ABSTRACT
This chapter summarises a brief history of postcolonial and critical race theories and brings them up to date. Through readings of Edward Said, Homi K. Bhabha, Neil Lazarus, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, the chapter details how postcolonialism privileges migrant demographics, and how there is a questionable focus on hybridity. Lazarus’s idea of looking out for literary disconsolation—a writing practice that uses modernist techniques long after modernism’s heyday—is also explored. Critical race theory is explored primarily through Stuart Hall and Michael Omi and Howard Winant, all of whom detail how ‘race’ is a sociohistorical construct and changes according to time and place. Critical race theory is further developed through attention to Kimberlé Crenshaw’s intersectional theories, and how they continue to be renewed through online activism such as #SayHerName and #BlackLivesMatter. This chapter takes these ideas and offers readings of hyper-contemporary literature, focusing on the difficulties representing history in Novuyo Rosa Tshuma’s House of Stone (2018) compared with Guy Gunaratne’s In Our Mad and Furious City (2018), on migration narratives in Jenny Xie’s Eye Level (2018) compared with Michael Donkor’s Hold and Zoe Gilbert’s Folk (2018), and online racial narratives in Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s Friday Black (2018).
