Traces, Codes and Clues: Reading Race in Crime Fiction - Hardcover

Reddy, Maureen T

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0813532019 ISBN 13: 9780813532011

Publisher: Rutgers University Press, 2002

Synopsis

Since 1975, many white women and people of colour have written works of crime fiction. Readers worldwide clamour for adventures featuring detectives of colour, such as Barbara Neely's ""Blanche White"" and Walter Mosley's ""Easy Rawlins"". Mysteries, considered ""light reading"" also hold important cultural and social ""clues"". Much contemporary scholarly work has demonstrated that race is both a cultural fiction - not a biological reality - and a central organizing principle of experience. Popular writers are likely to reflect the conventions of their own historical situations. In this text, the author explores the ways in which crime fiction manipulates cultural constructions such as race and gender to inscribe dominant cultural discourses. She notes that even those writers who appear to set out with the goal of revising conventions repeatedly produce some of the genre's most conservative elements.

About this title

About the Author

Maureen T. Reddy is a professor of English and women's studies at Rhode Island College. She is the author of many books, including Crossing the Color Line: Race, Parenting, and Culture (Rutgers University Press) and Everyday Acts Against Racism. She is the coeditor of other titles, including Race in the College Classroom: Pedagogy and Politics (with Bonnie TuSmith, Rutgers University Press).

Edition details

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0813532019
• ISBN 13: 9780813532011
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 200