Writing Gone Wao

Reviewed by: The Dramatic Landscape of Steinbeck's Short Stories, and: The Short Novels of John Steinbeck, and: New Essays on "The Grapes of Wrath", and: Inside Cannery Row: Sketches from the Steinbeck Era Joseph R. Millichap John H. Timmerman . The Dramatic Landscape of Steinbeck's Short Stories. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1990. 350 pp. $27.95. Jackson J. Benson , ed. The Short Novels of John Steinbeck. Durham: Duke UP, 1990. 359 pp. $39.50 cloth; pb. $18.95. David Wyatt , ed. New Essays on "The Grapes of Wrath."Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990. 139 pp. $19.95 cloth; pb. $8.95. Bruce Ariss . Inside Cannery Row: Sketches from the Steinbeck Era. San Francisco: Lexikos, 1988. 124 pp. $19.95. Curiously enough, in view of the critical tides of our times, the literary reputation of John Steinbeck seems to be undergoing a positive reassessment within academic circles. Of course, Steinbeck's popularity has never waned with the general reader, both here and abroad; most nonacademic students of his work probably would rank him with the "Big Three" of modern American fiction—Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner. Although the academic stock of this triumverate is marked by mixed losses and gains, after all they are "D.W.M.s" (Dead White Males), [End Page 256] the Steinbeck market looks decidedly bullish. The reasons for this upturn are somewhat difficult to discern, as Steinbeck's work seems as little amenable to the new "political correctness" or the new critical arcana as it was to the old New Republic liberalism or the old New Criticism. Steinbeck's attitude toward the "Other," especially as manifested in nonmale and nonwhite characters, makes the sensitive reader as nervous as any of the masters in the old canon. Perhaps the main reason for Steinbeck's re-establishment is simply an instance of the Emersonian law of compensation; his fiction was so critically underrated for so long that the pendulum had to swing back toward him once again. Steinbeck at his best really is a fine writer, an American master accessible to both learned and general readers, an interesting place to occupy in the continuing battle of the canons. More immediate reasons for his rising stock probably include the omniverous appetite of academic criticism; if Steinbeck does not lend himself to deconstruction, he does yield to biographical, psychological, social, and textual study. Jackson Benson's monumental biography, The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer, marked a turning point in Steinbeck studies in 1984. In short order the fiftieth anniversaries of Steinbeck's major fictions of the 1930s have produced a surge of interest, capped by at least a dozen books of all sorts in recognition of his single masterpiece, The Grapes of Wrath (1939). Interestingly enough, the four books reviewed here concern themselves with Steinbeck's most important and accessible work—the stories, short novels, and popular successes—for the most part from biographical, social, and textual perspectives. It is a pleasure to report that all four are themselves accessible, readable, and valuable in terms of critical insight. Steinbeck's short stories are the subject of two recent books. R. S. Hughes' very competent introduction, John Steinbeck: A Study of the Short Fiction, appeared in 1989 as part of Twayne's interesting new series under the general editorship of Gordon Weaver. John H. Timmerman's new study plows the same ground but from different angles and to differing ends. The net effect of both books should be to re-emphasize a somewhat neglected aspect of the Steinbeck canon. Although most readers know only a handful of anthology favorites—"Chrysanthemums," "Flight," or "The Red Pony," for example—Steinbeck produced a large, varied, and successful body of short fiction. If the "chapters" of The Pasture of Heaven are treated as separate stories, as both Hughes and Timmerman effectively argue, Steinbeck wrote more than fifty stories. Of course, not all of these are minor masterpieces like the anthology favorites, but a surprising number are very good indeed. Both Hughes and Timmerman argue that the stories are important for more than their inherent quality, as both critics see the short fiction providing points of access to the longer, more complex works. Both then...

Monsters in the Attic: Women’s Rage and the Gothic

Reviewed by: Signs of Borges Debra A. Castillo Sylvia Molloy . Signs of Borges. Trans. Oscar Montero. Durham: Duke UP, 1994. 142 pp. $32.50 cloth, $15.95 paper. With this superb new translation of Molloy's 1979 book, English-speaking fans of poet, essayist, and short story writer Jorge Luis Borges finally have access to this important study of the Argentine master. This is a book to read cover-to-cover, in order to delight in the fluid interplay of Borges' texts and Molloy's interpretations, to enjoy the flashes of humor, to learn from [End Page 391] the carefully wrought analyses. One of things I like best about Molloy's book is its clarity of exposition. While a sophisticated understanding of current theoretical trends underlies and informs her analysis, Molloy has the confidence not to overburden her text with unnecessary quotes, and the result is a tightly focused monograph. This is not to say that the book is an easy read. Molloy notes in her 1993 preface that "Borges taught me to think about literature, even to write it": a useful warning for students who find Borges' stories difficult, uncanny, or inhospitable upon first reading. Certainly, one of the ways that both Borges and Molloy think about literature is abstractly, and one of the delights of this book for me is to see how Molloy utilizes Borges' scattered, unsystematic, and frequently contradictory statements about literary form as the basis for a coherent and systematic theory for reading Borges. Molloy's chapters are, as the title of the book indicates, arranged around semiotic—rather than more user-friendly thematic—structures, but they are structures that echo and expand upon familiar Borgesian tropes. Among her topics are "a surface of images", "mask and displacement," "deflected signs," "lack of symmetry," "the waste of the circumstantial," "the pleasure of interpolation," and "heterogeneous enumeration and overcrowded series." Molloy begins the book with a statement that seems to me even more compelling now, given the vast Borges industry, than it was in the late 1970s: "To read Borges, to consume a predictable Borges who no longer surprises us, has become a habit. By common accord, it would seem, readers of Borges, with the collaboration perhaps of the author himself, have turned an unstable text into a solid monument." In essence, Borges has taught all of us how to read literature—his literature—but something has been lost in the reading and in the canonization of this eccentric and brilliant figure. Molloy's intent in this book is to restore to her reading of Borges' narrative a recognition of its potentially disquieting and provocative effects, and to do so without falling into the trap of an overfacile categorization of rhetorical modes that both she and Borges would decry. The tactic requires an elegant balancing act, in which Molloy, like the author she studies, established a "surface of images," which, in her words "sets up a multiplicity of dialogues and of possible, variously interchangeable complicities." If Molloy's study does not shift quite as paradoxically and unpredicatably as the author she studies, she is continually aware of the Borgesian dialogue and its possibilities, and she opens herself up critically to the game of masking. In other words, we would do well to remember that her critical "I" is as much a ritual imposture as the narrative "I" of the author she studies. It is, I think, this feature more than any other that helps Molloy cut through the paralyzing seriousness that often attends Borges studies and to remind us of that other Borges: the masked reveler in a literary carnival. The overriding metaphor in the entire book is one familiar to us from Borges' short stories and essays: the metaphor of the face, and of the shadow play of a mirrored identity which is both accepted and decried in [End Page 392] the same tragi- comic gesture. Molloy's preface, with its evocation of "el otro, el mismo" reminds us of Borges' famous discussions of artistic identity: of authors and characters including Shakespeare, Cervantes, Funes, Pierre Menard, Herbert Quain, Hamlet, and Borges himself, all of whom meet and exchange ideas in the atemporal world of the library...

