An Ethics of Reading

An Ethics of Reading considers how writers of contemporary American fiction represent collective identities by producing literature that bears witness to cultural traumas. With chapters focused on important American novelists including Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Sherman Alexie, Edwidge Danticat and Junot Díaz, the book works to situate novels that explore ethnic identity in conversation with one another. From those intertextual conversations, it draws conclusions about how fiction functions as testimony and the ways that readers might work to ethically respond to the testimonial features of the prose.

The book’s investigations of distinct cultural traumas are broad, ranging from analyses of African American novels that treat slavery to Native American novels that portray land and child theft to Dominican and Haitian American accounts of US-backed hegemony in the Caribbean diaspora. Ultimately, the central claim of the book – that some works of contemporary American fiction function both didactically and aesthetically as cultural markers around which ethnic identities might be negotiated by writers and readers – becomes a kind of call to action for literary studies in the early 21st century, encouraging an ideological and pragmatic shift in how contemporary literature is read, analysed and discussed. By suggesting specific strategies for considering ethnicity in a radically diasporic American context, the book calls for critical engagement that is also concerned with the ethics of interpretive praxis, which, it suggests, might be a mechanism for building coalitions for social justice within, around, and through literature.