Reads and interprets eight works of literature by people of color, foregrounding the philosophical debate about modernity vs. postmodernity rather than solely issues of race.

Reads and interprets eight works of literature by people of color, foregrounding the philosophical debate about modernity vs. postmodernity rather than solely issues of race.

Essay from the year 2005 in the subject Sociology - Politics, Majorities, Minorities, grade: 1,5, University of Leicester (Department of Sociology), course: Identity and Society, language: English, abstract: The issue about “race” is still of great significance in today’s societies. Recent incidents like racist slurs at football games show how deep racist tendencies are still embedded in people’s minds – in spite of consistent awareness raising and information. However, these examples show only the peak of racist tendencies. Racial imagery in media and arts is central to the organisation of the modern world (Dyer 1997: 1). Furthermore, the scientific “foundation” of theories of “race” continues to be a disputed question for biology as well as for the social sciences (Lang 2000: x). This essay is about the implications of the term “race” and the coherence of “race” and identity. It implements a postmodern approach to the understanding of identity and applies this concept to the representation of "the other" in a recent newspaper article.

This collection brings together a dozen academics from diverse racial, ethnic, and gender perspectives to explore race in a postmodern way. Postmodernism and Race articulates the differences between modern and postmodern discourses. It then offers a third alternative based on comparative civilizational studies, which suggest a multidimensional approach to power, identity, and social order. Also drawing on Western and non-Western interpretations, the discursive nature of race as a cultural product and semiotic marker is explored. The collection seeks to achieve three tasks: To present a uniquely kynical approach to truth-saying presented by modernists and sophisticated so-called postmodernists (with their faith in lingualism); to explore what modernism is in the context of race; and to investigate the concept of race in an aperspectival way, including the language-gaming of racism. The obsession with racial measurement and its correlation with measures of intelligence is explored, as is the mythology of racial homogeneity in Japan. Also examined are the discursive nature of racial reality and power, and racial identity in Africa. All those concerned with issues of race and/or postmodern civilization, as well as those interested in operational definition, scalar phenomena, relativism, and postmodern views of truth, justice, and power, will find this a provocative collection.

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.

DIVA collection of essays arguing for a global and economically based modernity driven by capitalist development./div

Postmodern Racial Dialectics is a collection of ten essays on African American philosophy. Addressing issues as disparate as why there are no graduate programs in philosophy at the more than one hundred traditionally black colleges and universities in the U.S.—to conceptions of Black utopianism—to the nature of postmodern revolutions, these essays are beyond the bounds of traditional racial discourse. The essays are dialectical in the sense that they are conversations between personal histories, between ideologies, and between changing ways that the races talk to one another. The book is postmodern in that it is beyond modernity’s linear logic. Postmodern Racial Dialectics is also a political entreaty for African Americans to be wary of conventional ways of thinking, and to begin thinking transgressively beyond narrowly prescribed conceptions from both sides of the color line.