595 DAT BLACK GIRL MAGIC! REVIEW-ESSAY Isiah Lavender III Dat Black Girl Magic! Diana Adesola Mafe. Where No Black Woman Has Gone Before: Subversive Portrayals in Speculative Film and TV. Austin: U of Texas P, 2018. ix+173 pp. $27.95 pbk. Sami Schalk. Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2018. vii+180 pp. $89.95 hc, $23.95 pbk. The ongoing colored wave of sf—perhaps now better thought of as alternative futurisms—continues to gain influence in literature, film, television, comics, and online media. The 2018 Hugo Awards serve as incontrovertible proof of this claim (as do the 2018 Nebula Awards): N.K. Jemisin won for best novel, Rebecca Roanhorse won for best short story, and Marjorie M. Liu (writer) and Sana Takeda (illustrator) won for the best graphic story. While she did not win a Hugo, Nnedi Okorafor won the WorldCon award for best YA novel, and Roanhorse was also honored with the John W. Campbell Award for best new writer. Additionally, at least eight other people of color were nominated for Hugo Awards across the categories: Yoon Ha Lee (twice), Nnedi Okorafor, JY Yang, Vina Jie-Min Prasad (twice), Aliette de Bodard, Caroline M. Yochim, Saladin Ahmed, and Jordan Peele. Scholarship has followed, even if a bit belatedly. At least thirteen monographs focused on representations of race and ethnicity in speculative literatures have been published since 2010, in addition to seven edited collections. In keeping with the Black Girl Magic social movement started by CaShawn Thompson’s hashtag in 2013,1 referenced in my title, this review considers two black-authored studies of race and racism in sf: Diana Adesola Mafe’s Where No Black Woman Has Gone Before: Subversive Portrayals in Speculative Film and TV and Sami Schalk’s Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction. Diana Adesola Mafe makes a solid contribution to this expanding field by exploring depictions of black femininity on both big and small screens, in what is the first published study on this subject. Writing in an accessible style, Mafe begins her study with Lieutenant Uhura (Nichelle Nichols) of the original STAR TREK series (1966-1969) as her model, and she concludes the book with further analysis of Uhura (Zoe Saldana) in the J.J. Abrams Star Trek reboot (2009) and its sequels.2 Noting how black actresses in speculative-fiction roles usually reinforce white patriarchal authority and tend to be eroticized like the character Lisa (Rosalind Cash) in Boris Sagal’s The Omega Man (1971), Mafe demonstrates how such portrayals establish and cement stereotypes of black women in genre films throughout the late twentieth century and into the new millennium. Mafe suggests that such stereotypes make black women largely invisible to the critical 596 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 46 (2019) eye, functionally erasing black womanhood from sf for roughly forty years while continuing to promulgate social prejudices. In this book, however, Mafe centers on black femininity in her discussion of recent American and British film and television, arguing for their significance in reimagining social constructions and agency by drawing on critical race, film, postcolonial, and gender theories. She examines subversive black female characters from the twenty-first century in four films—28 Days Later (2002), AVP: Alien vs. Predator (2004), Children of Men (2006), and Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012)—and two television series—Firefly (2002) and the third series of Doctor Who (2007)—all directed by white men. Five chapters and a coda follow her introduction. She splits her case studies evenly, providing close readings of three British and three American offerings, without claiming to be undertaking an exhaustive survey. Her readings proceed in chronological order of release dates. Mafe’s introduction, “To Boldly Go,” lays out the premise of her book: to examine representative black female characters in sf to correct their omission from visual culture. Smartly recognizing Uhura as “the symbolic face of black women in science fiction,” Mafe taps into the seemingly limitless possibilities of raced/gendered representation in sf to destabilize the stereotypes of black femininity (1). By considering the black female characters in the...

