Postmodern American Literature and Its Other

Redefining postmodern American literature to include the voices of women and nonwhite writers

Although literary postmodernism has been defined in terms of difference, multiplicity, heterogeneity, and plurality, some of the most vaunted authors of postmodern American fiction--such as Thomas Pynchon, Paul Auster, and other white male authors--often fail to adequately represent the distinct subjectivities of African Americans, American Indians, Latinos and Latinas, women, the poor of the center, and the global periphery. In this groundbreaking study, W. Lawrence Hogue exposes the ways in which much postmodern American literature privileges a typically Eurocentric, male-oriented type of subjectivity, often at the expense of victimizing or objectifying the ethnic or gendered Other.

In contrast to the dominant white male perspective on postmodernism, Hogue points to African American, American Indian, and women authors within the American postmodern canon--Rikki Ducornet, Kathy Acker, Ishmael Reed, and Gerald Vizenor--who work against these structures of stereotype and bias, resulting in a literary postmodernism that more genuinely respects and represents difference. He argues that most postmodern African American, American Indian, and women writers experience and write about postmodernity in ways that are substantially different from white men, since they are intimately concerned with the existence of racism and sexism. These “Other” authors, who are searching for new cultural forms and paradigms to describe themselves outside modernity’s conventions, define themselves according to their own logic, one that eschews fixed notions of identity in favor of a network of contextual, partial, contradictory, and shifting identifications.