Pushing the Limits of Reality in Clarence Major’s Fun & Games

This article examines Clarence Major’s Fun & Games (1990) in relation to broader questions about realism and experimentation in the African American short story. While Major’s introduction to his anthology Calling the Wind suggests a historical trajectory in which African American writers abandon realism because of its imbrication with majority culture views of race and class, his own career complicates this narrative as scholars have noted that his fiction becomes increasingly realist over time, raising the question of how realism and race relate in his work. Through an analysis of Fun & Games, this article argues that Major’s short fiction cuts the ties that bind realism with a race consciousness calibrated to whiteness and innovates a new realism conditioned by formal innovation and liberated from hegemonic views of race.