“Race After Identity” examines multi-ethnic literary interventions into discourses of racial difference and politics of identity formation. Central to this study is the tension between race and form. Literary studies of race, in focusing on thematic representations of racial identity, tend to elide more formally experimental works that lack explicitly racialized contents. The result is a methodological impasse in which racial particularity is either essentialized or subsumed under the “post-identity” tendencies of a pure formalism. My dissertation project argues for the persistence of racial difference in the face of its thematic absence. In doing so, I develop the concept of “racial configuration” to track how the locus of race has shifted from discrete identitarian categories (figures) to diffuse structures of feeling, being, and sensation (configurations) that mediate the limits of the bounded human subject. Investigating the works of Colson Whitehead, Susan Choi, Chang-rae Lee, and Marie Clements, I contend that these Black and Asian North American and Indigenous writers disrupt literary practices by which race is welded to notions of identity. In the place of identitarian formations, I assemble a theoretical archive of feminist and anti-colonial critiques that interrogate the category of the human as grounding, and therefore disciplining, racialized subjects’ claims for political inclusion and recognition. Closely reading literary texts alongside these critiques, I offer case studies of four alternate “configurations”—time, space, objecthood, and landscape—through which race takes form, aesthetically, and lives on, materially. In analyzing literary accounts of racial formation through non-thematic means, the argument of my project is therefore continuous with and arises out of its method: when disarticulated from explicit identity, racial difference inheres in the totality of structures and relations within which the human form assumes coherence.
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Citation
Wang, Jennifer,
"Race After Identity: Forms of Racial Configuration in Contemporary North American Literature"
(2019).
English Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.26300/a457-rv38