Reviewed by: The Afro-Latin@ Reader: History and Culture in the United States Daynali Flores-Rodriguez (bio) Jiménez Román, Miriam, and Juan Flores, eds. The Afro-Latin@ Reader: History and Culture in the United States. Durham: Duke UP, 2010. Published a year before the United Nations declared 2011 the International Year for People of African Descent, The Afro-Latin@ Reader: History and Culture in the United States, takes a deeper look into the complex world of ethnic and race relations in America. Miriam Jiménez Román, the executive director of Afro-Latino Forum, a research and resource center for Black Latinos in the US, and Juan Flores, Director of Latino Studies at NYU, engage Afro-Latin@s as a population that “bridge various communities even as they constitute a community in their own right” (xiii). Similar to Henry Louis Gates’s Black in Latin America (2011) a four-part documentary series shown earlier this year on PBS that explores the influence of African descent in Latin America, The Afro-Latin@ Reader focuses “on the strategically important but still largely understudied United States context of Afro-Latin@ experience” (3). Both are proof of an emerging interest in transnational relations of race as a way to challenge the homogenizing effects of national and regional constructs of identity. The complex history of ethnic and racial movements in the United States is traditionally framed within a socially-progressive agenda intended to reveal and denounce hidden histories of racialization, colonization, exploitation and social mobilization still experienced by many. In their zeal to be acknowledged and recognized as equals in mainstream society, ethnic and racial groups often articulate identity in terms that foster the same practices of cultural disenfranchisement these groups were denouncing in the first place. Likewise, in Latin America, the myth of racial democracy based on “mestizaje” or mixed race, is still touted as one of the most defining traits of a pan-ethnic cultural identity. Since slavery was a systematic practice brought upon Latin America by European [End Page 548] colonizers and later adopted and asserted by the United States (considered the ideological and practical heir of Europe), racial discrimination and prejudice is considered a foreign problem that attests to the immorality of imperialist and colonial practices and a strategic attempt to distract and divide Latin Americans from their common goal to resist these advances. Indigenous and black identities are accepted (in that order) as long as they do not compromise the traditional discourse of racial harmony that makes Latin Americans stand strong against the neocolonial threat, represented by the United States. The editors of The Afro-Latin@ Reader: History and Culture in the United States make a compelling effort to reveal the subtle and complex negotiations of social identity that take place when these two paradigms clash. While oral narratives and testimonies are a common point of departure for historians and social scientists alike, the material included in the collection demonstrates an innovative approach that encourages readers to keep reflecting on the contributions made by Afro-Latin@s, far beyond the strict academic setting that so strongly divides experience from theory. Voices of the past acquire a new meaning for our own times. Arturo Alfonso Schomburg’s plea for the establishment of a Chair of Negro History in 1913 demonstrates his relevance as a pioneer for Black Studies and resonates stronger nowadays, where ethnic studies (specifically Latin@ and Chican@ studies) are threatened amidst accusations of reverse racism and/or the false premises of a post-racial America heightened by Barack Obama’s election in 2008. The essays by Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof and Evelyne Laurent-Perrault not only describe the world of tense racial coalitions and segregation Schomburg inhabited but how his legacy is kept alive and still facilitates the conversation about what it means to be an Afro-Latin@. The strength of this collection is the diverse array of materials suitable for those reflecting comparatively on issues of race, ethnicity, and identity, whether for the first time or for the hundredth. The Afro-Latin@ Reader uses academic essays, memoirs, poetry, literature, interviews, Census statistics, short stories, music, film, and popular culture to establish a much needed conversation on the...

"Found" in Translation:Multilingual Scholars, Vernacular Archives, and Postcolonial Studies Shobna Nijhawan Henitiuk, Valerie, and Supriya Kar (eds.). Spark of Light: Short Stories by Women Writers of Odisha. Athabasca: Athabasca UP, 2016. Kaul, Suvir. Of Gardens and Graves: Kashmir, Poetry, Politics. Photographs by Javed Dar. Durham: Duke UP, 2017. Nerlekar, Anjali. Bombay Modern: Arun Kolatkar and Bilingual Literary Culture. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 2016. The three books discussed in this article all practice multilingual scholarship as methodology for South Asian literary and postcolonial studies. They result from the consultation of primary sources in South Asian vernacular languages and the belief in the translatability of these linguistically and culturally complex materials. Moreover, they point to the interconnectedness and interplay of the regional, the national, and the transnational in various forms of literary expression and communication. Their focus, however, lies on the local, which stands, inevitably and necessarily, in relationship to and in interaction with the global. From this focus, the questions that concern the books arise: How do writers, poets, and scholars make sense of the world(s) around them? How do they write the everyday lives of actual people? Thankfully, the three books are testimony that it is possible to bring the vernacular and its culturally specific idiom to the reader who may otherwise be disconnected from the people and subject matters written about. Furthermore, they help us in reconsidering the notion [End Page 789] of the marginal in regard to places, languages, and literary cultures. A multilingual framework is crucial to such projects. The books share the goal of making accessible, providing context, and creating meanings for poetry and short stories written in the South Asian vernacular languages Oriya, Kashmiri, and Marathi, and English. Arguably, their audiences are English-language readers around the world. The short story collection is conceptualized for the Western reader as well as for the South Asian English reader without access to the Odishan originals. Kaul and Nerlekar's work may be speaking to the bilingual reader who has lost touch not so much with the non-English mother tongue (Guha) but with the tongue's script. Kashmiri, Urdu, and Marathi sources are included in the books; however, they are rendered in Roman transliteration and do not appear in the languages' original scripts. Though they all deal with translation and biliterate exchange, the books' underlying concepts thereof differ. The short story collection Spark of Light may come closest to what the Sahitya Akademi, India's national academy of letters (est. 1954), would promote and support as the preservation of regional literatures, cultural diversity, and multilingual literary dialogue across India and the world. In fact, translation as a national project has been a pillar of the literary institution's activities. Many of the contributors to Spark of Light are Odisha Sahitya Akademi awardees and trained translators, including one of the editors of the volume, Supriya Kar. Kaul and Nerlekar are translators as much as they are bilingual scholars. Unlike the Odishan female short story writers, the poets discussed in Nerlekar's volume defy translation as much as they refuse the categorization of the Marathi (monolingual) writer. This category was a nationally promoted (but contested) one after the creation of Maharashtra as a monolingual state in 1960. Instead, Nerlekar suggests, their work may be conceptualized more accurately in a bilingual framework. Kaul, on the other hand, makes it a point to place the Kashmiri poetry next to his annotated English translations. In all cases, the literary analyses offered by the scholars are rich and thorough. Beyond the consideration of the primary source materials, the books are also important historical studies on post-independence contexts, such as sociolinguistic politics of Western-Indian urban spaces (Nerlekar), political analysis of the contested and highly militarized region of Kashmir in the North (Kaul and Dar) and lives, often human suffering, of the socially marginalized in Odishan literary culture in the East (Henitiuk and Kar). Spark of Light Spark of Light offers English readers rare and precious insights into Odishan literary culture. It presents a collection of short stories authored by women writers spanning the entire twentieth century. The themes of this literature revolve around the everyday lives, social interactions, and...

