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Reveals the representational paradoxes of liberal multicultural subjecthood, in which the citizen-subject tends to become representable only as an individual representative of a social identity group. It uses historicist and formalist methodologies within Marxist, psychoanalytic, and critical race frameworks.

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The Liberal Multicultural Paradox and Aesthetics of Internal Distantiation Psychic Distantiation: Audre Lorde, Traumatic Formalism, and New Social Movement Identities Hybrid Distantiation: Uses of Sexuality in the Fiction of Arturo Islas Inter(national) Distantiation: Jamaica Kincaid, Reginald McKnight, and the Cosmopolitan Novel Academic Investments in Liberal Multiculturalism: Bharati Mukherjee´s Representational vs. Distantiative Aesthetics Internal Distantiation in the 21st Century Survey Results: Jasmine and The Holder of the World

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"This book will be an important one in the field of contemporary fiction, and will have to be addressed by all subsequent literary and cultural critics who wish to write about ethnicity, post-modernity, or politics in contemporary U.S. literature." - Deborah Carlin, Professor and Associate Chair of English, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

"Persuasively arguing that a necessary but self-contradictory multiculturalist logic continues to shape U.S. social life, Obourn deftly shows how key works of contemporary literature at once exploit that logic and expose its inevitable limits. Theoretically astute and textually sensitive, Obourn s analysis demonstrates both the utility of socially-engaged literary criticism, and the social-critical potential of literature itself." - Phillip Brian Harper, Remarque Professor of Literature, New York University

"Using a powerful analytic framework that draws on the Althusserian idea of distantiation, Reconstituting Americans shines new light on the unfinished work of U.S. multiculturalism and the dynamics of emergent literatures." - Cyrus R. K. Patell, Associate Dean of Humanities, New York University AbuDhabi and Associate Professor of English,New York University

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MEGAN OBOURN Assistant Professor of English at SUNY College at Brockport, USA.

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