The Politics of Identity in Contemporary Literature - Essay Example

The Politics of Identity in Contemporary Literature Introduction This study will attempt to demonstrate that social groups, no matter how cohesive their identity or their “difference” appears to be, are not constituted by nature. According to this paradigm, social groupings – like region, race and nation – are always in flux, always in the process of being constructed and negotiated. Further it can be demonstrated that one’s ethnicity is unable to stabilize identity because, like any other word, it turns out to be interchangeable in a system of differences. If one simply says “identity”, it is not clear whether he is talking about identity in a Cartesian, Enlightenment sense or identity in a Rushdian sense. It is not clear because the same word can have both meanings. Because there is no other word, he has to use it in such a way as to close out certain connotations and open up others. The term ‘black’ faces similar crisis. People did not have another word for it, and there was a contestation around that word precisely because it was already inserted in the discourse in a negative way. That was a word that had to be disarticulated from its older discursive configuration and rearticulated in a new one. The politics of identity is therefore about disentangling it from its older, negative notions and reinvesting it with positive associations.1 Stereotypes in Literature The Issue Literature reflects the perceptions, and misperceptions of its time, its authors, and its readers. The inextricable relationship between literature and culture reflects the continual clash of values and worldviews inherent in human society. Much has been written and debated on different groups’ portrayals in literary works; full-length critical works are devoted to the stereotypes of many different groups. The word “stereotype” itself has different connotations, from simply denoting a type to castigating certain groups. The whole range of possible interpretations can be found in American works. Background Characters are sometimes referred to as “static” and “dynamic” or “flat” and “round.” Dynamic or round characters change in response to the actions or circumstances. Authors often purposefully employ static characters; to say that a work of literature includes such characters is not to condemn it. When such types become merely caricatures, those with a single exclusive trait, then they no longer resemble believable human beings. Authors sometimes employ character types, or stock characters, sometimes atypical ones, and sometimes combine the two—even in the same characters, thus portraying both the universal and the particular. Since literary works reflect their times and authors’ views, as times change, the reception of the literature often changes with them. Challenges to current works of literature show that culture is often divided on the issues of race, ethnicity and gender. Implications Literature provides a complex, implicit interweaving of types and stereotypes. Readers must distinguish between typifying that makes comparison to universal human experience and stereotyping that identifies others based on gender, race, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and all the other classifications that culture recognizes. To resist typifying leaves literary characters who bear little resemblance to human beings. However, to anticipate behavior, values, and attitudes based solely on identification with a particular group misrepresents human experience. Resisting Stereotypes In the eighteenth century, when the empirical theories of English thinkers John Locke and Sir Isaac Newton were shaping American literature generally, the African American presence in America added a new dimension to the cultural identity of American literature. Since African Americans were involuntarily transported into a new environment, their cultural transition became the source of their literary creativity as well as a historical contribution. With the passage of time, African American writers infused new perspectives into the literary canon through experimentation and through revisions of existing conventions.2 Metafictional archetype Toiya Kristen Finley suggests that “some of the more recent metafictions have different goals than the textual games in the metafictions of the 1960s and 1970s and historiographic metafictions. "Archetypical metafiction" may not be the right term for them but their metafictional techniques bring new perspectives on evaluating and challenging flawed ideals…In a climate where the times are becoming more confusing and groups are becoming even more marginalized due to their race, economic status, religion, sexual orientation, or political affiliation, some of the ideals we've held on a pedestal deserve to be ridiculed by keen and opportunistic authors. The methodology appearing in archetypical metafiction is one more way to tear those ideals down.”3 Percival Everett’s Erasure Percival Everett's Erasure attacks the questions surrounding black identity and "acceptable" black art with an aggressive satire. Monk’s own perception of things around him and his being labeled as a black writer has always left him in a conundrum: While in college I was a member of the Black Panther Party, defunct as it was, mainly because I felt I had to prove I was black enough. Some people in the society in which I live, described as being black, tell me I am not black enough. Some people who the society calls white tell me the same thing.