Writing and race

In contemporary writing, the question of ‘race’ remains one of the most complex and difficult to handle. This chapter attempts to unravel some of that complexity, exploring race’s status as and in fiction. Certainly, many leading writers in the post-war period have worked explicitly to combat the ideologies of racism, exploring their expression in the atrocities of American slavery and the Nazi Holocaust. At the same time, however, it is not difficult to find instances in which notions of racial identity and racial community are affirmed by writers in apparently positive and affirmatory ways. There is a paradox here which needs to be understood.