwig is a white glowworm in the mist. The game is that he’s
scouting for a vast white army, always at his other flank, ready to come
down off of the high ground at a word from Ludwig, and smear the blacks
into the earth. But he would never call them down. He would rather go
with the trek, invisible. There is no hustling for him down there. Their
journey doesn’t include him. They have somewhere to go. He feels he must
go with them, but separate, a stranger, no more or less at the mercy of the
Zone. (GR, 733)
Ludwig does not call down the ‘vast white army’; instead, like the Hereros
and Slothrop, he is absorbed into the logic of the Zone. We are told that
he gets by through prostitution: ‘A lot of foreign cock. How else does a
foot-loose kid get by in the Zone in these days.’ Sexual exploitation and
racial ideology are part of the underlying logic of commercial exploitation
in the Zone: ‘Ludwig has fallen into a fate worse than death and found
it’s negotiable.’ Everything is prone to ‘the sin of profit’ (GR, 729), under
a regime of brutality and violence, which the novel describes in an earlier
scene as a ‘White Market’. In that scene, as the Allied police brutally break
up some small-time black market trading among the displaced persons of
the Zone:
The War must’ve been lean times for crowd control, murder and mopery
was the best you could do, one suspect at a time. But now, with the White
Market to be protected, here again are whole streets full of bodies eager for
that erste Abreibung [beating], and you can bet the heat are happy with it.
(GR, 570)
The resistance offered by the Counterforce is as ambivalent and uncer-
tain as the Zone. As many critics have noted, the political efficacy of the
Counterforce is debatable. This doubt, I argue, arises from the novel’s pre-
scient critique of two responses to past racist exploitations and atrocities
that have become predominant: 1) voluntarist, individual antiracialism
and 2) guilt. Both are tied to affective individuality and involve aware-
ness that wrongs have been done/are being done. Peter Sloterdijk, Sianne
Ngai and others have written about the contradictory affects arising from
the Western bourgeoisie’s sense of individual complicity with late capi
talism and simultaneous sense of impotence to do anything about it.16 By
the same token, after having realised that he is embedded in problem-
atic organizations and histories, Slothrop tries to escape, but ‘[e]verything
poor paranoid Tyrone tries raises the question of complicity and futility’.17
One early passage encapsulates this trajectory:
For a minute here, Slothrop, in his English uniform, is alone with the
paraphernalia of an order whose presence among the ordinary debris of
waking he has only lately begun to suspect . . . what game do They deal?
What passes are these, so blurred, so old and perfect? ‘Fuck you,’ whispers
Slothrop. It’s the only spell he knows, and a pretty good all-purpose one at
that. (GR, 202–3)
Slothrop’s ‘fuck you’ distills the countercultural resistance that many crit-
ics and readers have noted remains ultimately ambiguous. As McHugh
puts it, Gravity’s Rainbow ‘undeniably creates sympathy for the counter-
force and its cause’, yet it ‘presents the possibility that the counterforce’s
creative paranoia, no less than Slothrop’s politics of pleasure, fails to alter
material reality’.18 In the same way, antiracialism can be an ambiguous or
even dangerous construct, in which genuine interpersonal sympathy may
be produced while institutional and economic realities remain unchanged.
Gravity’s Rainbow is awash in white and non-white bodies possibly form-
ing connections with one another, while the institutions of imperialism
and capitalism forge ahead, mainly unchecked.
276 Sue J. K i m
Another common response to past crimes is guilt, which Gravity’s
Rainbow astutely notes will fuel a lucrative industry:
Hunger, compromise, money, paranoia, memory, comfort, guilt. Guilt . . .
is becoming quite a commodity in the Zone. Remittance men from all
over the world will come to Heidelberg before long, to major in guilt.
There will be bars and nightclubs catering especially to guilt enthusiasts.
Extermination camps will be turned into tourist attractions, foreigners
with cameras will come piling through in droves, tickled and shivering
with guilt. (GR, 453)
Remembrance is of course critical to antiracism, but when memorials
degenerate into tourist exhibits that promote the idea that race-based
exploitation are things of the past, sanitise that past and/or profit from that
past, they become complicit with current injustices. The power of racial
neoliberalism is such that sometimes, despite the best efforts of architects
and artists of memorials to counteract the tendency to relegate atrocities
to the past and/or other places, visitors may come away with precisely the
outcome Gravity’s Rainbow foresees: liberal guilt assuaged while contem-
porary inequalities and exploitation are neglected.
In depicting these transitions from an overtly racist world order to an
embrace of antiracialism, I suggest that Gravity’s Rainbow is an early pre-
cursor to what Ramón Saldívar has termed a ‘postrace aesthetic’. Saldívar’s
use of ‘postrace’ most pointedly does not correspond to antiracialism, the
popular idea that racism is over. Rather, like Colson Whitehead, Saldívar
uses the term somewhat ironically to refer to a generation of post–Civil
Rights, post-postmodern novelists – including Whitehead, Junot Díaz,
Karen Tei Yamashita and Gary Shteyngart – who share stylistic and the-
matic concerns. In particular, Saldívar notes that these writers’ works insist
‘on the urgency of the matter of race in the twenty-first century’, not from
a cultural nationalist or antiracialist view, but with a sense of the complex
imbrication of race with all aspects of modern life. Furthermore, Saldívar
writes,
In these novels, the multi-racial realities characteristic of the racialization
of ethnicity in the United States are represented as an active doing that cre-
ates social structures and discourses that articulate a dialogical narrative of
American social life based on multiplicity, heterogeneity, and difference,
all of which then become rigidly hierarchical states of social and political
fact.19
Gravity’s Rainbow depicts a world in which race, including and especially

whiteness, suffuses structures of power, regardless of individual volition.
The ‘doing’ of racial hierarchies in the post–Second World War neolib-
eral, neocolonial era of late capitalism continues apace despite attempts
to deny the word of race, or to pretend that the world is race-blind and
that color has become detached from bodies. The novel’s pessimism about
the liberatory potential of the Zone and the Counterforce, I would argue,
corresponds to the contradiction between postmodern ‘multiplicity, het-
erogeneity, and difference’ and the ‘rigidly hierarchical states of social
and political fact’ that such heterogeneity can nevertheless become (or
be appropriated into). The ostensibly laudatory aim of freedom of/from
identity neglects the structural hierarchies organised around those identi-
ties that continue to order our post-postmodern world.
Notes
1 There are scores of such discussions; for a few of the most influential, see Brian
McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (New York: Routledge, 1987); Molly Hite,
The Ideas of Order in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon (Columbus: Ohio State
University Press, 1983); and Joseph Tabbi, Postmodern Sublime: Technology and
American Writing from Mailer to Cyberpunk (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1995).
2 For discussions of the relationship between neoliberalism and postmodernism
(as epistemology as well as aesthetic style), see Ronald Strickland (ed.), Growing
Up Postmodern: Neoliberalism and the War on the Young (Lanham: Rowman
and Littlefield Publishers, 2002); Martín Hopenhayn, ‘Postmodernism and
Neoliberalism in Latin America’, Boundary 2 20/3 (1993), 93–109; and David
Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2007).
3 See, for instance, the late-twentieth-/early-twenty-first-century discussions of
‘postmodern imperialism’, exemplified by Robert Cooper, ‘Why We Still Need
Empires’, Observer, April 2002, 7.
4 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
(Durham: Duke University Press, 1990).
5 David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on Racial Neoliberalism
(Malden: Blackwell, 2009), 21. Hereafter referred to in the text as TR.
6 Ramón Saldivár, ‘The Second Elevation of the Novel: Race, Form, and the
Postrace Aesthetic in Contemporary Narrative’, Narrative 21/1 (2013), 2.
7 David Witzling, Everybody’s America: Thomas Pynchon, Race, and the Cultures of
Postmodernism (New York: Routledge, 2008); Joanna Freer, ‘Thomas Pynchon
and the Black Panther Party: Revolutionary Suicide in Gravity’s Rainbow’,
Journal of American Studies 47/1 (February 2013), 171–88; Michael Harris,
‘Pynchon’s Postcoloniality’ in Niran Abbas (ed.), Thomas Pynchon: Reading
from the Margins (Madison NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003),
197–214; Sue J. Kim, Critiquing Postmodernism in Contemporary Discourses of
Race (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
278 Sue J. K i m
8 Witzling, Everybody’s America, 145–6.
9 Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (New York: Penguin, 1973), 288.
Hereafter referred to in the text as GR.
10 Patrick McHugh, ‘Cultural Politics, Postmodernism, and White Guys: Affect
in Gravity’s Rainbow’, College Literature 28/2 (Spring 2001), 13.
11 George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness (Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 1998), 2.
12 For further discussions of racial formation, see Michael Omi and Howard
Winant, Racial Formations in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s,
2nd edition (New York: Routledge, 1994) and Ian F. Haney López, ‘The Social
Construction of Race’ in Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic (eds.), Critical
Race Theory: the Cutting Edge (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2013),
191–203.
13 McHugh, ‘Cultural Politics’, 11.
14 ‘Cultural Politics’, 9.
15 Virtually everyone who has written on Gravity’s Rainbow deliberates to
some degree on the Zone; for a few of the more productive discussions,
see McHale, Postmodernist Fiction; Jeffrey Baker, ‘A Democratic Pynchon:
Counterculture, Counterforce, and Participatory Democracy’, Pynchon
Notes 32/33 (Spring–Fall 1993), 99–131; Leo Bersani, ‘Pynchon, Paranoia, and
Literature’, Representations 25 (Winter 1989), 99–118; and David Seed, The
Fictional Labyrinths of Thomas Pynchon (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press,
1988).
16 See Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, trans. Michael Eldred
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987) and Sianne Ngai, Ugly
Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).
17 McHugh, ‘Cultural Politics’, 11.
18 ‘Cultural Politics’, 2.
19 Saldívar, ‘Second Elevation’, 1, 3.
Ch apter 17
‘Some Kind of Black’

