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Madhu Dubey. Signs and Cities: Black Literary Postmodernism. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2003. ix + 284 pp.
Dubey begins by noting that while "we would expect African-American literature to form a vital resource for debates about postmodernism, it is conspicuously missing, even when these debates are launched in the name of racial difference" (2). Too often, when African-American literature is invoked in such discussions, it is in an effort to separate African-American writing from any association with the postmodern. Still, the gap Dubey offers to fill is not quite as wide as the publishers suggest on the book's cover, where they tout Signs and Cities as "the first book to consider what it means to speak of a post-modern moment in African-American literature." The fact that Dubey's own text makes reference to earlier books that undertake just such a consideration should serve to remind us that marketing departments are generally the final arbiters of jacket copy. Dubey's concentration on fiction brings about a further elision of preceding books on the subject, but Signs and Cities will be recognized, most particularly by its grateful predecessors, as a...