ABSTRACT
In this essay, Sigrid Michelle Anderson focuses on the ways that race has been reseen or ‘remixed’ in several recent novels and short stories that have updated and recast Pride and Prejudice. Specifically, she examines the ways that writers of colour have used Austen’s plots as an opportunity to explore racialised, gendered, and cultural identity within their communities in the early twenty-first century. Her discussion covers the rendering of class tensions within a gentrifying African-American neighbourhood in Ibi Zoboi’s Pride: A Pride and Prejudice Remix ; clashes between conservatism and a more liberal reading of Muslim identity in Uzma Jalaluddin’s Ayesha at Last; the experience of second-generation Japanese Americans in Karen Tei Yamashita’s Sansei and Sensibility; and limitations on women’s lives and options in Pakistani society in Soniah Kamal’s Unmarriageable—all novels that use the framework of Pride and Prejudice to explore and resist social, religious, racial, gender, and class prejudice both within and towards communities of colour.
