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Images of Interracialism in Contemporary American Crime Fiction
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Abdel-Monem, Tarik |
| Copyright Year | 2010 |
| Abstract | Racial clues have always been written into crime fiction. Sherlock Holmes was as much an anthropologist as he was a detective. The venerable investigator of Britain's imperial empire could as easily differentiate between the footprints of a Hindu or Muslim as he could identify the Chinese origins of a tattoo by its color.1 Although these types of racialized and often racist depictions are no longer mainstays of the genre, race still plays a central role in many contemporary works of crime fiction. Modern writers have brought new perspectives on race, justice, and social inequalities to contemporary crime stories, infusing the crime narrative with critical race, feminist, post-colonial, gay/lesbian, and other perspectives. Today's authors are just as likely to find evil in individual villains as they are in racism, sexism, corporate greed, or political institutions. Crime fiction has thus become more and more a platform for social commentary as well as entertainment. But if race still has meaning and relevance to the detective story, it begs the question of what the significance is of interracialism in the criminal worlds of our collective imaginations. As America continues its Quixotic quest for a post-racial new world, an examination of our interracial imaginings poses important questions. In popular thought, miscegenation serves as an ideological symbol representing everything from racial genocide to racial harmony, from social destruction to social progress (Olumide 2002, 1-2). This article provides an overview of how ideologies of interracialism inhabit contemporary works of crime fiction. My argument is that |
| Starting Page | 131 |
| Ending Page | 157 |
| Page Count | 27 |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| DOI | 10.1353/ams.2010.0131 |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://journals.ku.edu/amerstud/article/download/4283/4028 |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://doi.org/10.1353/ams.2010.0131 |
| Volume Number | 51 |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