[6]  .4 In a society with rigidly defined racial identities and narratives, a black man who did not grow up in the rural South reworks Greek myths, can't dance, has doctors in his family, and writes novels that have nothing to do with the "African American experience" (whatever it may be), is not "black enough."5. In despair, he churns out a rushed parody of the black ghetto novel, entitled My Pafology, under the pseudynom Stagg R Lee. “I tighten up my belt and then yank my pants down on my ass…So, why not me?”6. When his agent sells it for a huge sum, Monk's problems really begin. He needs the money badly but every bone in his postmodern body recoils against the notion of perpetuating black stereotypes, particularly black stereotypes written as parody that white publishing houses then find 'magnificently raw and honest'. When Monk finds himself embroiled in a literary nightmare of his own making, Everett seems to posit two important questions: does the dominant culture really view these ghetto-fabulous portrayals as representative of the authentic black experience, and what is wrong with black artists that they willfully bolster and encourage these destructive archetypes of blacks, especially when some of these artists have never experienced anything close to the circumstances they're substantiating? It can be argued that not all white individuals perceive blacks in a negative way, but with the way the narratives of black life are promoted by the dominant culture in various media, one can never be sure. Though theoretically it is no longer acceptable to portray mammies and Uncle Toms in any form of media, it is rather unfortunate that commercial publishers and distributors still support such projects and affirm the dominant culture's ideals of “real blackness”.7 This becomes a double jeopardy for the black writers because it leaves them torn between commercial success and reinstating the stereotypes they set out to resist. From the politics set forth in the novel, we can see that Everett is concerned with the double standard set for white and black writers. White writers freely, and often unconsciously, write on a wide range of experiences, while black writers are expected to write about some single idea of a ‘black experience.’ In this light, Erasure can be read as a provocative satire on the impact of the publishing industry on the authority, authenticity, and agency of autonomous, non-conventional contemporary African American novelists. “I am a writer. I am a man. I am black man in this culture. Of course my experience as a black man in America influences my art; it influences the way I drive down the street. But certainly John Updike's work is influenced by his being white in America, but we never really discuss that. I think readers, black and white, are sophisticated enough to be engaged by a range of black experience, informed by economic situation, religion (or lack thereof) or geography, just as one accepts a range of so-called white experience.”8 “The story-within-a-story structure and style of the paradoxically double-voiced satirical attack in Erasure on African American double-consciousness, African American neo-realism, Eurocentric poststructuralism, and popular culture in the United States are both a clever and crude imaginative construction of the disturbing socialized ambivalence and identity crisis of the implied author and protagonist of the novel.”9 The satirical events that dominate the frame-story of Monk's expressionist aesthetic as a writer and college professor and that reveal his intellectual arrogance and alienation as an African American artist are disrupted periodically with flashbacks to his childhood fascination with woodworking and fly fishing with his father. They also illuminate the origins of his existential angst, the exaggerated sense of his intellectual and artistic difference, fostered by the favoritism and pronouncements of his father, who committed suicide, and the subsequent emotional estrangement and psychological alienation from his siblings, colleagues, and acquaintances. The murder by an anti-abortionist of his gynecologist sister and the divorce of his gay plastic surgeon brother, both symbolically engaged in forms of identity erasure, confront Monk with the responsibility of moving from Los Angeles to the District of Columbia to care for his mother, whose health and authentic identity are being rapidly erased by Alzheimer's. But his family relationship, like his professional relationship to other writers and his sexual relationship with Linda Mallory and Marilyn Tilman, is in a state of erasure.10 Margaret Russett on Erasure Margaret Russett hits on a key idea that Everett’s novel is asserting: “Everett unhinges ‘black’ subject matter from a lingering stereotype of ‘black’ style, while challenging the assumption that a single or consensual African-American Experience