Journal of American Studies of Turkey
9 (1999) : 103-105.Book Review
Post-Colonial Literatures: Expanding the Canon. Edited by Deborah L. Madsen. 1999, viii+237 pages. Available from Pluto Press, 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA, UK, and Quicksilver Drive, Sterling, VA 20166-2012, USA.
The development of indigenous English-language US literature as a discipline is a recent phenomenon, dating back to the 1970s. The interest in this phenomenon, along with the productivity of the ethnic writers and the quality of their output in the last decades, has been requiring new approaches and even a rethinking of the discipline itself. Post-Colonial Literatures responds to this need. The trust behind this timely produced and energetic book is “the desire to revise and expand the post-colonial paradigm” to include the literatures of the indigenous peoples of the US (2). In her introductory chapter, revealingly entitled “Beyond the Commonwealth: Post-Colonialism and American Literature,” editor Deborah L. Madsen makes it clear that the basic assumption of Post-Colonial Literatures is the “post-coloniality” of the situation of Native American peoples. “Threatened with erasure by a dominant white settler culture,” Madsen affirms, these people are “as thoroughly colonized now as at any time in the past” (2). Therefore, the intention of this study is to go beyond “the restricted field of ex-British Commonwealth literatures” (3), and to develop a revised post-colonial literary canon that accommodates the literatures of Native Americans, Chicano/as, Afro-Hispanic and African American peoples.
The articles gathered in the volume aim to expand the existing post-colonial canon through a comparativist approach which examines points of similarity between Commonwealth literatures and the ethnic literatures of the US, arguing that the works of the ethnic writers fit a post-colonial paradigm. The opening chapters of the collection deal with theoretical issues rather than with the study of particular texts or authors. Karen Piper, commenting on “the failure of the discourse of ‘multiculturalism’ within the US” (15), argues that claims to multiculturalism, while they foreground ethnic diversity and privilege the authenticity of cultures, at the same time ignore the hybridity of the actual environment; therefore inevitably putting limits upon the cultural expression of the subaltern. Patricia Linton examines the readership of contemporary ethnic and post-colonial texts, and warns the Euro-American readers that these narratives, in which “the margin becomes the centre, and the centre the margin” (34), may grant only limited access to cultural outsiders. Attempting to read “resistant texts,” Eurocentric readers will experience “what marginalization means: invisibility, criticism, exclusion” (34); yet an “ethical” reading should recognize and respect the rhetorical barriers of cultural difference that intentionally keep them at a distance. While Linton reads the Native Canadian writer Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water (1993) as a “resistant text,” in the following chapter Richard J. Lane explores Canadian/US literary relations with references to Catherine Bush’s Minus Time (1995).
The following chapters of the collection turn to the post-colonial literatures of the Southern hemisphere. Marion Wynne-Davies analyzes three white texts from New Zealand and Australia, Jane Campion’s movie The Piano (1993), and Thomas Keneally’s novel The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1972) and its movie version (1978), examining the issues of “language and silence” in relation to both gender and race in post-colonialist discourse. After warning against “the dangers of homogenizing” black women’s writing and thus erasing “their differences, specificity and individual worth” (173), Gina Wisker looks particularly into the autobiographical works of black South African and Australian Aboriginal women writers. Pauline Dudgson examines the Zimbabwean literature after Independence in 1980, and analyzes two novels—one male and one female authored—depicting the plight of rural women during the war of liberation and thus giving voice to “the stories of those at the margins” (101).
The remaining chapters are connected by their common interest in diverse American experiences and their literary expressions. Gail Low reads Fred D’Aguiar’s Feeding the Ghosts (1998) as part of the black British contribution to the discourse of slavery. Suzanne Scafe turns to Caribbean women’s writing and studies Merle Collins’s Angel (1987) and the dialogic relationship it establishes with Franz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961). Alan Rice looks into different texts by Tony Morrison and explores the stylistic devices she employs in foregrounding the vernacular culture of black America, especially her use of the African American musical modes. Rosemary Geisdorfer Feal contributes to the development of a feminist post-colonial approach and looks at the literatures produced by writers of African descent in Spanish America. Candida N. Hepworth deals with the intercultural dynamics behind the construction of Chicano identity and observes that post-colonial Chicano/a literature is the product of a border culture which encourages the readers to become “border crossers” and see from both sides. Debra A. Castillo writes on Mexican-US border theory and border writers while examining several border texts. Lee Schweninger discusses the issue of racialism in Native American literature and looks at the strategies of several writers who dismantle it. In the final chapter, Robert Gregory suggests that Native American stories ask for a different kind of reading that emphasizes “involvement and dialogue, rather than distance and expertise” (224).
Providing a comparative methodology to re-evaluate and offer a “re-vision” of North American literatures, and contextualizing American ethnic writing as part of the post-colonial canon, the book serves its pronounced purpose of expanding the post-colonial paradigm. This approach connects American ethnic writing with the Canadian and thus presents a wider and more comprehensive view of North American literatures. It also provides alternative readings of US writers of color, diversifying and enriching the images and conceptions of American writing while reinterpreting the cultural dynamics of the racially and ethnically diverse American society. The broadened notion of the post-colonial writing that the book argues for includes “invader-settler cultures, indigenous cultures, and ‘ethnic’ cultures, of the United States and the ex-British Empire or British Commonwealth” (12), and the articles included here underline the dialogic relationship of all these cultures demonstrating and valuing their interconnectedness and polyphony. This may well be the greatest asset of the book.
This fully engaging volume offers a revised reading of indigenous English-language US literatures, thus contributing to the ongoing efforts aimed at challenging what used to be the existing consensus in the field. It covers an impressively wide range of issues and focuses on writers from diverse racial, ethnic and cultural backgrounds. The articles included in this collection are in the nature of stimulating debate among scholars who work in the fields of postcolonial literature, ethnic literatures, and American literature and culture; they also provide points of departure for future studies that adopt the same paradigm and employ a similar comparativist approach.
Works Cited
Bush, Catherine. Minus Time. London and New York: Tail/High Risk, 1995.
Collins, Merle. Angel. London: The Women’s Press, 1987.
D’Aguiar, Fred. Feeding the Ghosts. London: Vintage, 1998.
Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Trans. Constance Farrington. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961.
Keneally, Thomas. The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith. 1972. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1988.
King, Thomas. Green Grass, Running Water. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1993.