Abstract
John Edgar Wideman’s Philadelphia Fire is a postmodern novel in which its textuality is emphasized and its narratives are led by multiple voices of diverse African-Americans. However, instead of embodying political ‘indeterminacy’ of most postmodern novels, Philadelphia Fire not only reexamines how the black lower class is victimized by the racialized consumer capitalism of white dominant American society, but urges readers to be aware of its social and political inequality. By disclosing the implications of the scattered diverse narratives and connecting the silences and gaps in those narratives, this study attempts to investigate the ultimate causes of the catastrophic ‘MOVE’ fire in the context of the racialized consumer capitalism. Furthermore, through analyzing raps in part 3 as well as the narrator Cudjoe’s revision of The Tempest, this paper examines how Wideman’s resistant awareness of the problematic contemporary American society is expressed in the counternarrative.
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