Reviews American reality. Wilson, the study argues, employs sympathetic but ultimately ineffectual characters to condemn kindness without justice and utilizes images of childhood innocence and naturalism to subvert conceptions of black unworthiness. A novel interpretation of Keckley’s memoir, reflecting her time as the Lincolns’ seamstress and servant, views black female textile production as a critique of white, normative aesthetics devaluing black creation, and the memoir’s deliberate use of epistolary evidence as exposing the unspoken racist and misogynistic notions beneath seemingly supportive assertions of liberalism. eories of sonicity and aurality are brought to bear on Anna Julia Cooper’s A Voice from the South, as Fox argues that music serves as an alternative rhetoric countering the vacuity of abstract political ideas that yield no meaningful social reform. Sherley Anne Williams ’s Dessa Rose is framed as the response to the call of the earlier texts. rough a politics of sound embracing spirituals, love songs, and call and response, the novel is seen as undermining conventional sign systems that demean black women. Placing these works in conversation reveals black women as activist theorists, not merely the objects of theory. At some points, the language of Resistance Reimagined is more complex than it needs to be. For instance: ‘e domain of resistive praxis subsequently takes on a proprietary cast, as an entity irretrievable beyond the bounds of outwardly incendiary transgression at the hands of embattled masses or of charismatic/celebrity male leadership via authorized avenues of dissent’ (p. ). Frequently one has the sense that new terminology is being applied to prevailing ideas. While not always novel, however, Resistance Reimagined is always informative. Photographs of the Sojourner Truth memorial and the Underground Railroad monument in Battlecreek , Michigan, of the Harriet Wilson monument in Milford, New Hampshire, and of a portrait of Anna Julia Cooper in doctoral regalia are among the items of visual evidence that add to an edifying argument. Relegating black women’s critiques to the societal margins will be impossible aer engaging with Fox’s analysis of the multiple forms through which black women contested injustice. E U V B Virginia Woolf . By I N. (Critical Lives) London: Reaktion Books. . pp. £.. ISBN ––––. Biographies of Virginia Woolf cover a small but substantial shelf. Ira Nadel’s recent Virginia Woolf in Reaktion’s Critical Lives series contributes to this abundance by participating in the ‘spatial turn’ in literary studies. As Warf and Arias note in their Introduction to e Spatial Turn: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (London: Routledge, ), ‘space is every bit as important as time in the unfolding of human affairs [. . .] where things happen is critical to knowing how and why they happen’ (p. ). We might see Woolf, especially in To the Lighthouse, prefiguring at least one of the emphases in this field: ‘the notion of the autonomous subject standing apart from the world he/she observes has come under question’ (p. ). Nadel structures the MLR, ., biography into chapters focused on Woolf’s residences throughout her life—from Hyde Park Gate as a child to Monk’s House in the last years of her life. is spatial organization allows Nadel to consider ‘Woolf’s use and need of place’ (p. ), for example in A Room of One’s Own, but also how ‘where she was defined who she might become’ (p. ). Nadel makes the most of this methodology. His chapter ‘ Gordon Square, –’ summarizes well the significance of this period to Woolf and her siblings by stressing how changes of London neighbourhood, architecture, and household arrangements—along with a string of family deaths—led to what we know by the spatial designation ‘Bloomsbury’. Using varied sources, including essays, memoirs and autobiographies, and critical works, Nadel provides a compressed and readable overview of the founding of Bloomsbury. One of the strongest sections of the volume is the exploration of photography’s meanings for Woolf; this appears in the final chapter, ‘Monk’s House II, –’. Nadel offers tantalizing biographical details: Woolf was ‘thrilled with Leonard’s purchase of a [. . .] Zeiss camera’ in (p. ); she ‘refused to be photographed by Cecil Beaton and was furious at appearing in a collection of his images’ (p. ); she ‘asked Vita for [a photo...
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Nov 12, 2020
Amr Adel 
Open Access
