On Differences – Aspects of Pluralism in Contemporary Literature
On Differences – Aspects of Pluralism in Contemporary Literature

Summary/Abstract: The present paper situates its concerns at the crossroads of cultural studies, gender studies and visual arts in an effort to illustrate how identity production is achieved at the intersection of difference and sameness, of Self and the Other, as an ongoing negotiation and transgression of borders and boundaries. This study focuses on the work of the contemporary American visual artist Kara Walker in order to offer an illustration of how the exploration of the continuous interplay between difference and sameness generates an artistic act whose originality reaches beyond ideological categories, hierarchies, dichotomies. Moreover, this paper explores how contemporary art rewrites traditional master narratives such as history or patriarchy relying on the reinterpretation of their clichés and stereotypes.This paper presents three instances of literary representation of identity, in the age ofglobalization and cultural hybridity. Namely, two examples from Hispanic-Americanliterature, Gloria Anzaldua and Nicholasa Mohr, who address the issues of belonging to acommunity and expressing certain ethnic and psychological particularities. The otherexample is Zadie Smith, a postcolonial writer who expresses the construction ofmulticulturalism. Their characters demonstrate the problems of living in a postmodernworld. They collide with each other in the pursuit of meaning and truth.

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