Reading for Enigmas: A Method for Decoding Race and Capital

Book talk by Jap-Nanak Kaur Makkar on her book manuscript Enigmas of Capital: Literature and Theory in the Late Twentieth Century.

This talk is an excerpt from my book manuscript, Enigmas of Capital: Literature and Theory in the Late Twentieth Century, which models a practice of reading for “enigmas.” As developed by Roland Barthes in S/Z, enigma as a concept referred to any narrative unit that initiates a hermeneutic process of decoding. As I modify the term, enigma is any unit of a text that ignites readerly curiosity about a meaning that has fallen into historical obscurity. At the core of my manuscript is an interest in how the South African novelists, J. M. Coetzee and Nadine Gordimer, as well as South Asian diasporic novelists, Salman Rushdie and Hanif Kureishi, resorted to concepts emerging out of poststructuralism as they wrote their most memorable fiction. These concepts, and in particular their rendering in literary form, are the book’s titular enigmas. They invite decoding from the reader; upon unpacking them, the reader discovers the dynamics of race and capital as these were experienced by white authors in the global South, on the one hand, and racialized authors in the global North, on the other.

Bio Jap-Nanak Kaur Makkar

Jap-Nanak Kaur Makkar is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Kentucky, and formerly ACLS Postdoctoral Fellow (2020-2022) at the same institution. She received a B.A. and an M.A. from the University of Toronto, and a Ph.D. from the University of Virginia (2018). Her work has appeared in New Literary History, Modern Fiction Studies, Contemporary Literature, and boundary 2.

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