Black British Historiographic Metafictions
and the Postmodern Politics of Race
Sara Upstone
In the scholarly fields of postcolonial and African-American literature,

frequent attention is paid to synergies with postmodern theory; essays by
Alison Ward, Peter Morey, Vedrana Velickovic and Nick Bentley in this
volume attest to the ways in which postmodernity is a useful strategy for
writers attempting to explore issues of cultural identity, particularly in
terms of marginality, liminality and questions of selfhood. In a British con-
text, however, literature produced by black British (or diasporic) writers –
those who for the purposes of this essay can be defined as writers of ethnic
origin either born in Britain or living there from early childhood, or those
who self-define as black British – is in contrast often defined as forsak-
ing postmodern experimentation. This is particularly the case in terms of
literature written from an Afro-Caribbean perspective which, compared
to British Asian writing in particular, is seen as more explicitly eschew-
ing aesthetic flamboyance. Defined by Fatimah Kelleher as ‘“frontline”
and council estate realism’, this Afro-Caribbean literature – rooted in the
harsh physicality of the gang and the estate – is seen to focus on a gritty
contemporary present that is in stark contrast to the urban landscapes of
contemporary white British writers such as Barnes and Ballard.1
In this context, forays into historical narrative by black British writ-
ers have largely emerged from established writers who are perhaps more
able to convince publishers of the marketability of works that fall outside
this image. Most particularly, two of the most established recent black
British writers, Andrea Levy and Bernadine Evaristo, have produced his-
torical narratives focussed on re-visioning white histories from the per-
spective of a diasporic black British consciousness. In the case of Evaristo,
this historical interest has been sustained across her body of fiction, whilst
for Levy it has been a recent departure from her early novels which were
set in contemporary Britain. Equally, whilst for Evaristo this historicism
has always been accompanied by an experimental prose style, for Levy the
279
280 Sara Upstone
movement to historical narrative has also been accompanied by a gradual
but sustained departure from her earlier realist form.
These authors’ most recent and most daring forays into the historical
via neo-slave narratives – Evaristo’s Blonde Roots (2008) and Levy’s The
Long Song (2010) – offer strategic rewritings of history intended to simul-
taneously speak to the silencing of black voices in conventional histori-
ography, and the realities of race relations in contemporary Britain. Their
novels can be situated within the context of a range of black British writ-
ings, including such works as Caryl Phillips’s Cambridge (1991) and Fred
D’Aguiar’s The Longest Memory (1994) that aim to use the neo-slave narra-
tive to ‘reinsert’ a pre-Windrush black British presence, denied in existing
historical discourse.2 By focussing on female protagonists, however, these
novels extend the concern with marginal voices to an intersectional atten-
tion with matters of gender as well as race, presenting a ‘herstory’.3
Such postmodernist narratives can be productively read through one
of the most significant concepts in postmodern literary studies – Linda
Hutcheon’s notion of historiographic metafiction – a term frequently
employed in postcolonial studies but rarely explored in the black British
context. For Evaristo, postmodern satire allows her to invert slavery’s racial
dynamic; she writes an alternative history in which blacks are slave own-
ers, whites their slaves, to comment on the politics of difference which is
the most significant barrier to the post-racial, new humanist visions of
social commentators such as Paul Gilroy, but also the grand narrative of
racial science. For Levy, an unreliable narrator provides recourse to post-
modern histories that interrogate not only the documentary realism of
both historical document and the frontline realist black British novel,
but also the marginalisation of slave history as ‘black history’. In these
ways, Evaristo and Levy employ satirical, self-referential and consciously
reflexive histories in order to destabilise not only the nineteenth-century
racial science which provided justification for the perpetuation of slav-
ery, but also twenty-first-century new ‘cultural racisms’. At the same time,
these strategies evidence a broader range of black British fictions which
renew postmodernism as a strategy for literary political comment, and
which point towards the need for a reappraisal of postmodernism as a
contemporary aesthetic.
According to Hutcheon’s now-famous definition, a historiographic
metafiction is one where the always-present blurring of fiction and his-
tory in the historical novel gives way to an explicitness about fictionality,
a self-referential quality, the calling into question of the factual nature of
historical writing, and the removal of the ‘pretence of transparency’.4 This
‘Some Kind of Black’ 281
is not merely a matter of destabilising the historical novel. It also draws
attention to how public experience of history is one of a textuality that,
as Haydon White and others have shown, does not necessarily confer access
to a historical ‘reality’, establishing itself within the context of an existing
discourse surrounding historical writing ‘as narrative’. The interruptions to
realist verisimilitude that are foregrounded in both Blonde Roots and The
Long Song see them fit easily within this definition. In Blonde Roots, the use
of paratextual images which serve to enact a kind of Brechtian alienation,
a mock epistolary slave owner narrative that mimics the classic slave narra-
tive but, most pronounced, the racial inversion of slavery itself that makes
black Africa the slaveholding continent, and Europe its slave market, all
displace the reader’s acceptance of the narrative as realist.5
This marks a departure from Evaristo’s earlier work, in which postmod-
ernism could be more easily identified in terms of the crossing of generic
boundaries between prose and verse (Blonde Roots is her first entirely prose
fiction).
The Long Song, too, is something of a departure for Levy, marking her
most sophisticated narrative voice and structure; while her previous novel
Small Island (2004) does include a non-linear time frame, and also the
use of multiple narrative viewpoints, it never undercuts realism in the
way that the later novel does, ostensibly the narrative of July – a former
slave – but under the instruction of her more educated son, Thomas.
From the very beginning we are suspect to trust Thomas’s assertion that
the narrative is ‘all my mama’s endeavour’.6 Accepting his acknowledged
minor interventions, should the reader take the rest of the narrative of
July’s own or, perhaps, see this admission as Thomas’s attempt to obscure
his wider authorial presence? Many critics have assumed the former, see-
ing the tale as Levy’s assertion of the ability to write one’s tale, merely
than to tell it, and have it transcribed.7 However, it is equally possible
that readers might question to what extent the narrative is July’s at all,
where Thomas’s obvious interventions may function only as a strategic
act devised to encourage the reader to accept the rest as ‘truth’. This unre-
liability is further ensconced by July’s own acknowledgement that some
events have been constructed or taken from other accounts, again possibly
to be read as a foil that strategically attempts to render everything that is
not acknowledged in such a way as accurate. The novel contains events
in which July is not present, thus obviously being fictional – for example
her mother Kitty’s experience of July being born (which they never have
the opportunity to discuss), or Caroline’s first meeting with her sister-in-
law, Agnes, and their discussion about the management of slaves. Passages
282 Sara Upstone
such as ‘My son will begin’ explicitly direct us to Thomas’s interventions
and yet obscure the fact that it is as much he as July who is voicing such
statements. This double-voicing is exacerbated by the fact that July’s spo-
ken voice – for example her protestation that her son ‘wan’ me suffer every
likkle t’ing again’ (LS, 187, 192) – is so different from the formal English
in which the story is narrated. Such use of dialect illustrates the ways in
which the totalising historical narrative is inscribed in certain kinds of lin-
guistic practice. Then, of course, we have the fact that July herself is unre-
liable; with the same conceit as her son, she introduces multiple tellings
of her own birth, only to declare ‘I cannot allow my narrative to be mud-
dled by such ornate invention, for upon some later page you may feel to
accuse me of deception when, in point, I am speaking face, even though
the contents may seem equally preposterous’. Given this is the same strat-
egy as Thomas employs, the reader then must ask again whether it is July
at all who speaks here, or her son throughout. When the narrator refers
to herself in the third person as ‘our July’ (LS, 13, 160) is this because July
the writer is constructing a notional objectivity, or rather an indication of
Thomas’s editorial hand which depersonalises the story and undermines
her open subjectivity?
This narrative instability is not a matter of Levy being unconcerned
with the realism of the tale, but rather deeply concerned with expressing
its artifice. Thomas continually intervenes, directing his mother’s narra-
tive, and even being given the last word in the novel’s afterword. Take, for
example, the following passage:
But Miss Clara caught July’s arm to bind her in conversation. July did not
notice the four gold rings upon Miss Clara’s fingers. Four! Two with green
stones that clicked together – big as swollen knuckles, yet July did not see
them. Nor did she regard the delicate ruby beads mounted like pin pricks of
blood within a striking gold chain which laced about her throat. (LS, 245)
If this is July’s narrative, then how can she tell the reader things she did
not see? Either she did see these things, and we take the suggestion that
she did not as ironic, or she did not, and therefore the adornments to
Miss Clara that she lists are imaginative embellishments. Regardless, such
passages foreground the artifice of supposedly autobiographical histories,
and how the details that reinforce their truth via a constructed verisimili-
tude must be viewed via the possibility of their falsity.
Both The Long Song and Blonde Roots, then, show a self-conscious
awareness of how, in David Lowenthal’s terms, the past is ‘largely an arti-
fact of the present’, with the awareness that ‘a heritage wholly saved or
authentically reproduced is no less transformed than one day deliberately
manipulated’.8 For Lowenthal, ‘Every account of the past is both more
or less than that past – less because no account can incorporate an entire
past, however exhaustive the records; more because narrators of past events
have the advantage of knowing subsequent outcomes’.9 This resonates with
Hutcheon’s own position that facts are events that we have given meaning
to, and therefore different facts can be produced from the same event. It
is particularly evident in The Long Song, mirroring a strategy Hutcheon
identifies in Midnight’s Children (1981) in which self-representation cannot
be separated from the history of the nation.10 In the event of the Baptist
War, for example, July’s unawareness of the conflict disconnects her from
official history and produces ‘facts’ that pertain to her own parallel but to
some extent unrelated reality. The same is true of the emancipation cel-
ebrations, which July experiences only second hand, an ‘occasion written
within the pages of some other book’ (LS, 101, 195).
The Names of History

