Destabilizing Racial Differences in the Detective Fiction of Chester Himes

• In Event: The Politics of Genre

Abstract

In this essay, I explore the contemporary relevance of Himes’s detective novels, which de-stabilize racial categories even as they expose pervasive physical, sexual and psychological forms of violence sustain them. In a series of novels composed amidst the beginnings of the Civil Rights movement in the U.S. following the Second World War, Chester Himes portrayed “antidemocratic tendencies intended to limit the rights of marginalized groups” (to borrow a phrase from this year’s APSA theme statement) in intimate, lurid detail. By comparison with Ralph Ellison and Richard Wright, his friends and contemporaries, Chester Himes achieved little wealth or fame during his life – despite some critical acclaim – and his writings have received little attention from contemporary political theorists. Himes’s limited popularity may have reflected his harsh, ugly portraits of race relations in the U.S. and his pessimistic view of their future development. However, as I argue, Himes’s hyperbolic depictions of racial conflict appear all-too timely in our present circumstances.

Author

• Kam Shapiro, Illinois State University