White Men Write Now

Contemporary literature by white men in the United States about the
identity "white man" largely focuses on two themes: destabilized
structures of identity and their reinforcement. This concern with
the threat to identity structures of race and gender is an old one
in American literature. However, it takes on a new meaning in the
present postmodern climate that challenges master narratives and
their reinscription by forces which sustain them. White Men Write
Now repeatedly returns to the thesis that the rise of postmodernism
and postcolonialism against the backdrop of the Cold War created a
contemporary era which critiques the Cold War as a master
narrative. The challenge to narratives of nation and civilization
brings an analogous challenge to categories of national Selfhood.
It is a challenge to the social structures of difference, the
borders which inscribe difference, in turn complicating concepts
that attempt to transcend those borders.