• Corpus ID: 191410905

Multiculturalist Thrillers: Minority Detective Fiction and the Chandlerian Legacy

@inproceedings{Tandt1998MulticulturalistTM,
  title={Multiculturalist Thrillers: Minority Detective Fiction and the Chandlerian Legacy},
  author={Christophe Den Tandt and Geert Lernout and Marc Maufort},
  year={1998}
}

• Christophe Den Tandt, G. Lernout, Marc Maufort
• Published 1998
• Art

Detective fiction has often been praised for its capacity to provide a literary exploration of the conditions of urban-industrial societies. In this logic, the genre carries out for a broad popular audience the di-dactic and socially critical agenda of 19th- and 20th-century canonical literary realism. Yet academic critics, mindful of the fact that the detective genre also functions as what used to be called an “opiate of the masses,” underline that its realistic ambitions must remain somehow incomplete, inauthentic or fragmentary. 2 An optimistic formulation of this ambivalent assessment of popular culture appears in Fredric Jamesonʼs essay “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture” (1979), a text that profoundly shaped the development of Anglo-Saxon cultural studies in the 1980s and 1990s. In this argument, Jameson suggests that we should discern in the very structure of popular texts a conflict between “Utopian” and “ideological” impulses—liberating and alienating dimensions of the text (33). Contrary to earlier, more censorious theo-rists of mass culture, Jameson regards the emancipatory components of popular genres (their critique of class dominance, for instance) as the very root of their mass appeal. Endorsing a utopian view of human psychology, the American critic contends indeed that the popular audience does not in itself crave debasement or alienation (34). However, the emancipatory logic of the popular text is prevented from playing itself out by what Jameson calls “symbolic containment struc-tures” (25), that is, by textual features that make the narratives conform to the norms of the leisure industry and the general cultural framework of capitalism. In the present paper, I should like to apply Jamesonʼs insight to the issue of the representation of minorities in detective fiction. For this purpose, the readings below focus on contemporary writers—Tony Hillerman, Walter Mosley, Paretsky, and Patricia Cornwell—who write thrillers from the perspective of native Americans, or