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  • 3 - Rethinking Post-Racialism

  • from Part I - Histories of the Present
  • Edited by Yogita Goyal, University of California, Los Angeles
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to Contemporary African American Literature
    Published online:
    14 December 2023
    Print publication:
    21 December 2023, pp 63-78

  • Summary

    Much contemporary antiracist and African Americanist scholarship – especially since the 2008 election of President Barack Obama – has assumed a decidedly cynical orientation toward ideas of “post-racialism.” Scholars, journalists, and activists have rightly detected, in numerous deployments of the term, a kind of bad faith utopianism espoused as a cover for political retreat from progressive, race-conscious policies. This chapter recognizes the merits of such anti-post-racial critiques, but also argues against the summary dismissal of the term. More pointedly, the chapter argues for a rethinking of post-racialism that acknowledges and grapples with a long, ideologically heterogeneous history of African American investments in and ambivalence toward the race concept. The upshot of this rethinking is not a defense of post-racialism as such, but a richer and more dynamic portrait of post-racialism’s historical force, social currency, and inner workings. The chapter takes inspiration from, and proceeds through close readings and intertextual analyses of, Danzy Senna’s 2017 novel, New People.