The Politics of Representation in Contemporary Literature

Table of Contents R epresentation constitutes a primary site through which hierarchical systems reproduce themselves and through which those same systems become available for contestation and potential displacement. In contemporary literature the question of who appears, under what narrative conditions, through whose authorizing voice, and with what degree of epistemic gravitas carries immediate political consequence. Representation operates as a constitutive practice that selects, intensifies, and formally organizes social materials, thereby generating particular effects of the real and distributing narrative presence unevenly across the field of possible subjects. An analysis attentive to hierarchical relations—elite and subordinate positions, multiple modes of domination, peripheral subordinates, and the dependency nodes that render subordination durable—renders the politics of contemporary representation progressively pellucid and aligns literary criticism with an ontology of becomi…