Signs of Race in Poststructuralism

Robert Young is associate professor of English at University of Alabama. He specializes in African-American literary and cultural theory.

In this tightly argued book, Professor Young takes on the liberal race establishment. He insistently critiques the multiple ways—through the deployment of anti-realism, fetishism, and pluralism—in which "race" as discourse or experience becomes decoupled from class. Young understands class not as a category of identity we should respect and maintain; rather, he understands it primarily as social relations of production, political economy: he thus emphasizes the connection between "racial" discourse as ideology and structures and processes of class rule, structures that make the fight against racism central.

• Part 1 AcknowledgmentsPart 2 IntroductionPart 3 Chapter 1: Race as Commodity FetishPart 4 Chapter 2: Putting Materialism back into Race Theory: Toward a Transformative Theory of RacePart 5 Chapter 3: The Linguistic Turn, Materialism, and Race: The Postmodern Crisis in African-American Literary Theory and Richard Wright's Critique of IdeologyPart 6 Chapter 4: The Politics of Race and Psychoanalysis: Richard Wright's Critique of Bourgeois Subjectivity in Savage HolidayPart 7 Chapter 5: Oral Textualities, Oral (Blues) Poetics, and Oral Erotics: Disabling the Exchange Economy in Gayl Jones' CorregidoraPart 8 Bibliography