A Border Passage: From Cairo to America—A Woman's Journey, by Leila Ahmed. New York: Penguin Putnam Inc., 2000. A Recognition of Being: Reconstructing Native Womanhood, by Kim Anderson. Ontario: Second Story P, 2000. Marie d'Agoult: The Rebel Countess, by Richard Bolster. New Haven: Yale UP, 2000. Begotten, Not Made: Conceiving Manhood in Late Antiquity, by Virginia Burrus. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000. White Women Writing White: H.D., Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, and Whiteness, by Renee Curry. Connecticut: Greenwood P, 2000. Venus on Wheels: Two Decades of Dialogue on Disability, Biography, and Being Female in America, by Gelya Frank. Berkeley: U of California P, 2000. Musical Women in England, 1870–1914: Encroaching on All Man's Privileges, by Paula Gillett. New York: St. Martin's P, 2000. The Mixed Legacy of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, edited by Catherine J. Golden and Joanna Schneider Zangrando. Newark: U of Delaware P, 2000. Becoming Citizens: The Emergence and Development of the California Women's Movement, 1880–1911, by Gayle Gullett. Champaign, IL: U of Illinois P, 2000. Other Sexes: Rewriting Difference from Woolf to Winterson, by Andrea L. Harris. Albany: State U of New York P, 2000. Literary Trauma: Sadism, Memory, and Sexual Violence in American Women's Fiction, by Deborah M. Horvitz. Albany: State U of New York P, 2000. Cleavage: Technology, Controversy, and the Ironies of the Man‐Made Breast, by Nora Jacobson. New Brunswick, New Jersey and London: Rutgers UP, 2000. Living Between Danger and Love: The Limits of Choice, by Kathleen B. Jones. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2000. Elizabeth I: Collected Works, edited by Leah S. Marcus, Janel Mueller, and Mary Beth Rose. Chicago and London: The U of Chicago P, 2000. Suits Me: The Double Life of Billy Tipton, by Diane Wood Middlebrook. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1998. Sharing Secrets: Nineteenth‐Century Women's Relations in the Short Story, by Christine Palumbo‐DeSimone. Madison, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson UP, 2000. En‐Gendering India: Women and Nation in Colonial and Postcolonial Narratives, by Sangeeta Ray. Durham, N.C.: Duke UP, 2000. Women and Gender in Early Modern Wales, edited by Michael Roberts and Simone Clarke. Cardiff: U of Wales P, 2000. Changing Ireland: Strategies in Contemporary Women's Fiction, by Christine St. Peter. New York: St. Martin's P, 2000. Plots and Proposals: American Women's Fiction, 1850–90, by Karen Tracey. Champaign: U of Illinois P, 2000. Globalizing Concerns for Women's Human Rights: The Failure of the American Model, by Diana G. Zoelle. New York: St. Martin's P, 2000.

L'Esprit Créateur T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting. Black Venus. Sexualized Savages, Primal Fears, and Primitive Narratives in French. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1999. Pp. xii + 190. $17.95 (paper). In speaking of the African woman, H. W. Debrunner proposed that "she belongs to the dream world of primal psychological conceptions"—those conceptions being the ones of the western male. His words succinctly describe the subject of Sharpley-Whiting's book. She sets out to examine sexualized male narratives of the 19th century in France, in terms of the cultural, literary , and scientific representations of the black African woman. She seeks to examine their cultural and psychological importance, how they have produced racist-sexist ideologies, images, and institutions that serve to affirm and strengthen patriarchal dominance. Black women (primarily of African descent), who represent for French men the sexualized savage, have historically invoked primal fears and desire and inspired repulsion, attraction, and anxiety—giving rise to the 19thcentury "collective French male imaginations of Black Venus (primitive narratives)" (6). She offers a variety of examples. Chaps. 1 and 2 look at Sarah Bartmann, the Hottentot Venus from South Africa exhibited throughout the British Isles and France over a five-year period as an anatomical curiosity. For the celebrated anatomist and naturalist Georges Cuvier, who observed her while living and dissected her body after death, she provided the "missing link" between primitive species and "contemporary" Europeans, as borne out by his pseudoscientific theorization based on historical racist prejudices and phrenology and tinged with eroticism. Chap. 3 studies Balzac's La Fille aux yeux d'or in terms of how the sexually racialized stereotypes of the Négresse inform the portrait of the principal female character, the creóle Paquita. Chap. 4 looks at Count Gaspard de Pons's elegy Ourika, l'Africaine (1825), written two years after Claire de Duras's novel, Ourika. De Pons transforms the earlier sympathetic incarnations of Ourika into a figure of passion and vengeance, the racially quintessential African woman, primitive and bestial. Chap. 5 considers the "cafrine" woman of Baudelaire's La Belle Dorothée who is a "freed" black prostitute, "shuttled from French officer to officer, [and] continuously reinscribed into the racial-sexual political economy as dominated" (69). In chap. 6 Sharpley-Whiting considers Zola's Thérèse Raquin as an example of the conflation of black women with courtesans and prostitutes in 19th-century texts, and of the sexual allure of the black women for the French male psyche as a source of repulsion/repression and attraction (74). Maupassant's short story "Boitelle" (chap. 7) questions whether a white male can experience love for a black woman. In the case of Boitelle, a Normand peasant taken with a "young negress" on the quay in Le Havre, Sharpley-Whiting states that the supremacy of the white male "takes many forms, from extreme hatred of difference to an intensified adoration of Other bodies" (8687 ). Such truisms tend to proliferate in her study, wiüi the result that we encounter a redundancy of ideas, a listing of examples in a number of 19ui-century works that is at times too schematic to further any deeper understanding. For Boitelle, she concludes that "love of the Negress is indeed the love of the self and parenthetically remarks the fundamentally narcissistic nature of love, according to Sartre and Lacan, and others. She leaves us dangling without further comment. The relative brevity of the book and of the treatment of diverse authors and texts comes from a similar lack of development of her ideas that we find in other chapters. Chap. 8 treats Pierre Loti's Le Roman d'un spahi, which "veers from the standard Loti fare of exotica and sexual conquest" (92). As she explains, this novel becomes a "particular commentary on race mixing, on the unmendable differences diat blackness makes..." (92). In amply pointing out the degrading portrait Loti offers of Africans and black women in particular, we are left with a listing of the ways in which white men have degraded black women. Chap. 9 singles out Josephine Baker, the 1930s music hall sensation from America, and her debut in the "talking" cinema. "The Baker cinematic Venus...

