It has come to our attention that the critical essay “Black Activism: John Updike” by Suchitra Vashisth, an assistant professor at DIT University, Dehradun, Uttarakhand, India, was published last year in the International Journal of English Literature and Social Sciences (Vol. 3, Issue 1; Jan.-Feb. 2018).

“As a a literary artist, he has given us most powerful expression of the American racist society,” Vashisth writes, adding that “Rabbit Redux contains the story of the black revolution in America in the nineteen sixties. Updike reveals, through the speeches of Skeeter, black revolutionary, social injustices with the blacks in American society” and paraphrasing Richard Locke’s assessment that “the wide range of tones and rhythms in black speech has never been so well produced in contemporary white writing.”

Vashisth concludes, “The remarkable thing which is depicted here in this novel is a white failure of nerves or at least a flagging sense of white identity in the face of black assertiveness.”

Here is the link to the entire essay.