Drawing on Louis Althusser's concept of internal distantiation, " Reconstituting Americans" reads post-1960s U.S. literature to reveal the representational paradoxes of liberal multicultural subjecthood. This engaging study uses historicist and formalist methodologies within Marxist, psychoanalytic, and critical race frameworks to discuss the formal techniques in the work of Arturo Islas, Bharati Mukherjee, Jamaica Kincaid, Reginald McKnight, and Audre Lorde. Megan Obourn deftly looks at the historical and social realities of social identities, while simultaneously bringing to the fore the limitations of liberal multicultural ways of conceptualizing identity and difference.

Reveals the representational paradoxes of liberal multicultural subjecthood, in which the citizen-subject tends to become representable only as an individual representative of a social identity group. It uses historicist and formalist methodologies within Marxist, psychoanalytic, and critical race frameworks.