ABSTRACT
You might reasonably expect a chapter on racial difference to focus on, for example, William Faulkner’s great novel of social aspiration and race prejudice Absalom, Absalom! (1936) or Toni Morrison’s closely related slave narrative, Beloved (1987), or perhaps one of Salman Rushdie’s narratives of the Indian diaspora, or Derek Walcott’s poetry of Caribbean multiculturalism. Our intention here, however, is to argue that questions of race, slavery and racial violence are everywhere, and that they pervade even the most apparently ‘innocent’ literary works. In this way we will be guided by the provocative and incisive words of the American poet John Ashbery: ‘Remnants of the old atrocity subsist, but they are converted into ingenious shifts in scenery, a sort of “English Garden” effect, to give the required air of naturalness, pathos and hope’ (Ashbery, Three Poems (1956), cited in Wood 2002, 1).