Critics of historiographic metafiction argue that such destabilisation of
historical authority undermines the need for representation of margin-
alised voices. This has led to a number of alternative formulations, for
example Ansgar Nünning’s ‘Revisionist historical novels . . . inspired by
the wish to rewrite history, particularly from the point of view of those
all too long ignored by traditional historiography’.11 The problem arises
with the suggestion that historiographic metafiction involves a text that
‘overtly exposes the impossibility of producing an objective, totalized, and
true account of history’.12 This is particularly the case for novels involv-
ing slavery which, like the Holocaust, involves such massive and hor-
rific abuses that to suggest there is no ‘true’ account risks undermining
the trauma of those who have experienced it. Such criticisms, however,
neglect the fact that Hutcheon’s own definition both recognises this flaw
and addresses it. The limit for historiographic metafiction for Hutcheon
is precisely that postmodern texts, whilst in some ways mirroring fem-
inist and postcolonial concerns with marginality, nevertheless tend to
re-inscribe ‘totalizing strategies of domination’ (PP, 36). Hutcheon’s
example is Pynchon’s V (1963), a novel which ultimately shows the impos-
sibility of creating meaning, as a historical plot continually resists human
understanding, and therefore leaves little room for any kind of represen-
tation of experience. Hutcheon, however, points to two ways in which
historiographic metafiction – while at times behaving in such a way – may
284 Sara Upstone
nevertheless more broadly exceed such a definition. Firstly, these texts
may, in spite of their challenging of the idea of historical accuracy, never-
theless maintain some significant kernel of experience. Secondly, they
may do other kinds of political work in the interests of marginality –
conceived not in representative terms, but in the work of deconstructing
established and ideological historical discourses. The epigraph to Blonde
Roots, Nietzsche’s ‘All things are subject to interpretation: whichever inter-
pretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth’,
straddles these functions as it points simultaneously to the subjectivity of
history, and its ideological function.
In The Names of History Jacques Ranciere, who is interested in voices that
disrupt the order of things, draws attention to the history of the named
subject, a bias that is perpetuated not by the exclusion of the marginal, but
by its strategic incorporation: ‘the entrance of the people from anonymity
into the universe of speakers’ in a context where ‘the historian keeps them
silent by making them visible’.13 As novels such as Beloved (1987) illustrate,
postmodernity and subjective retellings do not necessarily undermine the
horror of these events but, in fact, may serve to reanimate the violence
of them and, in this context, employing the slave as narrator is in itself
an act of historical reconstruction rather than deconstruction. Both Levy’s
and Evaristo’s novels are fictionalised biographies of former female slaves
and they engage with the notion of black female biography as a personal-
ised corrective to official white and male-centred histories. Biography, then,
is a powerful ecriture feminine, and black female biography even more so
an interrogative force.14 In these terms, both Evaristo and Levy bring histo-
ries into being, rather than correct or interrogate them. For Evaristo, this
has been a frequent feature of her work, in novels including Lara (1997),
The Emperor’s Babe (2002) and Soul Tourists (2005), all of which either or
in part feature lost or silenced historical voices, identified with a historical
perspective that is postmodernist in its ‘counter-historical’ elements.15 The
epigraph to The Emperor’s Babe is a quote from Oscar Wilde: ‘The One
duty we owe to history is to rewrite it’. Yet Alastair Niven, in his interview
with Evaristo in Writing Across Worlds: Contemporary Writers Talk suggests
the novel is in fact not ‘so much a re-writing of history but a writing of it
for the first time’.16 Blonde Roots is an elevation of this counter-historical
strategy in its complete inversion of the past – the novel depicts a fictional
world in which the slave trade has been reversed, so that Europeans are
the slaves, and Africans the masters. This inversion exploits the tensions
between the two definitions of writing and ‘re-writing’. On one level the
novel is a rewriting of history: a powerful satire which exposes through
inversion the bizarre nature of racial prejudice. Yet, at the same time,
through this it is also a violent exposé of the realities of slavery as it was for
Africans, as the novel is infused with details from the actual slave experi-
ence, so that it becomes, too, a writing of that history in all its violence for
the first time. The novel’s imaginative inversion makes the reader see those
events afresh, so they are rendered anew by their dislocation. This then
proffers an awakening to the reality of a brutality often obscured by his-
torical re-creation, statistics, and the generics of public recognitions such
as the bicentenary of abolition events of 2007.
Likewise, The Long Song is a continuance of a historical concern begun
by Levy in her previous Windrush novel, Small Island, a work that marked
her first departure from her earlier fiction that was principally focussed
on the contemporary lives of black Britons. Levy’s narrative mimics the
classic eighteenth-century slave narrative to the extent that it can be seen
as a rewriting of these historical texts. At the same time, Levy herself posi-
tions the novel as a writing of that which has not been written. In the
notes to the reading group edition of the novel, Levy recounts how her
motivation lay in a conference where a young Jamaican woman asked how
she could be proud of her slave roots, and Levy ‘wondered why anyone
would feel any ambivalence or shame at having a slave ancestry’. Levy,
in response, wanted to write a novel which would facilitate this pride,
writing more than simply the ‘violence and misery’ of slavery, but also the
‘living and surviving’ that it entailed. Her motivation was that there are
very few surviving documents that capture the slave’s own voice and that
fiction ‘is a way of putting back the voices that were left out’, unavail-
able to academics because of the ‘rigour of their discipline’ (LS, 405–14)
which negates imaginative reconstruction.17 Here Levy can be seen to be
accepting a rationale of reinvention already established in relation to slav-
ery, most notably in the case of Alex Haley’s Roots, where much of the data
was shown to be made up, but the author defended this because he said
the real data could not be known.18
What the ‘words of history’ that Ranciere is interested in must do is a
kind of psychoanalysis, in which one historical figure (e.g. Napoleon) may
be the centre of the narrative but ‘lying beneath or behind or within that
“career” are the lives, thoughts, deeds, and words of the nameless millions
of people who made that career possible, participated in it, were ruined
or destroyed in the course of it and because of it, and left their anonymous
mark, their unidentifiable trace on the world of that time.’19 This act ‘is a
political duty insofar as it contributes to the legitimation of the demo-
cratic program peculiar to the modern age by substantiating the claim
286 Sara Upstone
of the anonymous masses and nameless poor to a place in history. Thus,
Ranciere takes up arms on behalf of Walter Benjamin’s idea that the story
of victors must be balanced, even supplanted, by the story of the van-
quished, the abject, and the downcast of history.’20 Novels such as Blonde
Roots and The Long Song recognise the need not merely to retrieve the
history of these figures, but to bring that history alive – to enact a kind of
historical resurrection. July’s novel that makes up most of The Long Song,
for example, asks this directly addressed reader not merely to absorb the
story but to sensuously engage with it – to be told of a carriage, for exam-
ple, and to ‘see it there in a distance’ (LS, 26).
In these terms, there is a subtle but significant modification of existing
female neo-slave narratives at work in both of these novels. Furthermore,
these modifications speak directly to the changing nature of postmod-
ernism as a literary discourse in relation to race, and the questions of
agency and representation which are in relation to these changes impli-
citly suggested. Content wise, neither Evaristo’s nor Levy’s novel does
