Sleuthing Ethnicity

Table of contents

This volume explores ways in which the literary trope of the palimpsest can be applied to ethnic and postcolonial literary and cultural studies. Based on contemporary theories of the palimpsest, the innovative chapters reveal hidden histories and uncover relationships across disciplines and seemingly unconnected texts. The contributors focus on diverse forms of the palimpsest: the incarceration of Native Americans in military forts and their response to the elimination of their cultures; mnemonic novels that rework the politics and poetics of the Black Atlantic; the urban palimpsests of Rio de Janeiro, Marseille, Johannesburg, and Los Angeles that reveal layers of humanity with disparities in origin, class, religion, and chronology; and the palimpsestic configurations of mythologies and religions that resist strict cultural distinctions and argue against cultural relativism.

During the interwar "golden age" of British detective fiction, women writers like Dorothy L. Sayers and Agatha Christie reigned, but their work remains tame compared to today's crime novels. Elements of sexuality and gender, including soft porn and sexual psychopathy, pervade contemporary detective fiction. The 10 essays in this collection explore issues of gender and sexuality in crime writing by women from 1985 to 2011, surveying works about girl sleuths, parodies, hard-boiled detective fiction, police procedurals, and recent serial killer series. They examine the relationship between genre and gender and explore how later works enter into a field of "post-feminism." Most importantly, this volume demonstrates how popular women writers of the last three decades have reconceptualized what it means to be a female detective.

Recent crime fiction increasingly transcends national boundaries, with investigators operating across countries and continents. Frequently, the detective is a migrant or comes from a transcultural background. To solve the crime, the investigator is called upon to decipher the meaning(s) hidden in clues and testimonies that require transcultural forms of understanding. For the reader, the investigation discloses new interpretive methods and processes of social investigation, often challenging facile interpretations of the postcolonial world order. Under the rubric 'postcolonial postmortems', this collection of essays seeks to explore the tropes, issues and themes that characterise this emergent form of crime fiction. But what does the 'postcolonial' bring to the genre apart from the well-known, and valid, discourses of resistance, subversion and ethnicity? And why 'postmortems'? A dissection and medical examination of a body to determine the cause of death, the 'postmortem' of the postcolonial not only alludes to the investigation of the victim's remains, but also to the body of the individual text and its contexts. This collection interrogates literary concepts of postcoloniality and crime from transcultural perspectives in the attempt to offer new critical impulses to the study of crime fiction and postcolonial literatures. International scholars offer insights into the 'postcolonial postmortems' of a wide range of texts by authors from Africa, South Asia, the Asian and African Diaspora, and Australia, including Robert G. Barrett, Unity Dow, Wessel Ebersohn, Romesh Gunesekera, Kazuo Ishiguro, Sujata Massey, Alexander McCall Smith and Michael Ondaatje.

Mysteries are among the most popular books today, and women continue to be among the most creative and widely read mystery writers. This book includes alphabetically arranged entries on 90 women mystery writers. Many of the writers discussed were not even writing when the first edition of this book was published in 1994, while others have written numerous works since then. Writers were selected based on their status as award winners, their commercial success, and their critical acclaim. Each entry provides biographical information, a discussion of major works and themes, and primary and secondary bibliographies. The volume closes with appendices and a selected, general bibliography. Public library patrons will value this guide to their favorite authors, while students will turn to it when writing reports.

In this illuminating insight into Denzel Washington's multifaceted image and remarkable career, Cynthia Baron traces his star persona and impact on mainstream society – from his time as a skilled actor in theatre and television in the 1980s, to his leading man roles in landmark films of the 1990s, to his place in Hollywood's elite in the 2000s.

To read a crime novel today largely simulates the exercise of reading newspapers or watching the news. The speed and frequency with which today's bestselling works of crime fiction are produced allow them to mirror and dissect nearly contemporaneous socio-political events and conflicts. This collection examines this phenomenon and offers original, critical, essays on how national identity appears in international crime fiction in the age of populism and globalization. These essays address topics such as the array of competing nationalisms in Europe; Indian secularism versus Hindu communalism; the populist rhetoric tinged with misogyny or homophobia in the United States; racial, religious or ethnic others who are sidelined in political appeals to dominant native voices; and the increasing economic chasm between a rich and poor. More broadly, these essays inquire into themes such as how national identity and various conceptions of masculinity are woven together, how dominant native cultures interact with migrant and colonized cultures to explore insider/outsider paradigms and identity politics, and how generic and cultural boundaries are repeatedly crossed in postcolonial detective fiction.

The essays collected in A Rich Field Full of Pleasant Surprises have been written by a number of lecturers from different Spanish universities in order to offer a picture of the current state of affairs in English Studies, covering the areas of Contemporary Literature, Postcolonial Studies, Feminist and Gender Studies, Globalization and Media, Film, Music, and Crime Fiction, among others. The essays comprised in this volume tackle theoretical issues as well as practical cases, showing the vitality and scholarly rigour of all kinds of literary and cultural manifestations worldwide, particularly within a European framework. The title of the book gives expression to the innovative and inspiring teaching of Professor Socorro Suárez Lafuente, to whom the collection is dedicated.