Critiquing Postmodernism in Contemporary Discourses of Race [Hardcover]

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.Introduction Ideological Fantasy of Otherness Postmodernism Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and the Politics of Form Not Three Worlds but One: Thomas Pynchon?and the Invisibility of Race Analyzing the Real: Bessie Head's Literary Psychosis Concluding Notes

Kim's study, then, points the way toward a consideration of difference that is not mired in relativism without ethics, but that appreciates real social conditions as they influence and particularize experience. - MELUS

In this marvelous book, Kim attempts what we rarely see in the innumerable critiques of postmodernism available to us from progressive, radical scholars: she constructs her case by drawing on the work of complex, sophisticated writers from diverse traditions and contexts - mainstream American, Asian American and African. This is superb work of comparative literary studies and cultural criticism. It is bound to exert some influence across several fields including postcolonial studies, American studies and the discourses of race, identity and agency. - Biodun Jeyifo, Professor, African and African American Studies and Literature and Comparative Literature, Harvard University

In Critiquing Postmodernism, Kim offers a searing critique of the postmodern politics of difference. Ranging across criticall£*