Racial Memory Research Articles

Legacies of Lynching: Racial Violence and Memory

Legacies of Lynching: Racial Violence and Memory

Legacies of Lynching: Racial Violence and Memory. By Jonathan Markovitz (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2004) 227 pp. $59.95 cloth $19.95 paper

<i>Legacies of Lynching: Racial Violence and Memory.</i> By Jonathan Markovitz (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2004) 227 pp. $59.95 cloth $19.95 paper

Cross-Gendering the Racial Memory

When Ernest Gaines chooses a woman as the individual subject for collective memorialization and the ideal medium of racial memory in his 1971 novel, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, he participates in a significant but overlooked genre of black masculine discourse, the composition of black authorship as historical/national authority through the voice and viewpoint of a female protagonist. This cross-gendering of the racial imaginary, introjecting a male vision of racial collectivity and history through a female’s frame of reference, though not exactly a form of cross-dressing, can be usefully analyzed as such. Erecting a feminine monument to emblematize and materialize highly abstract notions like nationhood, justice, peace, warfare, virtue, democracy, pro/creativity, and truth has a long history in many cultures across the globe. It is a long-standing practice within many patriarchal cultures, in other words, to project highly abstract masculine visions of established power onto a female form, draped in feminine attire. Whether this occurs metaphorically, as in the case of gendering the nation-state as feminine (Britannia for the United Kingdom, Columbia for the United States, St. Joan for France, etc.), or through more literal iconography, such as the Statue of Liberty, the feminine form serves to purify, emblematize, and collectivize—and thus to transcendentalize—concepts of rightful dis/empowerment that are otherwise fraught with cultural-historical strife. The static nature of such imagery distances us from the contentiousness of the act of cross-gendering that occurs ideologically in the enunciation or re-erection of patriarchal power through an objectified, if celebrated, feminine icon. We can find evidence of this conventionally patriarchal kind of feminine iconography in black cultural practice. For instance, in black nationalist discourse of the 1960s and ’70s (whether in the Black Power movement in the United States or the post-colonial movements in the West Indies and Africa), there is a tendency to emblematize the rising black nation as a fecund black mother, frequently figured more transcendently as “Mother Africa” herself, even as the battle for and leadership of these emerging nations is assumed to be the purview of militant big men. Ironically, to index the greatness of the emerging nation, and the bigness of the male freedom fighters and founders, both figuratively and materially the female icon must be giganticized, making her a presence so massive as to become a queer she-male—masculine in size and intent, feminine in spirit and form. In European-American iconography, there is a drive to materialize this gigantic feminine figure not only by super-sizing her but also by casting her in the hardest stones—again the Statue of Liberty providing a perfect instance. Lacking the economic resources for such a luxury of patriarchal imagination, black nationalist practice most frequently resorts to more figurative embodiments of the gigantic feminine in art, poetry, song, and dance. Gaines’s gigantic female who voices and embodies black American epochal and epical history, