Human Commonalities: Kureishi’s ‘Postethnic’ Short Stories

Abstract

Jansen argues that Kureishi’s stories also mark something of a watershed in the history of the black British short story because they introduce the postethnic mode of narration that will come to define contemporary black British short fiction more generally. Applying David Hollinger’s concept of ‘postethnicity’ to Kureishi’s short stories, Jansen shows that the majority of the stories either attach minor importance to a character’s ethnicity or do not contain any ethnic markers and, in the process, render ethnicity as a social category of difference inoperative. While the stories’ postethnicity directly contests anglocentric and monocultural notions of Britishness, Jansen contends that it also enables Kureishi’s stories to supersede the British context in which they are set and rethink community on a more general, ontological level. This chapter demonstrates that Kureishi’s postethnic stories ultimately imagine a differential, non-essentialist community of singularly plural human beings in the sense of Nancy’s inoperative community.