much to extend the horrors of the female experience of slavery and also
its heroism – particularly in relation to the mother-daughter relation-
ship – that has already been recounted so powerfully by Toni Morrison
in Beloved. Morrison’s earlier American novel is also frequently cited as
a postmodern narrative, though it is heavily influenced by modernism,
particularly the work of William Faulkner. The postmodernism of Beloved
comes in its foregrounding of the incommensurability of the slave experi-
ence, which is emphasised by a third-person narrative that refuses to ever
give the central character of Sethe – a freed slave – her own voice. The
character of Beloved herself, who both is and is not Sethe’s deceased child,
speaks of slavery as a haunting with appeal to a Derridean notion of the
spectre and furthermore distances the text from the possibility of accessing
slave histories. As Homi Bhabha (1994) has argued, Morrison’s text creates
a space of ambivalence: that the story Sethe tells in ‘not a story to pass on’
means it is both not a story to be told, but also not a story to be avoided.21
In this sense, Morrison’s text appeals to both a ‘postmodern postmodern-
ism’ interested in the death of representation, and a ‘postcolonial post-
modernism’ which attempts to address issues surrounding the limits of
female subaltern agency by raising the question of both the simultaneous
need for, and impossibility of, that representation. Evaristo and Levy both
subtly shift the discourse away from the unspeakable and towards histor-
ical witness, by suggesting that despite modification, manipulation and
even erasure, some kernel of the female slave experience is representable
as something more tangible than a haunting or a trace. To do so is to
move the concerns of postmodernism in the context of race away from
poststructuralist-influenced postcolonialism, towards a more culturally
present and explicitly real-world postmodern discourse. Such a reading
relies on the contention that historiographic metafiction, a much debated
critical framework that has entered into the mainstream of literary critical
theory, is not merely a corrective to Jameson’s reading of postmodernism
as ahistorical.22 Rather, it is a term that questions the notion of postmod-
ern play, and the elision of contemporary political circumstance, by draw-
ing attention to a mode of reflection on the means of assessing the past
that is inherently political and of use not just in terms of making sense of
the past, but also in relation to our interrogation of the present.23
July’s presence then opens up a dialogue and a commentary not availa-
ble to slaves at the time – she serves as the reader’s reviewer of slave owner
narratives, directing them to read the account of George Dovaston, but
avoid John Hoskin (LS, 103). Likewise, by reversing stereotypes, Blonde
Roots illustrates how ludicrous the racial prejudices on which slavery was
founded were. For example, Katamba’s slave owner narrative includes a
reversal of nineteenth-century racial science, and a travel narrative in which
animalised English ‘savages’ are ‘discovered’, complete with Conradian
intertextual reference (see BR, 118, 125, 136). Katamba’s narrative repeats
nineteenth-century attitudes that position the white colonialist as the ‘sav-
iour’ of indigenous women, resonant with Gayatri Spivak’s now famous
contextualisation of the colonial moment as ‘white men saving brown
women from brown men’.24 The novel shows how easy it is to reverse sav-
age/civilised oppositions; white superstitions about ladders, mirrors and
Friday the thirteenth become the markers of their inferiority and irration-
alism (BR, 135, 138). Alongside its humorous satire, often commented on
in reviews, there is horrific violence in Evaristo’s novel – the muzzling of
kitchen slaves; lashings; infanticide and gang rape; horrific bodily humili-
ations and of course the barbarism of the transportation.25 These events are
starkly contrasted with Doris’s utopian dreaming of lemonade, the wintry
breezes of home, lavender and mothballs. The ‘Englishness’ of her losses
is a particularly powerful inversion, resonating as it does with the English
reader’s own nostalgic cultural reference points. Inverting the colonial reli-
gious mission has a similar effect – one of the most positively powerful
moments in the novel is when Doris is able to celebrate her own Christian
religion publicly, after being encouraged to undergo conversion.26
The question therefore becomes what is more important: the voice of the
slave and their literary agency, or historical record. In The Long Song July
declares, ‘This tale is of my making. This story is told for my amusement.
288 Sara Upstone
What befalls July is for me to devise’ (LS, 185). The historical accuracy
becomes less politically significant than voice itself, and this becomes the
kernel of experience that continues to represent. July is constructed not as
a benign, anodyne figure, but rather as a proud and calculating woman,
for example in her feeling slighted that the cook Molly receives the same
valuation as her.27 This not only destabilises official histories, it contermin-
ously is evidence of the ability to claim ownership of one’s own narrative;
it affirms the possibility of a subaltern who can speak, and with the same
subjectivity as any other narrative voice. There is no suggestion here that
July’s marginal status means she must speak a discourse of positive essen-
tialist representation. And yet, at the same time, she does speak.
It is only within the context of this possibility of speaking, Hutcheon
argues, that challenging the kind of totalisation that silences the mar-
ginalised subject is also to challenge continuity in historical narrative.
Historiographic metafiction in this regard registers both our need for a
totalising narrative, and the political implications of dismantling the
possibility of achieving this.28 Postmodern texts, therefore, do not sim-
ply deconstruct history – they show how ‘narrative itself may be a barrier
to historical accuracy’: not in the service of apoliticism, but rather pre-
cisely as a political intervention.29 To produce a historiographic metafic-
tion is to resist the mastery or critical appropriation of that text, so that
it cannot be made to serve political agendas. Irony does not trivialise his-
tory (as Jameson might suggest); rather, it prevents it from slipping into
a dangerously conservative nostalgia.30 Thus we should not be aiming
for a lost moment of authenticity, for to do so only repeats the totalis-
ing power structures which are used against those in liminal or marginal
positions. This pertains to recent scholarship on biography, as something
which never speaks the truth of experience, and the novels simultaneously
uphold this reading through their unreliability. Both novels are simultane-
ously self-conscious commentaries on the larger truth about the fiction of
all forms of memoir, and indictments of slavery that speak to the ‘truth’
of the horror of this experience. A lack of totality means the texts cannot
be used to simplify or define the slave experience; they therefore resist the
appropriation of the subaltern voice by observers.
All of this indicates that there is in these fictions what Maria Helena
Lima in relation to The Long Song defines as an ‘ethics’. This advises a
certain kind of postmodernism. While The Long Song is, in Lima’s words,
‘consistently metafictional’, it is so in a way that disrupts the associ-
ations of this term with parody or literary exhaustion.31 Likewise, while
Evaristo’s paratexts may alienate the reader from the text’s realism, they
simultaneously confirm facticity. In such a way, these novels are the natural
inheritors of a fictional practice associated with figures such as Marquez
and Rushdie in which storytelling is rendered into a political act. Thus
whilst these histories may have little in common with the grand narra-
tives of Marxist historiography, they nevertheless question the notion that
postmodernism is dehistoricising. In this theory of postmodernism, it is
not that postmodernism is empty at its centre, but rather that the centre
has been displaced, and comes to look different as a result. For Hutcheon,
postmodernism looks different as a result of a feminist critique of post-
structuralism’s avowal of the death of subjectivity, maintaining identity
as something that must first be established before it can be subverted. In
these texts, ‘there is no dissolution or repudiation of representation; but
there is a problematizing of it’. The past exists in textual traces, but that is
not the same as saying it is only textual.32
The Past Is a Familiar Country

