Abstract

Abstract I read Toni Morrison’s God Help the Child (2015) and Zadie Smith’s Swing Time (2016) as interjections into discourses of the “postracial” and “post-black.” I further consider those conceptualizations of the transnation which have their beginnings in patterns of migration that were, post-Cold War, no longer solely the consequence of colonialism, empire, or slavery; and I examine the process of “othering” that Morrison outlines in The Origin of Others (2017) as a productive context for reading both novels. Both God Help the Child and Swing Time reveal women working, within the cosmetic and entertainment industries respectively, to enable the corporate world, while reflecting on their childhoods and racial heritage; their protagonists thus embody contemporary negotiations of identity, gender, and race as configured under globalization.

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