Download or read book Property, Mobility, and Epistemology in U.S. Women of Color Detective Fiction written by Julia Istomina and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This project explores how U.S. women of color detective fiction novels interpret and revise methods for obtaining and transmitting knowledge while operating within political and economic climates that discipline and occlude oppositional narratives, historiographies, and identifications. U.S. women of color detective fiction emerged in the early 1990s during a time when institutions began to incorporate historically marginalized perspectives, but also when American and transnational corporate initiatives sought to stigmatize and profit from poor women of color. The novels featured in this project make use of a genre that is invested in creating exceptionally intelligent and capable detectives who seek to identify and correct social injustice. In the process, these novels employ historiographic epistemologies that are typically elided in Anglo-European philosophical and narrative productions. Historiographic epistemologies are theories concerning the encoding and transmission of knowledge that also serve as mediations regarding the composition of history, testimony, and narrative. Through the use of historiographic epistemologies, U.S. women of color detective fiction novels reveal the creative and narrative-building aspects of logical reasoning employed by detective fiction and rationalist discourse more broadly. Moving from the local with Barbara Neely's Blanche on the Lam, to the transnational with Lucha Corpi's Black Widow's Wardrobe and Alicia Gaspar de Alba's Desert Blood: The Juarez Murders, to the global with Charlotte Carter's Coq au Vin and Lupe Solano's Havana Nights, this project identifies connections and distinctions among these texts that in turn enable a more nuanced understanding of how precarity is constituted through the pervasive, implicit division between domestic (white) space and public (surveillanced) space. In their use of a genre that reflects institutional and social structural alignments and in their employment of non-European epistemologies such as second sight, jazz, conocimiento, spiritual mestizaje, and public motherhood, the novels featured in this project also emphasize the fact that categories of difference are dynamic and that the uniqueness of each individual experience within the U.S. matrix of institutional and social power creates unique modes of resistance. As a result, the larger critical contribution of this project is its identification of connections between place-based, decolonial, and global womanist theories of subjecthood and space that test the predictability of the gender-race-class intersectional lens of analysis.