Reviewed by: Whose India?: The Independence Struggle in British and Indian Fiction and Asha Sen Teresa Hubel. Whose India?: The Independence Struggle in British and Indian Fiction and History. Durham: Duke UP, 1996. 234 pp. Teresa Hubel’s Whose India? is an important contribution to the ever increasing discourse on nationalism, gender, and subalternity. Her argument is based on the central premise that, in addition to being a geographical entity, India was also an imaginary space for British and Indian writers. Hubel uses a revisionist historiography which foregrounds the textuality of history and the historicity of fiction to balance her analysis of literary texts with an examination of significant historical claims about two major periods of the nationalist movement in India: 1885–1909 and 1909–1947. She defines herself against Orientalist and nationalist historians and provides an excellent critique of both conservative historians like Charles Heimsath and Percival Spear, who dismiss the nationalist movement by foregrounding its divisiveness, and nationalist historians like Bipin Chandra and Ram Gopal who overemphasize its cohesiveness. She also presents a comprehensive critical overview of the postcolonial theories of Edward Said, Jenny Sharpe, Gayatri Spivak, and the Subaltern Studies group of critics. Partha Chatterjee’s The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories and Susie Tharu and K. Lalitha’s anthology of Women Writing in India Vols. 1 & 2 are, however, noticeably absent from the body of critical discourse that Hubel examines. She also leaves out the critical voices of Frantz Fanon and Homi Bhabha, whose theories of nationalism, violence, and mimicry might have enhanced her project. In keeping with her aim to disturb “the uncomplicated image of imperialism as the confrontation between the two ruling classes of India and Britain,” she begins her book by analyzing this orthodox conception of the British-Indian encounter. Hubel moves from examining the fiction and history of the rulers to the counter-discourse produced by the ruled and then on to the voices of disadvantaged subject groups within the population. Her project also includes an insightful critique of the imperialist hegemony behind the construction of literary canons in the West and in India. In the first half of her book Hubel discusses colonial writers Rudyard Kipling, Sara Jeannette Duncan, and E. M. Forster. She finds a similarity [End Page 535] in the responses of Kipling and Duncan who either dismissed nationalism as the product of a Westernized elite or were sympathetic to a more violent or “authentic” nationalism. Hubel describes the mixed responses of Western critics to Kipling’s imperialism, but she does not attempt to explain the interest that postcolonial critics like Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, and Ashis Nandy show in him. Nevertheless, she provides an interesting analysis of the ways in which two short stories by Kipling, “The Enlightenments of Pagett MP” and “On the City Wall,” try to diffuse the nationalist challenge to the dominant discourse of British imperialism as embodied in the myth of sacrifice latent in the ICS (Indian Civil Service). Hubel then moves on to discuss Sara Jeannette Duncan’s creation of the “ordinary memsahib,” Lucy Foley, as a response both to Kipling’s femme fatales—Mrs. Hauksbee and Mrs. Revier—and to the romantic myth of British civilization perpetuated by Maud Diver and Flora Annie Steel. As Hubel emphasizes, Lucy Foley’s most important contribution is her safe, conservative presence which serves as a normalizing force against the incipient threat of Indian nationalism. Hubel also provides a fascinating analysis of Duncan’s subversive use of the marriage metaphor in her novel The Burnt Offering. She points out that while Kipling adopts the traditional formula of a marriage between a male England and a passive India in which the latter is entirely dependent on the former, in The Burnt Offering the British/India marriage is a metaphor produced by an Indian, Yadava, for the benefit of other Indians. Not only does this marriage signify an equal partnership, it also involves an interracial relationship between a Bengali man, Bepin Dey, and an Englishwoman, Joan Mills. Although the marriage is never consummated and the beliefs of both protagonists are trivialized at the end, Hubel feels that the relationship holds out subversive possibilities for the...

