This book analyzes contemporary literature in Los Angeles in relation to the city's form, its visual character and its recent political history. Writers such as Bret Easton Ellis and James Ellroy are considered as responding to racial and ethnic partitioning in LA, as well as to increasing cultural homogeneity. Unlike other books on contemporary American literature, this book builds a composite portrait of a single literary scene in order to demonstrate the significance of writing in a tendentially post-literate culture, and the difficulties of literary representation in a city committed to...

What is the relationship between Marxism and postcolonial thought? Can a revolutionary European ideology be an emancipatory intellectual tool in the post-imperial world? Or, in sites where European thought is often treated with suspicion, does it repeat distrusted legacies and epistemologies? This collection is the first systematic attempt to provide an overview of this collision. An international cast of contributors challenge the elision of Marxist thought in the debate on what the term "postcolonial" actually entails. The volume is essential reading for all engaged in postcolonial and...