Race, space and post-colonial landscape in Bernard Malamud’s The Tenants

Abstract

The following article presents strategies for decolonizing complex ethno-racial and social relationships between Jewish and black characters within a restricted, multifaceted area of a decaying tenement in Bernard Malamud’s The Tenants. This interpretation is concerned with finding features of post-colonial discourse such as the representation of the characters in dichotomous terms: the colonized/colonizer, the observed/the observer, superior/inferior. It focuses on the analysis of the main characters’ different methods of dominating the ‘space or subjectivity’ of each other through surveillance, mimicry and appropriation.