For Lowenthal, ‘memory and history both derive and gain emphasis from
physical remains’, a way to bring the past alive, not in the manner of doc-
umentary realism, but as an imaginative act of reconstruction spurred by
the object’s physical presence.33 The novels then, both function as a kind
of fictionalised ‘relic’ that might stimulate a remembrance of the positive
legacy of slavery. Thomas in his foreword to The Long Song points to this
possibility by defining the novel as a ‘fable’ that ‘would never be lost and,
in its several recitals, might gain a majesty to rival the legends told whilst
pointing at the portraits or busts in any fancy house upon this island of
Jamaica’. The ‘present’ in The Long Song is an unidentified year in the late
nineteenth century, from which July and her son both speak directly to
the reader and introduce July’s novel which speaks from this same present,
again directly to the reader, but of earlier events. It ‘ends’ on multiple
occasions (LS, 1, 183). When July directly appeals to the ‘reader’ on mul-
tiple occasions, beginning on the very first page of the novel proper, she
addresses not only her literal reader – the white slave owning community –
but also simultaneously, the contemporary readership which will consume
the text as a historical document. This dual temporality is reinforced by
the unconventional chronologies of both novels, manipulations of time
which position the texts simultaneously in the past, the present of their
writing, and a future both immediate and distant. This ‘present’ is pointed
to in the dedication to Blonde Roots – remembering not just the twelve
million Africans taken as slaves in the period 1444–1888, but also ‘their
290 Sara Upstone
descendants’. Although Blonde Roots is ostensibly set at the time of slav-
ery, with reference to nineteenth-century dress, for example, it employs a
contemporary urban dialect from the very first page, with its discussion
of ‘stoosh party guests’, and makes references to contemporary practices
such as cosmetic surgery and tanning, and the culture of self-help books.34
This is further complicated with reference to Londolo’s Tube trains, which
have apparently stopped running many years earlier, due to the weight of
the buildings above them, the ‘Rushing hour something of the past’ (BR,
3, 39), making this even possibly a future narrative. Combined with refer-
ences to camel-drawn carriages this suggests an alternative world out of
time, rather than one easily correlated to the extra-fictional.35
Such use of anachronism is a common postmodern feature, central to
what Ranciere refers to as a ‘heretical history’ that will transform the dis-
tribution of the sensible via a ‘poetics of knowledge’.36 At the centre of this
radical history for Ranciere is an ‘untimeliness’ in which what he refers
to as ‘tesseracts’ join the ancient with the contemporary.37 This kind of
time in both novels problematises the more straightforward notion of a
metafictional historical novel that is generally set in the present but con-
cerned with the appropriation, revision and transmission of history. For
these novels are not set in the present, and yet they are. In Blonde Roots,
the slave owner’s initials which are branded on Doris – KKK – reference
to SUS laws, and Doris’ surprise at the existence of working-class blacks,
paralleling Windrush generation migrants’ responses on encounter-
ing poor whites in London, point the reader towards situating the novel
within the context of twentieth-century racial politics.38 This is cemented
in the novel’s final passage, which recounts how Bwana’s descendants con-
tinue to own the sugar estate, and reap the rewards of such ownership,
whereas the cane workers – still descendants of the original slaves – are
now paid. This ‘progress’ is of little distinction: all that has happened in
the contemporary period is a shift in the means of production, rather than
any essential change in the economic hierarchy or distribution of power.
Likewise, the final lines of The Long Song asking the reader if they know
the whereabouts of Thomas’s lost sister, and declaring that ‘in England the
finding of negro blood within a family is not always met with rejoicing’,
connects the past with the present, and with the future, by acknowledging
the presence of slavery in the British population, often not visible, and
often denied. Levy’s interview for the reading group edition of the book
explicitly frames it in these terms, asking both black and white readers to
identify with the characters because it could have been me [. . .] it could
have been you’ (LS, 398, 410).
While this is not unusual in terms of engagement with a black reader-
ship, Levy’s more generalised pronouncement that also asks a white read-
ership to identify with the slave-holding characters, without directing
them with any expectations about their response, whether they should
feel any kind of guilt, is rare. Levy also notes that white voices have been
lost, in her contention that ‘the story of the Caribbean cannot ultimately
be divided into “black” and “white”’ (LS, 415). And whilst Morrison has
vehemently argued in the past that her books are directed at African-
American readers, Levy positions her work explicitly as speaking to both
white and black Britons, a story that must be told ‘for us all’ (LS, 416).
Whereas Beloved is skewed intentionally to the representation of black
consciousness as a counterpoint to the white slave owner narrative, The
Long Song sees July also place herself in the consciousness of whites, par-
ticularly Caroline.39
It is in this context, again, that such texts subtly but significantly
modify the existing terrain. Morrison’s text is more directly relevant to
a high postmodernism which engages with both post-structuralism and
postcolonial theory, but the ‘whiteness’ and establishment associations of
this theory are tempered by her own declarations of a relationship to the
reader based on racial identification and legacy. Evaristo’s and Levy’s nov-
els are less formally experimental and elusive, and thus seem more obvi-
ously accessible as politically driven discourses making social commentary
through fiction. Their recourse to inclusivity, however, shows a desire to
avoid polarising identifications based on race, as themselves indicative of
a racial problematic of which the brutality of slavery is historical evidence.
What emerges in these terms is a post-racial inclusivity which Morrison’s
text eschews, and which can either be seen as wildly utopian, or as evi-
dence of a changing social landscape, depending on one’s circumstance.
This post-racial inclusivity speaks to Paul Gilroy’s ideas of a planetary
humanism, in which attention on race is superseded by an interest in the
human outside of racial or indeed gendered terms of reference.40 Given
the difference in publication dates, it is difficult to know whether such
differences are principally geographical, or temporal. In truth, they are
most likely a combination of the two; no doubt Morrison’s text is of a
pre-Obama phase of American literature less optimistic about a post-race
society, but at the same time continued reservations about whether much
movement has been made towards a more post-racial culture suggests that
there is an atemporal cultural difference which might also be acknowl-
edged if – and it is a large ‘if ’ – one were not to read the British novels as
utopian discourses.41
292 Sara Upstone
Conclusion
Both The Long Song and Blonde Roots affirm Hutcheon’s positioning of
historiographic metafiction as a strategy in the service of identity poli-
tics, offering an explicitly political postmodernism. They oscillate between
affirming marginalised voices and destabilising the notion of any singu-
lar historical truth. This, then, is a subaltern who can seemingly speak,
but whose voice is continually put under erasure both in general terms
because of the unreliability of narrative voice, but also – and here is where
the politics emerges – because of the ideological state apparatuses that pre-
vent this voice from truly speaking.
The consequences of these texts for how we conceive of postmodernism
are not insignificant. These novels’ interventions into Britishness complicate
Theo D’haen’s view that ‘postcolonial and multicultural postmodernism
function as counter-postmodernism to the West’s center-postmodernism’,
in that they fall in-between this binary.42 They are part of a very British
trend in postmodern historical fiction, yet at the same time speak to con-
cerns with racial identity commensurate with the postcolonial novel.43 For
D’haen, ‘anti-representational or center-postmodernism presupposes the
un-writing of “history” as Western discourse of truth, particularly in its
habitual guise as self-legitimizing record of progressive history as embodied
by the nation state under modernity’, whereas representational postmod-
ernism proposes, ‘alter-native modes of history telling’ from marginalised
perspectives. Here the anti-representational is ill-equipped to deal with the
postcolonial or multicultural; representational postmodernism, D’haen
argues, dominant in the 1960s, died out in the 1970s but re-emerged in
the 1980s as a response to multiculturalism. As this essay has shown, how-
ever, black British literature can be seen to present a mode of narrative his-
tory that negotiates the representational and anti-representational strands
which for Theo D’haen are inherent in postmodern historical fictions. It is
possible, therefore, to see these strands as less diametrically opposed and,
indeed, in doing so to question some of the problematics of representa-
tion as they pertain to the postcolonial context. This might approach what
D’haen refers to as ‘an-Other representationalism, beyond the neo-Marxist
and poststructuralist textualizing of Western views of history both of the
West itself and of the West’s Others’.44
Notes
1 Fatimah Kelleher, ‘Concrete Vistas and Dreamtime Peoplescapes: The Rise of
the Black Urban Novel in 1990s Britain’ in Kadija George Sesay (ed.), Write
Black, Write British: From Post Colonial to Black British Literature (London:
Hansib, 2003), 241–54.
2 See, for example, Sofia Munoz-Valdivieso, ‘Africa in Europe: Narrating Black
British History in Contemporary Fiction’, Journal of European Studies 40/2
(2010), 159–74.
3 Sebnem Toplu, Fiction Unbound: Bernadine Evaristo (Newcastle: Cambridge
Scholars Press, 2011), 23.
4 Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1989), 33.
Hereafter referred to in the text as PP.
5 For examples of paratextual images, see Bernadine Evaristo, Blonde Roots
(London: Penguin, 2008), 45, 109. Hereafter referred to in the text as BR.
6 Andrea Levy, The Long Song (London: Headline, 2010), 4. Hereafter referred
to in the text as LS.
7 Maria Helena Lima, ‘A Written Song: Andrea Levy’s Neo-Slave Narrative’,
EnterText 9 (2012), 135–53 [146].
8 David Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1985), xvi, xvii.
9 Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country, xxii–xxiii.
10 See PP, 54, 156.
11 Ansgar Nünning, ‘Crossing Borders and Blurring Genres: Towards Typology
and Poetics of Postmodernist Historical Fiction in England since the 1960s’,
12 Nunning, ‘Crossing Borders’, 230.
13 Jacques Ranciere, The Names of History: On the Poetics of Knowledge
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 44, 46.
14 For an excellent discussion of this form, see Johnnie M. Stover, Rhetoric and
Resistance in Black Women’s Autobiography (Gainesville: University Press of
Florida, 2003).
15 Sebrem Toplu, Fiction Unbound: Bernadine Evaristo (Newcastle under Tyne:
Cambridge Scholars Publication, 2011), 25.
16 Alastair Niven, ‘Interview with Bernadine Evaristo’ in Susheila Nasta (ed.),
Writing Across Worlds: Contemporary Writers Talk (London: Routledge, 2001),
279–91, 283.
17 In his essay, ‘“Telling Her a Story”: Remembering Trauma in Andrea Levy’s
Writing’, EnterText 9 (2012), 53–68, Ole Birk Laursen has argued for the
‘memorializing’ function of Levy’s novels as embodying a particular kind of
‘postmemory’.
18 Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country, 228.
19 Hayden White, ‘Foreword’, Ranciere, The Names of History, vii–ix, ix.
20 White, ‘Foreword’, ix.
21 Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994).
22 See Theo D’haen, ‘“History”, (Counter-)Postmodernism, and Postcolonialism’,
23 Catherine Bernard, ‘Coming to Terms with the Present: The Paradoxical
Truth Claims of British Postmodernism’, European Journal of English Studies
1/2 (1997), 135–8, 136.
294 Sara Upstone
24 Gayatri Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ in C. Nelson and L. Grossberg
(eds.), Marxism and Interpretation of Culture (Chicago: University of Illinois
Press, 1988), 271–313, 297.
25 See BR, 15, 172, 81, 212.
26 See BR, 88, 202.
27 See LS, 209.
28 See PP, 63, 60.
29 Eric L. Berlatsky, The Real, the True, and the Told: Postmodern Historical
Narrative and the Ethics of Representation (Columbus: Ohio State University
Press, 2008), 38.
30 See PP, 35, 176.
31 Lima, ‘Written Song’, 145, 138.
32 See Hutcheon, Politics, 82, 48, 54, 36, 47, 78.
33 Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country, xxiii.
34 See BR, 30, 230.
35 See BR, 6, 3.
36 See PP, 68 and Ranciere, Names of History, 4.
37 See Kristin Ross, ‘Historicizing Untimeliness’ in Gabriel Rockhill and Philip
Watts (eds.), Jacques Ranciere: History, Politics, Aesthetics (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2009), 15–29.
38 See BR, 18, 31, 27.
39 See LS, 31.
40 For Paul Gilroy, post-humanist thinking directs us to consider the ‘human’
outside of categories of race and gender. Between Camps: Nations, Cultures
and the Allure of Race (London: Routledge, 2004).
41 For such concerns, see David Hollinger, ‘Obama, the Instability of Color
Lines, and the Promise of a Postethnic Future’, Callaloo 31.4 (2008), 1033–7.
42 D’haen, ‘History’, 212.
43 For Nünning, ‘[t]he fact that since 1969 no less than ten such postmodernist
historical novels have been awarded the prestigious Booker Prize for Fiction
testifies to the reawakened interest in historical fiction’ (217).
44 See D’haen, ‘History’, 231, 214, 210.
Index
1960s Civil Rights, 37, 114, 267 Bangs, Lester

