This monograph examines Caryl Phillips’s The Nature of Blood (1997), a novel exploring recurring expressions of exclusion and discrimination throughout history with particular focus on Jewish and African diasporas and the storytelling of its migrant characters. Particular attention is given to the analysis of characters revealing different facets of the Jewish question. Maria Festa also provides a historical excursus on the notion of race and considers another character alluding to Shakespeare’s Othello to expose the paradoxes of the relationship between subjugator and subjugated. The study makes the case that among the novel’s most remarkable achievements is Phillips’s effort to redress the absence of the Other from our history, that by depicting experiences of displacement, and by confronting readers with seemingly disconnected narrative fragments, The Nature of Blood is a reminder of the missing stories, the voices—marginalised and often racialized—that Western history has consistently failed to include in its accounts of the past and arguably its present.

A German Jewish girl whose life is destroyed by the atrocities of World War II . . . her uncle, who undermines the sureties of his own life in order to fight for Israeli statehood . . . the Jews of a 15th-century Italian ghetto . . Othello, newly arrived in Venice . . . a young Ethiopian Jewish woman resettled in Israel. These are the extraordinary people who inhabit Caryl Phillips' eloquent and moving new novel, and whose stories are connected by circumstance, spirit, and blood across the centuries.

In this study of three of Barbara Pym’s novels, Naghmeh Varghaiyan, drawing on examinations of women’s humour by Eileen Gillooly, Regina Barreca, and others, shows how the humorous female discourse in Some Tame Gazelle, Excellent Women, and Jane and Prudence undermines patriarchal culture and subverts both female and male stereotypes such as that of the spinster and of the Byronic hero. Varghaiyan reveals how the rhetoric of women’s humour enables Pym’s female characters to survive in the patriarchal culture and to unsettle it.

Race and Antiracism in Black British and British Asian Literature offers the first comprehensive exploration of the cultural impact of the politics of race and antiracism in recent novels by black British and British Asian writers. It examines works by Zadie Smith, Caryl Phillips, Nadeem Aslam, Ferdinand Dennis, and others, arguing that an understanding of how race and ethnicity function in contemporary Britain can only be gained through attention to antiracism and the ways it conditions racial categories, identities, and models of behavior. Looking at topics such as the role of Africa, the reception of Islam, and the meaning of multiculturalism, Dave Gunning offers a detailed engagement with the nuances of antiracism and their effects on British literature and culture.

World War II produced a fundamental shift in modern racial discourse. In the postwar period, racism was situated for the first time at the center of international political life, and race's status as conceptual common sense and a justification for colonial rule was challenged with new intensity. In response to this crisis of race, the UN and UNESCO initiated a project of racial reeducation. This global antiracist campaign was framed by the persecution of Europe's Jews and anchored by UNESCO's epochal 1950 Statement on Race, which redefined the race concept and canonized the midcentury liberal antiracist consensus that continues to shape our present. In this book, Sonali Thakkar tells the story of how UNESCO's race project directly influenced anticolonial thought and made Jewish difference and the Holocaust enduring preoccupations for anticolonial and postcolonial writers. Drawing on UNESCO's rich archival resources and shifting between the scientific, social scientific, literary, and cultural, Thakkar offers new readings of a varied collection of texts from the postcolonial, Jewish, and Black diasporic traditions. Anticolonial thought and postcolonial literature critically recast liberal scientific antiracism, Thakkar argues, and the concepts central to this new moral economy were the medium for postcolonialism's engagement with Jewishness. By recovering these connections, she shows how the midcentury crisis of racial meaning shaped the kinds of solidarities between racialized subjects that are thinkable today.

Review: "This encyclopedia offers an authoritative and comprehensive survey of the important writers and works that form the literature about the Holocaust and its consequences. The collection is alphabetically arranged and consists of high-quality biocritical essays on 309 writers who are first-, second-, and third-generation survivors or important thinkers and spokespersons on the Holocaust. An essential literary reference work, this publication is an important addition to the genre and a solid value for public and academic libraries."--"The Top 20 Reference Titles of the Year," American Libraries, May 2004

Holocaust Memory and Racism in the Postwar World is intended for students and scholars of Holocaust and genocide studies, professionals working in museums and heritage organizations, and anyone interested in building on their knowledge of the Holocaust and the discourse of racism.