Reviewed by: This Thing Called the World: The Contemporary Novel as Global Form by Debjani Ganguly Claire Chambers Debjani Ganguly. This Thing Called the World: The Contemporary Novel as Global Form. Durham: Duke UP, 2016. xii + 300 pp. I write this review in November 2016, soon after Donald Trump was elected US president twenty-seven years to the day after the fall of the Berlin Wall. One of This Thing Called the World's most valuable contributions is the attention it accords to "the historically significant threshold of 1989" in shaping our current Manichean political climate (1). Notwithstanding recent scholarly emphasis on the World Trade Center attacks and their aftermath, I agree with Debjani Ganguly's thesis that 1989—a year significant for, but not reducible to, the collapse of communism—marked the most profound shift in geopolitics and literary aesthetics since the revolutionary movements of 1968. However, from my perspective as a researcher of British Muslim writing and given that Salman Rushdie's Shalimar the Clown is one of the key texts discussed in this monograph, it is surprising that Ganguly devotes little space to exploring the Rushdie affair in her nuanced analysis of 1989 as a new "temporal horizon for the emergence of a new kind of novel" (6). Ganguly, who is Director of the University of Virginia's Institute of the Humanities and Global Cultures, argues that post-Cold War world novels are notable for their engagement with modern kinds of unending war and insurgency, the digital environment, and human rights discourse. She launches this ambitious and perceptive line of enquiry by bringing contemporary world novels into dialogue with the late-eighteenth-century protonovel. The eighteenth-century comparative framework is illuminating, but it seldom filters into the individual case studies about contemporary novels. For instance, especially since the Ayatollah Khomeini issued the infamous fatwa against him in 1989, Rushdie has been eager to position himself as heir apparent to Enlightenment philosophes such as Voltaire. This promising research avenue is not pursued in Ganguly's chapter on Rushdie's 2005 novel. Ganguly's disentangling of the terms "postcolonial," "global," and "world" in the introduction is much needed and persuasive. She hints at the recent emergence of global literature as a category, linked as it is with the ongoing issues of colonialism and globalization. But it is puzzling to see that this well-read study does not interact with work on global fiction by such scholars as Sanjay Krishnan, Revathi Krishnaswamy and John C. Hawley, Diana Brydon, and Richard J. Lane. With her eighteenth-century expertise, Ganguly is more immersed [End Page 177] in longstanding debates about world literature from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe to Edward Said and Immanuel Wallerstein. Drawing on Romantic sources, she expounds on the lovely, instructive phrase "the melancholic realism of the world novel" (19). She also reflects on the increasingly pervasive sense in academia that there are problems with the term "postcoloniality," particularly in light of transnational brands of terror and war without end. Ganguly paints a grisly picture of what she terms, with a nod to Achille Mbembe, "deathworlds" around the globe (9), as well as to resistance movements that deflagrate in response. The chapter entitled "Forensic Witnessing," for example, is an elegy for the Sri Lanka killed during its protracted civil war as portrayed in Michael Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost. Strangely, though, the 2003 Iraq War is first encountered via Ian McEwan's Saturday. In this novel, a rather objectionable middle-class man, Henry Perowne, expresses views of the war and Muslim migrants in Britain that are hardly offset by even the echo of a contestatory subaltern voice. Similarly, Martin Amis's "The Last Days of Muhammad Atta" provides readers' first window on 9/11 in this volume. Ganguly praises "Amis's deft strokes" (49) in the short story and absorbs his phrase "the thing which is called the World" (43) into her title. It is a missed opportunity that she does not challenge Amis's preoccupation with the figure of the terrorist, his simplistic view of Atta as a man with a death wish, and the hateful nature of some of his public pronouncements on Muslims and Islam. Ganguly makes...

GELFANT, Blanche H., ed. The Columbia Companion to the Twentieth-Century American Short Story. New York: Columbia UP, 2000. 660 pp. $80.00. NAGEL, James. The Contemporary American Short-Story Cycle: The Ethnic Resonance of Genre. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2001. 297 pp. $49.95. WOGAN-BROWNE, Jocelyn. Saints' Lives and Women's Literary Culture. New York: Oxford UP, 2001. xvi, 314 pp. $80. NEILL, Michael. Putting History to the Question: Power, Politics, and Society in English Renaissance Drama. New York: Columbia UP, 2000. xii, 417 pp. $34.50. ULMER, William A. The Christian Wordsworth, 1798-1805. Albany: SUNY P, 2001. xv, 228 pp. $21.95. BIRCHALL, Diana. Onoto Watanna: The Story of Winnifred Eaton. Champaign: U Illinois P, 2001. xxii, 252 pp. $29.95. THURSTON, Michael. Making Something Happen: American Poetry Between the World Wars. Chapel Hill: U North Carolina P, 2001. viii, 272 pp. $49.95/$19.95. (Cultural Studies of the United States Series) HOWARD, June. Publishing the Family. Durham: Duke UP, 2001. xi, 337 pp. $18.95. (New Americanists Series) HOWELLS, William Dean, et al. The Whole Family: A Novel by Twelve Authors. Durham: Duke UP, 2001. li, 341 pp. $18.95.

Reviewed by: En-gendering India: Woman and Nation in Postcolonial Narratives Yumna Siddiqi Sangeeta Ray. En-gendering India: Woman and Nation in Postcolonial Narratives. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2000. 198 pp. In Engendering India, Sangeeta Ray examines the ways in which a number of South Asian and British writers treat ideologies of gender in their fictional portrayals of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Indian nationalism. Her point of departure is the fiction of Bankimchandra Chatterjee, the nineteenth-century Bengali writer and nationalist whose name has an almost incantatory resonance [End Page 210] among scholars of Bengali culture. Ray argues that in the two novels Devi Chaudharani and Anandamath, Chatterjee offers us female protagonists who are veritable warrior women, rejecting at least in part conventional codes of domesticity and sexuality. However, Ray claims, ultimately the representation of these female rebels serves to shore up the “male religio-political subject of Hindu nationalism.” Interestingly enough, the characterization of Indian women as suttees by the Victorian writers Harriet Martineau, Philip Meadows Taylor, and Flora Annie Steele is, despite the protocols of the stereotype, far more ambivalent—but then, as Bhabha has pointed out, colonial stereotypes are ambivalent. In British Rule in India, Martineau exhibits a curious reticence about suttee although the trope of suttee was one of the commonplaces of Victorian writing about India. Ray regards this silence as a consequence of both the contradictory nature of British colonial policy (explored by Lati Mani), and the ambivalence that marks descriptions of Sati, and ambivalence that frustrates a Manichean, binary coding. Meadows Taylor’s representation of Seeta, the exceptional Hindu widow who becomes the domestic partner of an Englishman against the backdrop of the mutiny, is again complex and ambivalent, though the novel moves towards emphasizing her difference in order to “shore up the identification of English national character with the Englishwoman in the Empire.” Flora Annie Steele falls back upon a “reified image of the burning widow” in her Mutiny novel On The Face of the Waters, but even she offers momentary possibilities of identification between the Indian woman and her English counterpart. Ray’s chapter on Tagore’s The Home and the World and Rokeya Sakhawat Hossein’s utopian feminist short story “Sultana’s Dream” is the most interesting in the book for its nuanced analysis of the complex relationship between an upper-class Indian woman, her forward-thinking aristocratic husband, and his self-serving, philandering nationalist friend. Ray builds on Partha Chatterjee’s work on the representation of woman as the untainted, inner essence of India that is advanced as the privileged ground for building the incipient nation to show how this ideology is, on the one hand, grappled with by Tagore, and on the other hand, rejected outright by Hossein. In the final chapter, Ray explores the ways in which ideologies of gender are treated in what has become a veritable academic cottage industry, partition fiction. She suggests (as have the historians Urvashi Bhutalia, Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin) that the violence of the partition was in fact gendered, and that Baapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India portrays the symbolic and literal gendering of partition violence, albeit from an elite perspective. Anita Desai’s Clear Lightof Day is only peripherally a novel of the partition, but according to Ray, it too portrays the elite negotiation of what turns out to be a persistent trope—that of the traditional, domestic dependent woman—upon which Indian nationalism is predicated. To conclude, while charting fairly familiar ground, both in the choice of novels and in the critical debates she draws from, En-gendering India is a useful contribution to the discussions of gender and nationalism in the Indian context. Yumna Siddiqi Middlebury College Copyright © 2002 symploke

