{"id":16072,"date":"2011-09-05T19:00:55","date_gmt":"2011-09-05T19:00:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=16072"},"modified":"2015-10-25T20:06:37","modified_gmt":"2015-10-25T20:06:37","slug":"historical-fantasy-speculative-realism-and-postrace-aesthetics-in-contemporary-american-fiction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=16072","title":{"rendered":"Historical Fantasy, Speculative Realism, and Postrace Aesthetics in Contemporary American Fiction"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong><em><a href=\"http:\/\/muse.jhu.edu\/journals\/american_literary_history\/summary\/v023\/23.3.saldivar.html\" target=\"_blank\">Historical Fantasy, Speculative Realism, and Postrace Aesthetics in Contemporary American Fiction<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/muse.jhu.edu\/journals\/american_literary_history\/\" target=\"_blank\">American Literary History<\/a><br \/>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/muse.jhu.edu\/journals\/american_literary_history\/toc\/alh.23.3.html\" target=\"_blank\">Volume 23, Number 3<\/a> (Fall 2011)<br \/>\npages 574-599<br \/>\nE-ISSN: 1468-4365 Print ISSN: 0896-7148<\/p>\n<p><strong><a href=\"http:\/\/english.stanford.edu\/bio.php?name_id=108\" target=\"_blank\">Ram\u00f3n Sald\u00edvar<\/a><\/strong>, Professor of History<br \/>\n<em>Stanford University<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Since the turn of the century, a new generation of minority writers has come to prominence whose work signals a radical turn to a postrace era in American literature. Outlining a paradigm that I term <em>historical fantasy<\/em>, I argue that in the twenty-first century, the relationship between race and social justice, race and identity, and indeed, race and history requires these writers to invent a new \u201cimaginary\u201d for thinking about the nature of a just society and the role of race in its construction. It also requires the invention of new forms to represent it. In this light, I address the topic of race and narrative theory in two contexts: in relation to the question of literary form and in relation to history. Doing so will allow me to explain the reasons for what I take to be the inauguration of a new stage in the history of the novel by twenty-first-century US ethnic writers.<\/p>\n<p>At the outset, I wish to make one thing clear about my use of the term \u201cpostrace\u201d: race and racism, ethnicity and difference are nowhere near extinct in contemporary America. <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/W._E._B._Du_Bois\" target=\"_blank\">W. E. B. Du Bois\u2019s<\/a> momentous pronouncement in 1901 that \u201cThe problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line\u201d could not have been a more accurate assessment of the fate of race during the twentieth century (354). Today race remains a central question, but one no longer defined exclusively in shades of black or white, or in the exact manner we once imagined. That is, apart from the election of <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Barack_Obama\" target=\"_blank\">Barack Obama<\/a>, one other matter marks the present differently from the racial history of the American past: race can no longer be considered exclusively in the binary form, black\/white, which has traditionally structured racial discourse in the US. If for no other reason than the profoundly shifting racial demographics of early twenty-first-century America, a new racial imaginary is required to account for the&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Read or purchase the article <a href=\"http:\/\/muse.jhu.edu\/journals\/american_literary_history\/v023\/23.3.saldivar.pdf\" target=\"_blank\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Historical Fantasy, Speculative Realism, and Postrace Aesthetics in Contemporary American Fiction American Literary History Volume 23, Number 3 (Fall 2011) pages 574-599 E-ISSN: 1468-4365 Print ISSN: 0896-7148 Ram\u00f3n Sald\u00edvar, Professor of History Stanford University Since the turn of the century, a new generation of minority writers has come to prominence whose work signals a radical [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,459,1196,8,20],"tags":[903,7448],"class_list":["post-16072","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-history","category-literary-criticism","category-media-archive","category-usa","tag-american-literary-history","tag-ramon-saldivar"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16072","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16072"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16072\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":43465,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16072\/revisions\/43465"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16072"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16072"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16072"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}