ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book describes how Helen Oyeyemi, in White Is for Witching, enlivens her re-invention of the nineteenth-century British Gothic novel by mixing traditional Gothic features with elements drawn from her several cultural legacies. It argues that Claudia Rankine’s Citizen employs “disidentification,” a term introduced by Jose Munoz to mean the exposure, rejection and revision of the preferred messages of the dominant culture. The book examines a literary linkage between Nella Larsen’s 1920s novel Passing and Toni Morrison’s 1990s short story “Recitatif.” Both texts play with oscillations between knowing and not-knowing in relation to issues of race, and both dramatize the costs of a racialized identity. The book provides Toni’s Morrison’s Home and Jazz as formal attempts at advancing an ethics of the oppressed.