Reviewed by: Scales of Captivity: Racial Capitalism and the Latinx Child by Mary Pat Brady Sarah J. Ropp Mary Pat Brady, Scales of Captivity: Racial Capitalism and the Latinx Child. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2022. 297 pp. Cloth, $104.95; paper, $27.95; e-book, $15.37. “Scale, like it or not, is beloved by scholars,” Mary Pat Brady writes in the conclusion to Scales of Captivity, “beloved for its promise of mastery, its premise that we live in only one world, not many, and that such a world can be wholly known, contained, bracketed, held captive” (239). The book is her effort to seduce us away from that promise. Brady reads a collection of Latine narratives spanning the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries and focused in Greater [End Page 428] Mexico/the western United States as first a series of testimonios bearing witness to the ways in which rescaling—the expansion of economic and political power—always depends on structures of captivity, as the increased mobility and freedom of some are predicated on the necessary containment of others. Secondly, Brady reads these various narratives as providing alternatives to scalar logics, namely density and queer horizontality, which signify for Brady an acceptance of many worlds less easily containable or knowable, as well as a recognition of mutual vulnerability and interconnectedness. The captive or cast-off child is centered as a crucial figure within all three of these projects. Within the “phallic verticality” of the “scaffold imaginary” that propels colonialist/capitalist expansion (19), racialized children are denied the protection of childhood even as racialized adults are conceptualized as perpetual children considered incapable of consent or self-governance. Within the Latine literature that Brady studies, the cast-off child functions as a surrogate, a stand-in for the violence and vulnerability endured by entire populations, impelling the reader’s “reparative witnessing.” And, because the child characters within these narratives often mobilize outside of the scalar logic that contains them, developmentally or socially, as children, they are also made to function in Brady’s analysis as symbols of or vehicles for density and queer horizontality. Brady begins in chapter 1 with María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s 1872 novel Who Would Have Thought It?, set during the American Civil War, arguing that the novel uses burlesque forms to expose as ridiculous the essential dependence of the notion of liberal consent on forms of captivity. Having established the racialized, captive child as central to any examination of US sovereignty, Ruiz de Burton’s novel is referred back to in every chapter that follows as a template for subsequent texts. Chapter 2 examines three novels that bear witness to postbellum practices of capture and containment via forced labor and anti-Indigenous violence in the settlement of the West: Jovita González and Eve Raleigh’s Caballero, Oscar Casares’s Amigoland, and Lorraine López’s The Gifted Gabaldón Sisters. In chapter 3 Brady highlights narratives that contradict the romantic vision of the expansion of freeways and highways in the western [End Page 429] United States in the mid-twentieth century as liberating and expose them instead as forms of enclosure: Helena María Viramontes’s novel Their Dogs Came With Them, José Montoya’s poem “Gabby Took the 99,” and Manuel Muñoz’s short story collection The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue. In perhaps her most convincing and clearly argued chapter, chapter 4, Brady demonstrates the crucial interrelatedness between anti-immigrant and anti-LGBTQ rhetoric and policy in the post-Reagan era of Clinton and NAFTA, analyzing novels that depict melodramas of migration into the US Southwest focused on unaccompanied girls (Illegal by Bettina Restrepo and Across a Hundred Mountains by Reyna Grande) as well as painting and poetry focused on day laborers in California and Laura Angélica Simón’s film Fear and Learning at Hoover Elementary. Finally, chapter 5 engages novels that speak to deportation itself (and what happens after) as a form of captivity: The Deportation of Wopper Barraza by Maceo Montoya, Sofi Mendoza’s Guide to Getting Lost in Mexico by Malín Alegrío, and Bang by Daniel Peña. Scholars of western American literature will...

