Theorists of Orientalism and postcolonialism argue that novelists betray political and cultural anxieties when characterizing "the Other." Shameem Black takes a different stance. Turning a fresh eye toward several key contemporary novelists, she reveals how "border-crossing" fiction represents socially diverse groups without resorting to stereotype, idealization, or other forms of imaginative constraint. Focusing on the work of J. M. Coetzee, Amitav Ghosh, Jeffrey Eugenides, Ruth Ozeki, Charles Johnson, Gish Jen, and Rupa Bajwa, Black introduces an interpretative lens that captures the ways in which these authors envision an ethics of representing social difference. They not only offer sympathetic portrayals of the lives of others but also detail the processes of imagining social difference. Whether depicting the multilingual worlds of South and Southeast Asia, the exportation of American culture abroad, or the racial tension of postapartheid South Africa, these transcultural representations explore social and political hierarchies in constructive ways. Boldly confronting the orthodoxies of recent literary criticism, Fiction Across Borders builds upon such seminal works as Edward Said's Orientalism and offers a provocative new study of the late twentieth-century novel.

Fiction Across Borders is an ambitious and timely study of contemporary Anglophone novels. Shameem Black advances new reading strategies for understanding emerging textual and narrative practices in novels, where authors cross a variety of borders--class-based and racial, ethnic, linguistic, and gendered--and represent figures on the other side of imagined borderlines. Her literary analyses are astute and insightful, and the theoretical arguments subtle and incisive. -- B. Venkat Mani, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and author of Cosmopolitical Claims: Turkish-German Literatures from Nadolny to Pamuk This fine book makes an extremely important and timely argument: that it is possible to enter sympathetically and constructively into the life of another, thus avoiding the failure, projection, and disguised domination that much contemporary criticism assumes to be the inevitable result of this enterprise. -- Bruce Robbins, Columbia University

About the Author
Shameem Black is assistant professor of English at Yale University, where she specializes in questions of globalization in contemporary literature.

Reviews
...a rich, learned study that explores the ethics of reading, avoids narrow theoretical adherence, develops a useful notion of the "crowded self," and delivers productive analyses of a wide variety of texts. CHOICE



Book Information
ISBN 9780231149792
Author Shameem Black
Format Paperback
Page Count 332
Imprint Columbia University Press
Publisher Columbia University Press