Book contents
- The Cambridge History of Black and Asian British Writing
- The Cambridge History of Black and Asian British Writing
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- Preface and Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Part I New Formations
- Part II Uneven Histories
- Part III Writing the Contemporary
- (I) Looking Back, Looking Forward
- (II) Framing New Visions
- 32 Through a Different Lens
- 33 Children’s Literature and the Construction of Contemporary Multicultures
- 34 Redefining the Boundaries
- 35 Prizing Otherness
- 36 Frontline Fictions
- 37 Reimagining Africa
- 38 Post-Secular Perspectives
- 39 Post-Ethnicity and the Politics of Positionality
- Select Bibliography
- Index
39 - Post-Ethnicity and the Politics of Positionality
from (II) - Framing New Visions
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 December 2019
- The Cambridge History of Black and Asian British Writing
- The Cambridge History of Black and Asian British Writing
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- Preface and Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Part I New Formations
- Part II Uneven Histories
- Part III Writing the Contemporary
- (I) Looking Back, Looking Forward
- (II) Framing New Visions
- 32 Through a Different Lens
- 33 Children’s Literature and the Construction of Contemporary Multicultures
- 34 Redefining the Boundaries
- 35 Prizing Otherness
- 36 Frontline Fictions
- 37 Reimagining Africa
- 38 Post-Secular Perspectives
- 39 Post-Ethnicity and the Politics of Positionality
- Select Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Hollinger’s concept of ‘postethnicity’ originates in the US context and will be adapted here to capture the intense play with the interrogation, transformation and construction of ethnicity that characterizes novels by Hanif Kureishi, Zadie Smith, Helen Oyeyemi, Kit De Waal, Diran Adebayo, and Diana Evans; the concept also serves to analyse BAME-authored texts that seek to evade unambiguous ethnic markers altogether. These strategies undercut and resist the recurrent expectation for black and Asian writers to construct protagonists of unambiguous ethnicity. In the wake of a threatened return to materiality, these novels are a radical statement on the contemporary state of ethnicity and a strategy for widening the aesthetic and thematic scope available to black and Asian British literary production.
- Type
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- Information
- The Cambridge History of Black and Asian British Writing , pp. 650 - 662Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2020