9/11, 5 Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor
Dung, 233
Abbott, Lynne, 101 Barkan, Elazar, 1
Ackroyd, Peter Barnes, Julian, 8, 213, 279
Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem, 211 England, England, 211, 219–21
Act of Union (UK), 134 Barth, John, 31, 36
African-American vernacular English (AAVE), ‘Lost in the Funhouse’, 229
237, 238 Barthes, Roland, 85, 160
Ahmad, Aijaz, 216, 249 Bataille, George
Allen, Graham, 84 ‘The Psychological Structure of
Althusser, Louis, 189 Fascism’, 224
Amis, Kingsley, 213, 220 Baudrillard, Jean, 7, 219
Anderson, Benedict, 212, 216 Amerique, 219
Andrade, Susan, 48 Bauman, Zygmunt
Ang, Ien, 154 Modernity and Ambivalence, 248
anti-Semitism, 17, 164, 170, 171 Baxter, Jeanette, 224
Antrim, Donald, 232 Beatty, Paul, 37
Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 2, 17, 231 Beck, Ulrich, 4
‘Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Bell, Eleanor
Postcolonial?’, 1, 231 Questioning Scotland, 141
‘The Incomplete Argument’, 22 Bellow, Saul, 161
‘Du Bois and the Illusion of Race’, 19–22 Benjamin, Walter, 67, 286
Auster, Paul Berlin Wall, fall of, 146
City of Glass, 66 Bernal, Martin
Avila, Eric Black Athena, 115
Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight, Bernier, Francois, 16, 17, 25
209n10 Bernstein, Leonard, 33
Bhabha, Homi, 13, 85, 183, 212, 286
Baker, Houston, 231 ‘How Newness Enters the World’, 94
Bakhtin, Mikhail, 84, 91 ‘Of Mimicry and Man’, 99,
Balibar, Étienne, 18 104–5, 108
Balkan conflict, 2, 8 Bhattacharya, Joydeep Roy, 155
‘balkanisation’, 150 Black Arts Movement, 37
Ballard, J.G., 3, 8, 213, 279 Black Panthers, 33
Kingdom Come, 221–25 Black Power, 267
Super Cannes, 224 blackface minstrelsy, 98–108, 171, 172
Bambara, Toni Cade, 37 blues, 68
The Salt Eaters, 37 Bowles, Paul
Bandaranaike, Sirimavo, 150 The Sheltering Sky, 181
295
296 Index
Brand, Dana, 66 D’Aguiar, Fred
Brannigan, John, 213 The Longest Memory, 280
Brennan, Timothy, 214, 215 Damas, Leon, 22, 23
Bronte, Charlotte Davis Jr, Sammy, 172
Jane Eyre, 85 Davis, Kimberley Chabot, 99
Brooks, Peter, 75 Dawson, Paul, 249, 252, 254
Brown, Bobby, 233 Defoe, Daniel
Brown, Ian, and Alan Riach Robinson Crusoe, 85
Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth Century Deleuze, Gilles, 155
Scottish Literature, 132 DeLillo, Don, 3, 8, 31, 173, 195–208, 228, 233
Burgess, Anthony, 131 Underworld, 195–208
Burnett, James, 134 White Noise, 195, 205, 231
Burroughs, William, 213 Derrida, Jacques, 14, 23, 134, 142, 286
Butler, Judith, 27, 103 Desai, Boman
Byatt’s, A. S. The Memory of Elephants, 96n2
Possession; detective fiction, 7, 65–82, 222
A Romance, 211 D’Haen, Theo, 4, 85, 292
Byerman, Keith, 72 diasporas, 2, 3, 5, 6, 9, 82, 89, 98, 105, 151, 152–56
Byron, Lord, 116 Diaz, Junot, 276
This is How You Lose Here, 47
Cain, James M. Dickens, Charles, 259
The Postman Always Rings Twice, 76 Disneyland, 219
Carby, Hazel, 103 Doane, Woody
Carpio, Glenda R., 116 ‘Rethinking Whiteness Studies’, 209n15
Carroll, Lewis Dodd, Phillip, 212
Alice in Wonderland, 185 Đorđevićm, Bora, 148
Carter, Angela Dos Passos, John, 164
Nights at the Circus, 211 Douglass, Frederick, 101
Carver, Raymond, 232 Downton Abbey, 214
Castillo, Susan Perez, 35 Doyle, Arthur Conan, 78
Cesaire, Aime, 22, 29n29 Dreiser, Theodore, 164
Negreries, 23 Du Bois, W. E. B., 19, 20–22, 24, 69
Chowdhury, Kanishka, 214 ‘The Conservation of Races’, 19, 22, 25
Chrisman, Laura, 214 The Souls of Black Folk, 67, 105
Christgau, Robert, 233 Dubey, Madhu, 248
Christie, Agatha, 78 Dunbar, Paul Laurence
Cisneros, Sandra, 36 ‘We Wear the Mask’, 99
civil rights legislation, 39 Dunbar, William, 16
Clarence, Thomas (Supreme Court During, Simon, 213
Justice), 230 Duvall, John N., 195, 198
Cobbett, William, 89
Cold War, 196, 197, 199, 230 Easthope, Anthony, 88
Cole, Teju Egan, Jennifer, 58
Open City, 47 Eggers, Dave, 48, 58, 232
Colls, Robert, 212 Eiblja Corba (Fish Soup), 147–49
Connor, Steven, 4, 91, 93 Eliot, George
Postmodernist Culture, 250 Middlemarch, 55
Conrad, Joseph Eliot, T. S., 89
Heart of Darkness, 85 Ellis, Brett Easton
Cook, Marion Will, 106 American Psycho, 222
Cooper, William, 213 Ellison, Ralph, 69, 104
cosmopolitanism and literary aesthetics, 47–59 The Invisible Man, 107
Costello, Mark, 233, 234 Englander, Nathan, 168
Craig, Cairns, 133 Equal Employment Opportunity Commission
cultural Jewish identity formations, 161–74 (US), 230
Index 297
Erdrich, Louise, 34, 36, 40, 41, 43, 45n18, 46n38 Gilroy, Paul, 98, 102, 153, 280
The Beet Queen, 35 ‘planetary humanism’, 4, 291
Tracks, 41–42, 45n34 globalisation, 32, 48, 151, 156, 171, 173, 214,
Eugenides, Jeffrey, 58, 232 265–66
Evans, Diana, 3 Goldberg, Theo, 17, 19, 267
Evaristo, Bernadine The Threat of Race, 265–6
Blonde Roots, 279–92 Goldstein, Eric, 161
Lara, 284 Goldsworthy, Vesna, 148
The Emperor’s Babe, 284 Goodman, Allegra, 167
The Soul Tourists, 284 Graham, Shane, 92
Everett, Percival, 37 Grant, Eddy, 147, 148
exile, 146–57 ‘Gimme Hope Jo’anna’, 147
‘Living on the Frontline’, 147
Fanon, Frantz, 91, 98 ‘War Party’, 147
Black Skin, White Masks, 19, 26–28 Gray, Alasdair, 7, 129–42, 211
The Wretched of the Earth, 218 1982, Janine, 130, 135–38
fascism, 222–25 Lanark, 131–33, 135
Faulkner, William, 240, 286 Poor Things, 131, 139–41, 144n25
‘The Bear’, 121 Why the Scots Should Rule Scotland, 129, 131
Fitzgerald, Scott ‘YOU’, 131, 143n8
The Great Gatsby, 189 Griffin, John Howard
Fitzpatrick, Kathleen, 232, 233 Black Like Me, 113
The Anxiety of Obsolescence, 231 Griffiths, Niall, 211
Flanery, Patrick, 49, 50 Guattari, Felix, 155
Flaubert, Gustave, 213 Gubar, Susan, 113
Floreani, Tracy, 168 Guglielmo, Thomas A., 202
Foer, Jonathan Safran, 161–62, 167
Everything Loud and Incredibly Hale, Dorothy, 55
Close, 168–69 Haley, Alex
Everything Is Illuminated, 167–68, Roots, 285
169–73 Hall, Stuart, 102
Forster, E. M., 86, 212, 259 Hardy, Thomas, 89
A Passage to India, 82 Harlem Renaissance, 109n13
Foucault, Michel, 14, 189 Harris, Cheryl I., 160
Fowles, John Harris, Michael, 267
French Lieutenant’s Woman, 211 Harvey, David, 52
Franco, Dean, 162 Hassan, Ihab, 251, 256
Franzen, Jonathan, 38, 39, 232, 233 Hawks, John, 124
‘Perchance to Dream In the Age of Head, Dominic, 48
Images, a Reason to Write Heise, Thomas, 197
Novels’, 33–35 Hensher, Philip, 47, 52
Freedman, Jonathan, 162, 165 Henson, Josiah, 115
Freer, Johanna, 267 Heppenstall, Raynor, 259
Freud, Sigmund, 188 Hill, Henry, 201, 210n16
epistemophilia, 74 hip-hop, 68, 108
Fukiyama, Francis, 146 Hiroshima, 268
Hitler, Adolf, 223, 224
Gaddis, William, 228 Hobsbawm, Eric, 212
Garner, Bryan Hoffman, Eva, 151
A Dictionary of Modern American Hogg, James
Usage, 237 The Prviate Memoirs and Confessions of a
Gasiorek, Andrzej, 213 Justified Sinner, 134
Gates Jr, Henry Louis, 25, 69, 231 Hogue, W. Lawrence, 73, 77, 79
The Signifying Monkey, 115 Holocaust, 162, 166, 167, 170, 283
Ghosh, Bishnupriya, 60n5 Holquist, Michael, 65, 66, 71
298 Index
hooks, bell, 231 Klein, Melanie, 75
Hoover, Edgar J., 199 Konstantinou, Lee, 239
Huggan, Graham, 91, 94 Kovačević, Natasa, 148, 156
Hughes, Langston, 69, 109n13 Kristeva, Julia, 84
Hume, David, 134 Kucich, John, 35
Of National Characteristics, 16 Kunzru, Hari, 7
Humphreys, Emyr, 211 The Impressionist, 83–95
Hurston, Zora Neale, 259 Kuppner, Frank, 130
Hutcheon, Linda, 4, 68, 100, 288, 289 Kureishi, Hanif, 83, 91
historiographic metafiction, 2, 144n25, 211, The Buddha of Suburbia, 85, 91
280, 283, 287, 288, 292
Hutcheson, Francis, 134 L.A. riots, 230
hybridity, 83–95, 131, 151, 156, 248 Laclau, Ernesto
‘postmodernism of difference’, 14
imperialism, 13, 15–16, 24, 171, 180 Lahiri, Jhumpa, 6, 50–52, 54, 57
intertextuality and postmodern aesthetics, 7, 68, Unaccustomed Earth, 50–52
96n8, 115–19 Lane, William Henry (‘Juba’), 103
Islamophobia, 266 Lanone, Catherine, 258
Larkin, Philip, 213
Jackson, Michael, 172, 173 Lassner, Phyliss, 247
Jacobs, Ronald N., 254 Laughlin, Nicholas, 104
Jambrešić-Kirin, Renata, 145 L’Etudiant noir, 23
James, Henry, 53 Levine, Andrea, 166
Jameson, Fredric, 96n2, 119, 145, Levy, Andrea
157, 214, 219, 222, 224, 264, The Long Song, 279–92
287, 288 Small Island, 285
jazz, 68, 71 Lima, Maria Helena, 288
Johnson, B.S., 259 Lipsitz, George, 119, 269
Johnson, James Weldon, 69 Loc, Tone, 233
The Book of American Negro Poetry, 68 Locke, John, 95
Johnson, Patrick E., 113 An Essay Concerning Human
Joyce, James, 50, 53, 256, 260 Understanding, 89
Ulysses, 53 Lopez, Ian Haney, 195
Lorentzen, Christian, 259
Kabakov, Ilya, 146 Lott, Eric, 113