exists to be represented”11. In a reflection of Everett's own experience, the book focuses on the publishing industry's pigeon-holing of African American writers. It is in fact interesting to note that a novel like Fuck, set in a Modern American city, is marketed and received as an exotic artifact. This relationship between reader and artifact is reminiscent of what Harvey Green considers the pre-industrial society’s superstitious, cautious relationship with the wilderness12. (230). Portraying this particular experience becomes a benchmark for authenticity. Russett asks the right question: “When can we say with confidence that a work of fiction has, or has not, met this obligation (dealing with racial themes)?”13 The bar needed for authenticity appears to reside somewhere in the extreme. For publishers, writers, or even teachers looking to maximize their delivery of authentic literature, they need to—based on these assumptions—find works that go heavy on the culture. Here a certain kind of language determines authenticity, so the work that includes the most cultural eccentricities, no matter how stereotypical or insignificant, is deemed the more authentic. If you want to hear about street life, you want to hear it from a street thug, problem being your preconceived ideas about what happens on the streets. It is easy to see how things went awry so easily, but Monk does not help his cause. Readers needed to see Stagg Leigh to ‘authenticate’ the book. His physical appearance hidden behind a white veil, Monk appears as Leigh on the Kenya Dunston Show. Monk as Leigh does not cooperate during the interview, refusing to talk much, but this does not damage the book’s reputation as an insightful look into the African American experience. Moreover, the identity of the creator is revealed / confirmed allowing readers to fully invest in the novel and its back story. Monk makes adjustments for his mother, but not for his readership. Labeling a book as parody would make the attempt at parody no longer effective. That’s the serious artist side of Monk. However, when we reflect back on that encounter at Border’s, we are reminded that Monk has a vindictive side and isn’t above financial reward. Is he surprised by the world’s reaction to his novel? We can’t know.14 We do know that Percival Everett has convincingly challenged ideas about authenticity and authority through the actions of his protagonist. Yet Everett's questions and challenges have been countered. In a review of Erasure that is both favorable and critical, Bernard Bell disapproves of Everett’s position: Contrary to the popularity in the academies of anti-essentialist arguments by postmodern critics, the authority, authenticity, and agency identities of most African Americans emanate most distinctively and innovatively from the particularity of our historical struggle against slavery and its legacy of anti-black racism in the United States.15 Though Bell and Everett may not be polar opposites per se, but they do speak from different positions. Everett feels little connection to the common experience posited by Bell, while Bell’s comments point to a feeling of disappointment in Everett’s political stance. Both sides offer convincing arguments. There is surely a middle ground, but if one were to choose a side (if sides exist) it would be based solely on preference or belief. However today it is easier to side with Everett, trying to determine the difficulty of confronting and overcoming issues of authenticity, authority, and race. Other Contemporary Novels The scope of the stories repeatedly demonstrates the variety and the richness of African-American life—its tragedy and pathos, which we are accustomed to encountering in such literature, but also its humor and absurdity. In the tradition of Zora Neale Hurston's "Their Eyes Were Watching God," many of the stories in this volume inform us that African-American life is not solely a response to racism. More importantly, they illustrate that "protest" in black writing is on the wane and that black writers are no longer taking potshots at members of the opposite sex, as was commonly believed to be the case during much of the past decade.16 Johnson's "China" explores with John Cheever-like perfection the shifting relationship between a middle-aged husband and wife whose marriage has slipped into boredom and complacency, largely because the wife has made her husband into a sap. Then the husband becomes interested in kung fu. Within months, their roles are reversed, prompting the wife to conclude, "I want you back the way you were: sick." Perhaps it should be noted that "China" could be the story of any middle-aged couple, black or white, a further indication that African-American writing is becoming increasingly difficult to pigeonhole. John Edgar Wideman's "Fever" is equally impressive, though slavery in this story is placed in a very different context. Using blackness as an ironic metaphor for racism as a whole, Wideman writes, "We were proclaimed carriers of the fever and treated as pariahs, but when it became expedient to command our services to nurse the sick and bury the dead, the previous allegations were no longer mentioned." Yet another