Realism – its definition, relevance and usefulness – continues to fuel animated debates in literary criticism. Often pitted against modernism – another notoriously slippery term – realism is seen as the naïve and transparent ‘other’. With its formal avant-gardist experiments, modernism for long seemed to have trumped realism; of course, this trumping depended on prior reductive assumptions that realism's representationalism is unsophisticated, overtly political and wanting in formal experimentation, all of which are seen as liabilities. Realism, as George Levine pronounced, ‘seems now to be a tired subject and to revive it is to risk repetition and boredom’. But he was quick to note that it is ‘impossible finally either to provide it with consistently precise definition or to banish it’. In other words, realism has been a persistent presence in literary production – sometimes reviled and rejected, and at other times embraced and revived. Andrzej Gasiorek has offered a more measured view on the realism–modernism debates, arguing that ‘the claim that experimental writing is inherently radical’ is ‘as mistaken as the counter-claim that realism is a fundamentally conservative form’.

Following Brecht, one might add that realism's success or failure, its radicalism or conservatism, can only be assessed in context: in its ability to represent new problems that demand new methods. In examining the possibilities that realism continues to offer, despite claims of the form's exhaustion, one might side with James Wood's conclusion that it is the pyrotechniques of avant-gardist formula, not realism, that is exhausted. Taking issue with novels where ‘stories and sub-stories sprout on every page’ in ‘bonhomous, punning, lively prose’, Wood invented a new category for this style: hysterical realism. In novels such as Salman Rushdie's The Ground beneath Her Feet (1999) and Zadie Smith's White Teeth (2000) he finds that ‘conventions of realism are being exhausted, and overworked’.

What, then, might a new kind of realism, neither exhausted nor hysterical, look like? In what follows, I examine selected novels written in the 1990s and 2000s by black British authors to rethink the overly hasty dismissal of realism and to suggest, following Fredric Jameson, that the novels instantiate ‘a new realist project’.