Western literature at century's end: Sketches in generation X, Los Angeles, and the post-Civil Rights novel

Since the early 1990s several "serious" southern California writers have begun writing science fiction, detective stories, mysteries, comic satires, even magical realism, finding freshly relevant ways to represent western life at century's end. Through novels by Sandra Tsing Loh and Cynthia Kadohata, I locate this turn to the popular within a larger political and cultural context we might call "post-Civil Rights." In such novels, texts do not take racial alterity as a starting, radically disruptive fact, although they do not claim that America has outgrown racism. Rather, a new racial subject and/or series of racial formations is under construction, invested in updating and reformulating the status of the nonwhite racial other, to account for the enormity of change in recent years, especially the place of youth within globalization discourse.