outstanding story is John McCluskey's "Lush Life," an evocative account of the rush that music provides to those who are truly addicted to the making of it. As two musicians drive in the middle of the night to their next gig, one of them says: "It's this music we play, Billy. It opens people up, makes them give up secrets. Better than whiskey or dope for that. It don't kill you, and you … can whistle it the next day in new places. You can loan it to strangers, and they thank you for it.'" Another contemporary leading black male novelist is Ishmael Reed. In his novel Mumbo Jumbo (1972), Reed experiments with the conventions of fiction to capture the complexity of African American identity as he integrates multiple layers of meaning in his prose. He parodies Western tradition and African American conventions. Reed decries any idealism that imposes unrealistic restrictions on the artist. Vizenor believes that Native American imagination foreshadows many postmodern literary strategies regarding identity. He uses the concept of “survivance” to denote the trickster’s playful attitude that undercuts domination-victimization oppositions and produces new worldviews. The trickster uses stories and humor to tease out contradictions between good and evil in the world. The Heirs of Columbus announces, “I am not a victim of Columbus,” and uses trickster storytelling to revise the history of relations between whites and tribal peoples. Always on the move, the trickster destabilizes “pure” identities. Tribal identities pass through tribal stories. Last but not the least, in Percival Everett’s Damned If I Do, even stories about racial prejudice are treated with a light satirical touch. In “The Appropriation of Cultures,” a young black man buys a pickup truck with a confederate flag on the back and, by driving it around, gradually undermines a symbol of racial injustice more successfully than conventional protests. In another story that centers on a pickup truck, a romance novelist just trying to earn a living, enjoy his privacy, and protect the environment, finds a way to make Hollywood pay through the nose and, in the process, staves off real estate and commercial encroachment. Therefore, one can read a Percival Everett story about a man trying to escape an insane asylum and know he is not going to be subjected to a tirade about better treatment of the mentally ill. One can read a Percival Everett story about a black government official trying to get a signature from a prejudiced old woman and know he is not going to have to listen to another rant about racial injustice. As readers, it is hard to resist a writer who makes you laugh and does not preach to you, a writer whose only agenda is the vulnerability and absurdity of the human condition. An attempt to stabilize identity “I think I represent an impulse that is essentially modernist and is certainly not unique to African-Americans - a desire for a certain standard of creative excellence. I think that has all but disappeared - in music, in fiction, in culture generally. Once, to be a writer or a musician, you needed to learn your craft and have a certain talent, and then you needed to prove yourself and improve your craft each time you created something. That's gone now. It's been replaced by other impulses like this bogus notion of authenticity that bedevils music and fiction made by black people”. “I have nothing against ghetto novels or rural Southern novels,' he continues, warming to his subject, 'except that they are the only representations out there. When I see my books in the Black Fiction or Black Studies section, I feel baffled. I really don't know what those terms mean. Especially, when I look around the store and there is no corresponding White Fiction section.” He pauses for a moment. “But, here we are again,” he says, “talking about race. I don't want to talk about race, I just want to make art.” He has succeeded in the latter, if not the former, which, ultimately, is all that really matters.17 This book is essentially about the creation of art. The narrator's idiosyncrasies scupper any notion of how a black intellectual should behave. He makes the case for an unfettered individuality in keeping with conventional views of the artist whose imagination in broadly utopian terms cannot be mortgaged to any group or cause. Everett chooses in Erasure to erase or nullify his African American identity in his transgressive quest for freedom and wholeness as an artist.18 Reflecting disturbingly on suicide while viewing paintings by Rothko and Antoine de Saint-Exupery in the National Gallery of Art, Monk thinks to himself: "My self-murder would not be an act of rage and despair, but of only despair and my artistic sensibility could not stand that."19 At the close of the novel, Monk, who was unsuccessful as one of the judges in attacking the aesthetics of Fuck, reflects: "The faces of my life, of my past, of my world became as real as the unreal.... Then there was a small boy, perhaps me as boy, and he held up a mirror so that I could see my face and it was the face of Stagg Leigh. 'Now you're free of illusion,' Stagg said. 