Imagining Cultures: The Transnational Imaginary in Postrace America

Abstract

Forthcoming in The Imaginary and Its Worlds: American Studies after the Transnational Turn , ed. Laura Bieger, Ramón Saldívar, and Johannes Voelz (Dartmouth College Press/University Press of New England, 2013). Ramón Saldívar‘s contribution is a wide-ranging and spirited piece of critical analysis that deals with the “color line” and its relation to the “cultural imaginary” of Americans. Making virtuosic use of examples drawn from texts by a panoply of different Black, Latino, and Asian American authors, Saldívar interrogates the nature (and existence) of “postethnic fiction.”