In letter 1.3 Pliny urges his friend Caninius Rufus to take advantage of the tranquillity of his villa to cultivate literary activity, for which (especially when it comes to poetry) Caninius shows aptitude. This exhortation is reinforced by and embellished with intertextual allusions: in particular Pliny evokes Hor. carm. 3.30. By alluding to this and other texts by Horace, Pliny builds an argument where the subject of posthumous memory is combined with that of the right to property. Unlike material goods – among them the villa – literary works are not passed on to heirs but forever remain the (intellectual) property of their authors.

This essay reads Celeste Ng’s 2017 novel Little Fires Everywhere as a meta-literary investigation into the relationship between literary and cultural form and the series of racial entanglements (black, white, and Asian American) played out in its neoliberal 1990s setting. The novel invites us to see that decade – from its discussions of presidential race to its often black/white and nationally delimited, Anglophone-based landscape of American literary criticism – from the vantage point of the present. In so doing, Ng explores the features of postracial form, which soon yield to the tragedy of color-blindness as the mask of racial violence. Finally, in its engagement with The Scarlet Letter, her novel allows us to ask what race in Hawthorne bequeaths to our own moment, and how our own moment reiterates the forms of unfreedom created by Hawthorne’s era and then imaginatively – spectacularly, as Toni Morrison might say – occluded by so much American literature and culture ever since.