'How does it feel to be free of one's illusions.'"20 Monk's artistic sensibility and aesthetic standards thus dominate or erase other aspects of his identity. Race under Erasure – A Theoretical Approach Race has now been discredited as a category of ‘real’ biological difference and has been theorized as involving political processes of classification. The demise of race as a purely objective, descriptive category connoting ‘natural’ biological difference, together with the increasing influence of post-structuralist and post-colonial scholarship, has led to theoretical approaches that have conceptualized race and ethnicity as socially constructed, relational and socially located.21 The treacherous bind of race and its close relationship to racism is an ever-lurking presence in research. It has implications for all researchers who are concerned with social difference and with how research can be used to challenge racism and oppression. As Hall notes, race and related concepts such as ethnicity, identity, diaspora and multiculturalism – are so discursively entangled (incapable of pure meaning) that they can only be used under erasure. Following Derrida, Hall’s reference to concepts operating under erasure signals a deconstructive approach that recognizes our relation to concepts that have passed their analytic sell-by date, that are no longer ‘good to think with’, but which have yet to be replaced. For Hall, in the interval ‘there is nothing to do but to continue to think with them – albeit now in their detotalized or deconstructed forms and no longer operating within the paradigm in which they were originally generated.22 Recognizing race as a concept that operates under erasure – a concept that cannot be thought of in the ‘old way’ as representing essential, discrete differences between groups, but which we still need in order to address and dismantle racism. We are in the deconstructive moment. We may simply have to occupy the underside, the disturbed, subverted side of the positive concepts – in order to think with, rather than waiting for some new dispensation. Conclusion The biggest irony of Everett’s Erasure is that a novel so titled “collapses the relation between race and writing into precisely the kind of label that both Everett and his character resist.”23 The complexity of racial and cultural identities includes much more than class, religion, and geography. Contrary to the popularity in the academies of anti-essentialist arguments by postmodern critics, the authority, authenticity, and agency of the identities of most African Americans emanate most distinctively and innovatively from the particularity of our historical struggle against slavery and its legacy of antiblack racism in the United States. They also emanate from the shared cultural codes and language of our individual and collective political agency in reconciling our unique double-consciousness in the open-ended process of constructing our identities and reconstructing a new world order.24 Notes 1. Gary A. Olson, Lynn Worsham, Race, Rhetoric, and the Postcolonial, Published by SUNY Press, 1999, pg no. 229 2. Mabel Khawaja. "African American Identity in Literature." Identities and Issues in Literature. Salem Press, 1997. eNotes.com. 2006. 29 Jan, 2009 3. Toiya Kristen Finley, Archetypical Metafiction: Scrutinizing Fallen Archetypes. Nashville, TN native Toiya Kristen Finley is a freelancer who was a professional student in another life, traveling to faraway places like New York University, Iowa State, and Binghamton University before returning home. She is the founding and former managing/fiction editor of Harpur Palate. Her nonfiction and fiction have appeared in Philosophy in Culture, Popular Contemporary Writers, The Encyclopedia of Themes in Science Fiction and Fantasy, Under Her Skin: How Girls Experience Race in America, Nature, Dog Versus Sandwich, Text: UR—The New Book of Masks, and Farrago's Wainscot. Upcoming fiction will be in Subtle Edens: The Elastic Book of Slipstream, Fifth Wednesday Journal and Electric Velocipede.. 4. Percival Everett. Erasure. New York: Hyperion, 2001.2. 5. Ibid. 43 'The line is, you're not black enough,' my agent said. 'What's that mean, Yul? How do they even know I'm black? Why does it matter?' 'We've been over this before. They know because of the photo on your first book. They know because they've seen you. They know because you're black, for crying out loud.' 'What, do I have to have my characters comb their afros and be called niggers for these people?' 'It wouldn't hurt.' I was stunned into silence 6. Ibid. 65 'I tighten up my belt and then yank my pants down on my ass. The T-shirt I'm wearin' be funky as shit. but I don't give a fuck. The world be stinkin' so why not me? That's what I says. So, why not me? That's my motto. So, why not me? It be eleben thirty in the mornin'...' 7. Stanford M. Lyman, Color, Culture, Civilization: Race and Minority Issues in American society. University of Illinois Press, 1995 – pg. 22 8. Sean O’ Hagan, Interview: Percival Everett. The Observer, Sunday 16 March 2003. This article was first published on guardian.co.uk at 02.41 GMT on Sunday 16 March 2003. It appeared in the Observer on Sunday 16 March 2003 . It was last updated at 02.41 GMT on Sunday 16 March 2003. 