Postmodernism and Race explores the question of how dramatic shifts in conceptions of race in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have been addressed by writers at the cutting edge of equally dramatic transformations of literary form. An opening section engages with the broad question of how the geographical and political positioning of experimental writing informs its contribution to racial discourses, while later segments focus on central critical domains within this field: race and performativity, race and the contemporary nation, and postracial futures. With essays on a wide range of contemporary writers, including Bernadine Evaristo, Alasdair Gray, Jhumpa Lahiri, Andrea Levy, and Don DeLillo, this volume makes an important contribution to our understanding of the politics and aesthetics of contemporary writing.

Critiquing Postmodernism in Contemporary Discourses of Race challenges the critical emphasis on otherness in treatments of race in literary and cultural studies. Sue J. Kim deftly argues that this treatment not only perpetuates narrow identity politics, but obscures the political and economic structures that shape issues of race in literary studies. Kim s revelatory book shows how reading authors through their identity ends up neglecting both complex historical contexts and aesthetic forms. This comparative study calls for a reconsideration of the bases for critical engagement and a reading ethics that melds the best of historicist and formalist approaches to literature.

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

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

Focusing on race, culture, acculturation, ethnicity, and ethnic identity—concepts commonly used to account for the behaviors of Asian Americans and other minorities—A Postmodern Psychology of Asian Americans examines the effects of modern psychology's epistemological and ontological premises on its investigative methods and concepts. Author Laura Uba looks at the social creation of psychological facts, including portrayals of ethnic and racial groups, and demonstrates, especially in ways pertinent to the study of minorities, that modern psychology needs to reconsider its ways of thinking about study samples, investigative methods, facts, and concepts used to describe and explain behaviors.

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

Critiquing Postmodernism in Contemporary Discourses of Race challenges the critical emphasis on otherness in treatments of race in literary and cultural studies. Sue J. Kim deftly argues that this treatment not only perpetuates narrow identity politics, but obscures the political and economic structures that shape issues of race in literary studies. Kim s revelatory book shows how reading authors through their identity ends up neglecting both complex historical contexts and aesthetic forms. This comparative study calls for a reconsideration of the bases for critical engagement and a reading ethics that melds the best of historicist and formalist approaches to literature.