Exploring Race and Identity in Don DeLillo’s “White Noise” and “Mao II”: Semiotic and Spatial Semantic Intersections

This article explores Don DeLillo’s representation of the dynamics of race and identity in the American society in his two celebrated novels, White Noise (1985) and Mao II (1991) with a particular emphasis on the semiotic devices and the opposition between urban and suburban spaces. The novels, while not overtly centered on race, offer subtle insights on the reality of race and identity in the American society in different contexts. In White Noise, DeLillo interweaves with a great deal of delicacies his critique of the consumer society and media saturation with his criticism of the racial cultural insularity and the latent racial prejudices that pervade much of the American suburbs. In a quite different way, Mao II sets the issues against a multiracial and multicultural urban setting, with special emphasis on the representation of Arabo-Muslim world.