9. Bernard Bell, Percival L. Everett. Erasure. Hanover: UP of New England, 2001 265 pp. African American Review Vol. 37, 2003 10. Ibid. 11. Margaret Russett. Race Under Erasure. Callaloo - Volume 28, Number 2, Spring 2005, pp. 358-368. The John Hopkins University Press. 12. Green, Harvey. Wood: Craft, Culture, History. New York: Viking, 2006. 13. Margaret Russett. Race Under Erasure. Callaloo - Volume 28, Number 2, Spring 2005, pp. 358-368. The John Hopkins University Press. 14. Adam Robinson, "You Always Want the Heartwood": Woodworking in Percival Everett’s Erasure, The Raveler – a magazine for masters students. http://www.theraveler.org/ravv1i1/?q=node/29 15. Bernard Bell, Percival L. Everett. Erasure. Hanover: UP of New England, 2001 265 pp. African American Review Vol. 37, 2003 16. "McMillan, Terry: Charles R. Larson (review date 23 September 1990)." Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Jeffrey W. Hunter. Vol. 112. Gale Cengage, 1999. eNotes.com. 2006. 29 Jan, 2009 17. Sean O’ Hagan, Interview: Percival Everett. The Observer, Sunday 16 March 2003. 18. Bernard Bell, Percival L. Everett. Erasure. Hanover: UP of New England, 2001 265 pp. African American Review Vol. 37, 2003 19. Percival Everett. Erasure. New York: Hyperion, 2001 20. Ibid. 21. Yasmin Gunaratnam. A ‘Treacherous Bind’:Working with and against racial categories. Researching Race and Ethnicity: Methods, Knowledge and Power. SAGE, 2003. pg. 31 22. Stuart Hall and Paul Du Gay. Questions of Cultural Identity. SAGE, 1996. pg. 1 23. Margaret Russett. Race Under Erasure. Callaloo - Volume 28, Number 2, Spring 2005, pp. 358-368. The John Hopkins University Press. 24. Bernard Bell, Percival L. Everett. Erasure. Hanover: UP of New England, 2001 265 pp. African American Review Vol. 37, 2003 Bibliography Bell, Bernard, W. Erasure by Percival L. Everett. African American Review, Vol. 37, No. 2/3, Amri Baraka Issue (Summer - Autumn, 2003), pp. 474-477. St. Louis University Brodwin, Paul. Genetics, Identity, and the Anthropology of Essentialism. Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 75, No. 2 (Spring, 2002), pp. 323-330. The George Washington University Institute for Ethnographic Research Dixton, Winstor, Wheeler. White by Richard Dyer Source: Film Quarterly, Vol. 52, No. 4 (Summer, 1999), pp. 62-63 Published by: University of California Press Everett, Percival. Erasure. New York: Hyperion, 2001 Gunaratnam, Yasmin. A ‘Treacherous Bind’:Working with and against racial categories. Researching Race and Ethnicity: Methods, Knowledge and Power. SAGE, 2003. pg. 31 Finley, Toiya, Kristen. Archetypical Metafiction: Scrutinizing Fallen Archetypes Hagan, Sean O. Interview: Percival Everett. The Observer, Sunday 16 March 2003. Hall, Stuart, Gay, Paul. Du. Questions of Cultural Identity. SAGE, 1996. pg. 1 Harvey, Green. Wood: Craft, Culture, History. New York: Viking, 2006. Khawaja, Mabel. "African American Identity in Literature." Identities and Issues in Literature. Salem Press, 1997. eNotes.com. 2006. 29 Jan, 2009 Lyman, Stanford M. Color, Culture, Civilization: Race and Minority Issues in American society. University of Illinois Press, 1995 – pg. 22 "McMillan, Terry: Charles R. Larson (review date 23 September 1990)." Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Jeffrey W. Hunter. Vol. 112. Gale Cengage, 1999. eNotes.com. 2006. 29 Jan, 2009 Olson, Gary A. Lynn Worsham, Race, Rhetoric, and the Postcolonial, Published by SUNY Press, 1999, pg no. 229 Robson, David. "Fry, Derrida, Pynchon and the Apocalyptic Space of Postmodern Fiction". Ed. Richard Dellamora. Postmodern Apocalypse: Theory and Cultural Practice at the End. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1995: 61-78. Russett, Margaret Race Under Erasure. Callaloo - Volume 28, Number 2, Spring 2005, pp. 358-368. The John Hopkins University Press. Said, Edward W.. Orientalism. 1978. New York: Vintage, 1994. Sollors, Werner. Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture. New York: Oxford UP, 1986. Stoneham, Geraldine. "'It's a Free Country': Visions of Hybridity in the Metropolis". Ed. Ashok Bery and Patricia Murray. Comparing Postcolonial Literatures. London: Macmillan, 2000. 81-92 Vizenor, Gerald. "Trickster Discourse: Comic Holotropes and Language Games". Ed. Vizenor. Narrative Chance: Postmodern Discourse on Native American Indian Literatures. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 1989: 187-211. Weisenburger, Steven. Fables of Subversion: Satire and the American Novel 1930- 1980. Athens, GA: U of Georgia P, 1995. West, Thomas. Reviewed work(s): Race, Rhetoric, and the Postcolonial by Gary A. Olson ; Lynn Worsham Source: South Atlantic Review, Vol. 65, No. 2 (Spring, 2000), pp. 217-221 Published by: South Atlantic Modern Language Association White, Hayden. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1973. Winant, Howard. Race and Race Theory. Annual Review of Sociology, Vol. 26 (2000), pp. 169-185 , Annual Reviews Young, Robert J.C. Imperial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race. London: Routledge, 1995. Zamora Lois. Writing the Apocalypse: Historical Vision in Contemporary U.S. and Latin American Fiction. 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