Dark Aesthetics: The Decolonial Possibilities of Multifocal Novels

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Over the past half century, multifocal narratives have emerged as a dominant literary mechanism for distributing narrative space across characters of different classes and ethno-racial communities. Such narratives seek to undo the pernicious epistemic effects of colonial histories while putting forward alternative ideas of subjectivity, community, and the logics by which people live together. By introducing readers to multiple worlds of sense - that is, to alternative domains of intelligibility inhabited by a variety of characters, each of which has its own sociality and set of values - multifocal narratives provincialize the so-called "universal" perspective and dismantle the Western idea of the autonomous individual. Employing a relational race studies approach to inquire into the historical emergence and ongoing articulations of race and ethnicity as powerful markers of human difference, we will multifocal novels by writers such as Tommy Orange, Bernardine Evaristo, Marlon James, Jennifer Egan, and Louise Erdrich, as well as read the scholarship of thinkers such as Walter Mignolo, Edouard Glissant, Audre Lorde, Frantz Fanon, Maria Lugones, and Gloria Anzaldua.