Over the past two decades, there has been an endless proliferation of critical methods and aesthetic forms tasked with the weight of mediating the contemporary. From the genre turn to distant reading, from autofiction to Anthropocene critique, the contemporary has been defined less by critical and/or aesthetic consensus than a continual contestation of what it means to be contemporary. In fact, it is this formal indeterminancy that, for some, has become isomorphic to the contemporary itself.  

Our seminar follows these two interlinked trajectories to explore what this has meant for multiethnic fiction written after 2000. In particular, we are curious about what race means in the contemporary and how its constant summoning into discourse deforms any attempt at narrative formalization. In a world where the protests of the summer of 2020 have led to a white supremacist backlash complete with Nazi salutes on daytime TV, what can racial politics look like? What formal reactions are truly viable in the face of an identity politics that has atrophied into cosmetic liberalism that generates endless hashtags, but has had no substantial effect on the material conditions of racialized minorities?

Of particular interest to our seminar is the nascent pushback against conceptualizations of “otherwise” worlds that has emerged in Afropessimism, queer theory, and negative strands of environmental critique. We are particularly invested in papers that look at how contemporary multiethnic fiction does not name a generative horizon, but is rather a distinctly negative aesthetic that draws attention to how race has become an impossibility for literary form at the same time that it also becomes its constitutive condition.