Reviewed by: The Monstered Self: Narrative of Death and Performance in Latin American Fiction Elzbieta Sklodowska Eduardo González . The Monstered Self: Narrative of Death and Performance in Latin American Fiction. Durham: Duke UP, 1992. 275 pp. $ 37.50 cloth. In keeping with the promise of its evocative title, Eduardo González's book explores the predicament of literary subjects who, like Shakespeare's Coriolanus, cannot perform without generating a complex web of stories that turn them into "monstered selves." González's masterly scrutiny of short stories and novels by Borges, Cortázar, Wells, Vargas Llosa and Roa Bastos elucidates the ways in which death, metamorphosis and transfiguration are closely linked to this dual character of performance. Part One, "Myth as Mask," consists of one extensive chapter, which offers a carefully articulated examination of the act of storytelling as a "conflict between individual autonomy and the stereotypes of group solidarity found in magic and ritual." González weaves his analysis of Borges' "El Sur" and "La muerte y la brujula" and H. G. Wells' The Invisible Man into a complex web of overlaps and continuations with Borges' own essays and Walter Benjamin's "The Storyteller" and "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." With remarkable resourcefulness González draws support from varied fields, including psychoanalysis, anthropology, etymology and comparative literature. The insights that result from this sophisticated blend are brought together in a virtuoso study of Vargas Llosa's The Storyteller that closes Part One. The two chapters of Part Two ("Pastoral and Dark Romance") focus on Cortázar's short fiction. By exploring the complex sedimentation of the character's voice in "Cefalea," the first chapter offers a powerful new "take" on the much discussed topic of the fantastic as a textual strategy which subverts the pastoral narrative from within. In contrast to many critical discussions of Córtazar's best-known stories that suffer from a limiting formalistic bias, the readings of "Bestiario," "Final del juego" and "Las armas secretas" benefit from a broader cultural perspective, encompassing psychoanalytical principles, the structuralist study of kinship and self-conscious reflection on the monstrosity of storytelling within literary criticism. In Part Three—focused on Roa Bastos' novel, Yo el Supremo-, González continues unfolding his argument, which "is simply this: in narrative, the need for expressiveness goes hand-in-hand with (and may radically resist) the plain urge to communicate with others." While Part Three attests to the labyrinthine nature of González's style, his interweaving of theory, intertextuality (Finnegans Wake, "The Pardoner's Tale") and textual analysis is illuminating and astute enough to lead us over the most unfamiliar ground. Through his compelling rereading of the Supreme's individual biography and of Paraguay's native myths, religion and collective genealogy, González reiterates and complements his previous meditations on the complexities of storytelling. [End Page 167] The Monstered Self is an exemplary work of scholarship whose relevance goes far beyond the critical horizon of Latin American literary studies. González possesses a remarkable mastery of an impressive theoretical apparatus, which enables him to challenge and engage the reader. By incorporating cross-discplinary insights in the field of Latin American literary criticism and seeking mutual illumination of literature, theory and criticism, The Monstered Self offers enriched understanding of all three. Elzbieta Sklodowska Washington University Copyright © 1994 Purdue Research Foundation

Reviewed by: Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life ed. by Ruha Benjamin Jennifer L. Lieberman Ruha Benjamin, ed. Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life. Durham: Duke UP, 2019. 416 pp. $29.95. Captivating Technology is a rigorous, imaginative, and impressively multifarious collection of essays. Composed of fourteen chapters, plus a Foreword and Introduction, it astutely critiques different aspects of science and technology that relate to carcerality—and it moves beyond criticism to identify techniques for liberation and resistance. It offers essential contributions to critical race studies, American studies, and science and technology studies. Troy Duster provides the Foreword, illuminating that the racial bias that gets coded into algorithms is only visible within specific cultural contexts. Ruha Benjamin elaborates on this point in her Introduction, "Discriminatory Design, Liberating Imagination," by defining what she calls "The New Jim Code": the use of technologies and policies that appear objective but deceptively extend racist social practices. Benjamin is a master of turning presumptions on their heads, asking such evocative questions as, "Could it be that we don't need technocorrections to make us secure, that we need social insecurity to justify technocorrections?" (2). The chapters that follow share Benjamin's innovative and attentive analysis. They are organized into three parts. "Part I: Carceral Techniques from Plantation to Prison" begins with a chapter by Britt Rusert: "Naturalizing Coercion: The Tuskegee Experiments and the Laboratory Life of the Plantation." This chapter sheds light on the presumptions about blackness and hygiene that informed public health efforts at Tuskegee, ranging from Booker T. Washington's "Negro Health Week" to the notorious syphilis study. Rusert suggests that Walter Rodney's thesis about the underdevelopment of Africa might be expanded to include "uneven development" within the United States (39). This chapter also includes a reading of Charles Chesnutt's The Conjure Tales (1899), which suggests that "African American literature exposed the logic and history of the Tuskegee syphilis study decades before they were uncovered" (41). For example, Rusert argues that Chesnutt's story "Po' Sandy" narrativizes how the plantation functions as a laboratory: By turning into a tree that can be milled into lumber, Po' Sandy allegorizes "how black bodies continued to be acted upon as commodifiable" even after emancipation (43). The second chapter, "Consumed by Disease: Medical Archives, Latino Fictions, and Carceral Health Imaginaries" by Christopher Perreira, also considers fiction as an important object of historical inquiry as it reads Alejandro Morales's The Captain of All These Men of [End Page 258] Death in conversation with the "discourses of racialized disease" that were promulgated within the context of "California public health" (52). The third chapter, "Billions Served: Prison Food Regimes, Nutritional Punishment, and Gastronomical Resistance" by Anthony Ryan Hatch, confronts the little-studied issue of food in prisons. Ryan analyzes everything from the prison farm to the hunger strike, and from the software companies that win exclusive contracts (which are appallingly unregulated by the FDA or USDA) to supply food to prisoners as cheaply as possible to the dubiously hopeful act of food hacking. Chapters four and five both analyze predictive policing. Andrea Miller's "Shadows of War, Traces of Policing: The Weaponization of Space and the Sensible in Preemption" interprets preemptive policing tools such as license-plate readers and PredPol predictive policing software in Atlanta as part of "a speculative military economy" (94). R. Joshua Scannell's "This Is Not Minority Report: Predictive Policing and Population Racism" also examines such tools as PredPol and HunchLab, putting them in conversation with Philip K. Dick's 1956 short story "The Minority Report" and its whitewashed filmic adaptation to interrogate the racial and economic logics that underwrite the assumption that crime can be preempted. Scannell compellingly argues that "Policing does not have a 'racist history.' Policing makes race" (108). "Part II: Surveillance Systems from Facebook to Fast Fashion" begins with chapter six, "Racialized Surveillance in the Digital Service Economy" by Winifred R. Poster. This chapter introduces the useful theoretical concept of "multi-surveillance," which connotes how "consumers [who] may be unified in their aims to counteract surveillance by firms … may surveill [sic] each other for factors like race" (135). Poster...