Résumé: 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

Résumé: This article grapples with one of the fundamental ethical debates of postmodern times in one of the most celebrated Don DeLillo‟s novels: (White Noise). The novel, in fact, discusses the human eternal existential dilemma about the life and death issue as perceived by the prominent thoughts and attitudes of late twentieth century America. In this novel DeLillo explores the general failure of the great metanarratives, religion, science and consumer culture, to account for the needs and preoccupations of the postmodern human societies and the consequent trauma on the human psyche.

Résumé: By the end of the civil war and on, the myth of the “melting pot” society seems to fall apart as a founding ideal in the American society. The abolition of slavery, the emancipation of blacks and heavy immigration from non white stocks combined together to transform the American society from a multinational to a multiracial and multiethnic society. Ever since, the individual and group identifications are no longer based on national or linguistic grounds but on a ‘black and white’ racial identification. This situation created a racial tension within the American society transforming the debate over the “melting pot “ideal from assimilation to the speech about a multiracial, multiethnic and multicultural society. This paper analyses the condition of the Arab Americans in the United States as symptomatic to the general situation of the ethnic groups in the American society. The Arab immigrants saw their classification within the American society changing, according to the historical circumstances, from ‘white’ to non-white’ to something outside ethnic boundaries. Their strive for total assimilation to the white community has been undermined by the growing tensions between the American governments and the Arab world, they are now trying to found, and win recognition as, a separate community with a cultural, rather than racial or ethnic, identity.