Kaczvinsky, David, 144n25 Lowenthal, David, 282, 289
Kant, Immanuel, 16, 25 Lumumba, Patrice, 150
Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Lustig, T. J.
the Sublime, 16 Doubled-Up, Or My Life as the Back-End of a
Kassabova, Kapka Pantomime Horse, 212
Street without a Name: Childhood and Lye, Coleen, 49
Other Misadventures in Lyon, Janet, 55
Bulgaria, 149 Lyotard, Jean-Francois, 13, 212, 215
Kelleher, Fatima, 279
Kennedy, A. L., 211 magic realism, 82, 169, 170, 172, 173,
Kennedy, Raymond, 25 213, 216
Kermode, Frank, 256, 259 Mailer, Norman, 161, 172, 174
Kim, Sue J., 15, 267 Advertisements for Myself, 163–67
King, Bruce, 247 Barbary Shore, 163
Kingston, Maxine Hong, 40, 41 The Deer Park, 163
Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book, 43 ‘First Advertisment for Myself ’, 164–65
Kipling, Rudyard, 86 The Naked and the Dead, 164
Kirby, Alan, 146, 156, 256 ‘The White Negro’, 163, 164, 165–67, 169
‘The Death of Postmodernism and Major, Clarence, 7, 37, 68
Beyond’, 253 Reflex and Bone Structure, 67, 70–79
Index 299
Major, John, 212 Non-Aligned Movement, 149, 150
Mansfield, Jayne, 203 Norton Anthology of Postmodern American
Marcus, David, 48, 54 Fiction, 35
Marques, Gabriel Marcia, 289 nostalgia, 95, 151, 195–208, 215
Mars-Jones, Adam, 61n33 Nowatzki, Robert, 101
Marxism, 14 Nunning, Ansgar, 283
mass cultural media, 32 Nussbaum, Martha, 4
Massey, Doreen, 214 Nyman, Jopi, 92
Massie, Alan, 131
Matthews, Graham, 225 Oates, Joyce Carol, 168, 232
McCaffrey, Larry, 71 Obama, Barack, 291
McEwan, Ian, 3 O’Connor, Flannery, 7, 114, 125
McGurl, Mark The Comforts of Home, 120–25
‘technomodernism’, 232 ‘Revelation’, 119
McHale, Brian, 4, 36, 66 O’Neill, Joseph
McHugh, Patrick, 268, 269, 275 Netherland, 61n30
McLaughlin, Robert, 31 orientalism, 23, 83, 93
Medovoi, Leerum, 197 Orr, Mary, 259
Mercer, Kobena, 1, 100 Orwell, George, 86
Merivale, Patricia, 66 Burmese Days, 91
micropolitics and the novel, 32 ‘Shooting an Elephant’, 91
modernism, 13, 48, 213, 215, 232, 250, 255, 282 Osiris, 69
Modisane, Bloke, 25
Moody, Rick, 232 Palahniuk, Chuck
Moraru, Christian, 4 Fight Club, 222
Morrison, Toni, 3, 34, 36, 40, 41, 42, 121, 199, Paley, Grace, 161, 174
232, 291 Pan-Africanism, 231
Beloved, 284, 286, 291 Parker, Charlie, 205
Playing in the Dark, 199 Phillips, Caryl, 7
‘Rootedness: The Ancestor as Cambridge, 18, 280
Foundation’, 40–41 Crossing the River, 101
Moss, Stephen, 251 Dancing in the Dark, 98–108
Mouffe, Chantal. See Laclau, Ernesto Pietsch, Michael, 239
Movement poets, 213 Pinsker, Sanford, 165
Mukherjee, Arun, 93 Plain, Gill, 76, 78
multiculturalism, 38, 147, 221, 231, 248, Poe, Edgar Allan, 66, 117
267, 292 ‘The Man of the Crowd’, 79, 116–17
Murdoch, H. Adlai, 247 Posnock, Ross, 165
postcolonialism, 1–4, 6, 13–28, 98, 146, 178,
Naipaul, V. S, 83 179, 180, 212, 213–15, 216, 218, 230,
The Enigma of Arrival, 85, 89–90 247, 248, 249, 252, 253, 260, 279, 283,
Nairn, Tom, 129, 131, 135, 136, 141 287, 291
The Break-Up of Britain, 134–35, 136, post-communist Eastern Europe, 146–57
138–39, 140 postracial, 4
Native America, 33, 38, 39, 41, 42, 117, 204, poststructuralism, 5, 14, 83, 85, 291
210n21 Pynchon, Thomas, 2, 3, 36, 173, 233
Naylor, Gloria, 36 ‘A Journey Into the Mind of Watts’, 231
Nazism, 223 Gravity’s Rainbow, 9, 264–77
négritude, 22–24, 26, 258 The Crying of Lot 49, 228
Nehru, Jawaharial, 150 V, 164, 283
neoliberalism, 239, 264–77
Ngai, Sianne, 275 Ranciere, Jacques, 285, 290
Nietzche, Friedrich, 284 The Names of History, 284
Niven, Alastair, 284 Reagan, Ronald, 230, 239
Nkrumah, Kwame, 150 Rebein, Robert, 36
300 Index
Reed, Ishmael, 7, 68, 71, 114, 119, 125 Siebert, Wilbur H.
Flight to Canada, 115–19 The Underground Railroad:
Mumbo Jumbo, 67–70, 78, 115 From Slavery to Freedom, 118–19
Resaldo, Renato, 207 Silko, Leslie Marmon, 35, 40
Rhys, Jean Sinatra, Frank, 198
Wide Sargasso sea, 188 slavery, 26, See Evaristo, Bernadine: Blonde
Ribbat, Christophe, 241 Roots; Levy, Andrea: The Long Song;
Riblja Corba (Fish Soup) Phillips, Caryl: Cambridge
‘Amsterdam’, 147–49 Sloterdijk, Peter, 275
Rich, Adrienne, 174 Smith, Adam, 134
Richard, Nelly, 213 Smith, Philip, 254
Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 213 Smith, Zadie, 3, 6, 9, 58–59, 61n30, 247–61
Roediger, David, 119, 201 The Autograph Man, 250–51, 258
Rogin, Michael, 101, 113 ‘A Conversation with Zadie Smith’, 252
Rosenbaum. Thane, 167 ‘E. M. Forster, Middle Manager’, 259
Rosenberg, Warren, 166 The Embassy of Cambodia, 59
Roth, Philip, 31, 33, 161, 165, 232 NW, 58–59, 249, 260
Portnoy’s Complaint, 165 On Beauty, 52, 56, 57, 58, 61n25, 252, 253, 255,
Rowe, John Carlos, 31, 36 258–59
Roy, Arundhati, 94 ‘Two Directions for the Novel’, 248, 255, 260
The God of Small Things, 94 White Teeth, 52, 58, 247, 250, 253–57, 260
Rushdie, Salman, 2, 8, 13, 83, 94, Soitos, Stephen, 67, 69, 70
213, 289 Sontag, Susan
Midnight’s Children, 82, 215, 283 On Photography, 150
The Satanic Verses, 85, 90, 215–19 Sotiropoulos, Karen, 101, 104
Shame, 215, 216 Spanos, William, 65–66
Spivak, Gayatri, 13, 24, 117, 287
Said, Edward, 14 St Maurice, 28n6
Saldivar, Ramon, 47, 49, 265, 276 Star Wars, 214
Santner, Eric, 156 Steiner, Wendy, 36
Sartre, John Paul, 26 Stevenson, Randall, 132
Savran, David, 163 Stevenson, Robert Louis
Scarry, Elaine, 259 Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, 134
Schama, Simon, 258 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 125
Scorcese, Martin Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 68, 116
Goodfellas, 201 Strausbaugh, John, 108
Scott, Paul Sukenik, Ronald, 79
Staying On, 188 Death of the Novel and Other
Scottish neo-nationalism, 7, 129–42 Stories, 31
Sealy, I. Allan Sundquist, Eric J., 106
The Trotter Nama, 96n2 Sunshine on Leith, 130
Second World War, 196, 212 Sweeney, Elizabeth, 66
Selasi, Taiye
Ghana Must Go, 47 Tan, Amy, 34, 36
Self, Will, 8 Tharoor, Shashi
The Butt, 177–91 The Great Indian Novel, 96n2
Senghor, Leopold Sedar, 22, 24 Thatcher, Margaret, 212
négritude, 19 The Empire Strikes Back, 84
Serbian nationalism, 148 Thompson, Clifford, 247
Seroff, Doug, 101 Thorpe, Adam
Seshagiri,Urmila, 49 Ulverton, 211
Seyhan, Adade, 155 Todorov, Tzvetan, 73
Shakespeare, William Todorova, Maria, 148
The Tempest, 85 Toibin, Colm
Shteyngart, Gary, 276 The Penguin Book of Fiction, 132
Index 301
Traber, Daniel S., 195 Infinite Jest, 228, 229, 236–37, 241
Whiteness, Otherness and the Individualism The Pale King, 228, 239–40
Paradox from Huck to Punk New York, Signifying Rappers, 228, 233–34
208n1 ‘This Is Water’, 241
Turner, Chris, 219 ‘Westward the Course of Empire Takes
Twain, Mark Its Way’, 229
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 172 Wallace, Sam, 251
Warner, Alan, 211
Ugrešić, Dubravka, 145–57 Washington, Booker T., 22, 69
After the Museum, 151 Waugh, Evelyn, 212
Baba Yage Laid an Egg, 146 Weaver, Jave, 41
The Culture of Lies, 147, 149, 152 Welch, James, 42
Europe in Sepia, 150, 155, 156 Ploughshares, 39
Fording the Stream of Consciousness, 145 Wells, H. G.
Have a Nice Day: The Island of Dr Moreau, 186
From the Balkan War to the American Welsh, Irvine, 211
Dream, 152 Marabou Stork Nightmares, 178
The Jaws of Life, 145 White, Haydon, 281
Karaoke Culture, 146–47, 156 Whitehead, Colson, 47, 276
Life is a Fairytale, 145 Widemann, John Edgar, 37
The Ministry of Pain, 146, 151 Wigeman, Robin, 119
The Museum of Conditional Surrender, 146, Wilde, Oscar, 284
150–51 Williams, Bert, 98–108
Nobody’s Home, 150, 151, 154–56 Wilson, Harris
Thank You For Not Reading, 153–54 Tradition, the Writer and
Upstone, Sara, 215 Society, 14
Spatial Politics in the Postcolonial Novel, 214 Wisse, Ruth, 161
Witzling, David, 267
Vizenor, Gerald, 39, 43, 46n38 Wodehouse, P. G., 212
Vodoun. See Voodoo Wolfe, Tom, 32–33, 36, 37
Voodoo, 69, 114, 115, 119 The Bonfire of the Vanities, 38
Vrasti, Wanda, 206 ‘Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast:
A Literary Manifesto for the New Social
Walcott, Derek Novel’, 32–33
Another Life, 188 Womack, Craig, 43
Walker, Alice, 36 Woolf, Virginia, 254, 260
Walkowitz, Rebecca L., 49 Wordsworth, William, 89
Wallace, David Foster, 8, 34, 39, 48, 228–41
‘Authority and American Usage’, 228, 237–39 Yamashita, Karen Tei, 276
The Broom of the System, 228 Yang, William, 19
‘E Unibus Pluram’, 229 Yugoslav League of Communists, 148
‘Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously
Young’, 232 Ziegler, Garrett, 247
Getting Away from Already Being Pretty Much Žižek, Slavoj, 156
Away From It All, 228, 235–36 Zollschan, Ignaz, 17

