Writing Complicity: Race, Liberalism and Postwar American Literature

Writing Complicity proposes a new frame for understanding post-war American literature and its legacy in the present. The term “complicity” derives etymologically from the Latin complicāre, which means “to fold.” If one is complicit, one is folded into a larger system of social harm over which one has little or no direct control. In the period from 1945 to the early 1970s, complicity with structural racism became a central concern for American writing and thought, both as a social phenomenon to be represented and as a problem threatening to enfold writers themselves. In addressing this concern, writers were obliged to reconsider their social role and to innovate new means of literary expression capable of articulating new experiences of guilt and responsibility. Writing Complicity tells the story of that process as it took place across several genres, from highbrow short stories to crime fiction, and from experimental metafiction to the reportage essays of the New Journalism. It argues that the history of racial complicity is inseparable from the history of liberalism, and shows how we can make sense of our present preoccupations with complicity by studying its origins in the past.