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Document Type

Article

Author Biography

Frida Beckman is a professor of Literature at Stockholm University, Sweden. She has published books, articles, and edited volumes on American literature and culture and on topics such as critique and theory. She has also published a biography of Gilles Deleuze (2017). Her most recent monograph is The Paranoid Chronotope: Power, Truth, Identity (2022), and her most recent edited book is the coedited Theory Conspiracy (2024). Her articles have appeared in journals such as Symploke, Modern Fiction Studies, Textual Practice, and SubStance.

Abstract

This article redresses what it sees as the narrow focus of current postcritical discourses on what are largely white postmodern and poststructuralist literary and critical practices. Such discourses, it argues, have much to learn from African American literary and theoretical practices. Not only do the latter postulate perspectives on debates on literature, reading, and critique that have largely been neglected within the field of “postcritique,” they also provide productive ways of deploying the self-reflexivity that is now frequently in question. The article reads John Edgar Wideman’s novel Fanon: A Novel (2008) to show how metafiction, typically seen as associated with the complex and convoluted modes of reading and writing that we now need to move beyond, constitutes a powerful critical tool that, rather than signaling the “usedupness” of literature and critique, serves to address key phenomenological dimensions of historical and political oppression. Apart from illuminating the critical potential of Wideman’s novel, this reading contributes to the broadening of the postcritical discourses today.

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