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P o s t m o d e r n L i t e r at u r e a n d

Postmodern Literature and Race explores the question of how ­dramatic

Len Pl at t is Professor of Modern Literatures at Goldsmiths,

Sara Upstone is Associate Professor of English Literature at

Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.

Notes on Contributors page vii

P art O ne Postmodern Problemati c s

P art T wo Race a nd Per f ormati vi t y

Part Fo u r Revi si ng Metanarrati ve s

Part Five PostRaci al F utures?

Bill Ashcroft is Professor in the School of Arts and Media at the

The relationship between postcolonialism and postmodernism is a

In postcolonial studies, the question of race is represented from the per-

Du Bois, ‘The Conservation of Races’ and

Négritude and Essentialism

Négritude, then, presents a classic case to the postmodernist of the essen-

Race as Colour: Fanon and ‘The Fact of Blackness’

Race and the Crisis of the Postmodern

Postmodernism has been widely perceived, by novelists and literary ­critics

This sequence exemplifies the two-tiered fashion in which Smith moves

Race and Performativity

Postmodernism and the Metaphysical Detective Story

Rather than dispense with the epistemological method, the postmod-

‘Gumbo’ Style: Ishmael Reed and the

The Missing Body and Reflex and Bone Structure

I am standing behind Cora. She is wearing a thin black nightgown. The

The fascination is not that of the epistemological quest, typical of the

‘Cutting the Philosophy Bullshit’

A man who invents himself needs someone to believe in him, to

Writing in 1928 an anonymous Indian critic compared the sympathetic

I would argue that the same kind of ‘meta-exoticism’ is in play in The

Performing Race in Caryl Phillips’s

Postcolonial author, playwright and essayist Caryl Phillips was born on

As this opening stanza suggests, Dunbar’s poem captures the ambiguities

No longer Egbert Austin Williams. He kept telling himself, I am no longer

The near critical consensus is that white appropriations of blackness are

Flight to Canada, Literary Theft, and Reed’s Aesthetics

Essentially, Stowe is identified as a bokar, an evil practitioner of Vodun. She

He buried your brother alive

The Whiteface Minstrelsy of ‘The Comforts of Home’

Nations and Belonging

‘How SCOTTISH I am’

‘Modernity without Illusions’

Receiving Lanark – Problematics of Cultural

‘Dependable Tools’: Scottishness and 1982, Janine

inherited a social-economic position in history vastly more favourable

Gray’s 1982, Janine is typically in a moving, provisional state, its imagined

In his influential analysis of the postmodern condition, Fredric Jameson

Ugrešić provides a useful encapsulation of such paradoxes. Yugoslavs did

More than in any country, she feels at home in no-man’s-land which

Postmodern Prose and the Discourse

Race, Comedy and Tourism

Narrative, Reversal, Teleology

The transformation of the emblematically aboriginal Ayers Rock into

Race and Colour

The Triplicity of Justice

Discourse, Plosives and the ‘Bing-Bong Question’

The Hideousness of the Foreign

The Uncertainty Principle

White Male Nostalgia in Don DeLillo’s

Between 1945 and 1960, a pervasive iconography of white, middle-class

As part of a rather fanciful quartet of celebrity baseball fans depicted

Postmodern Revisions of Englishness

Postmodern Literature and Race explores the question of how dramatic

Postmodernism has been widely perceived, by novelists and literary critics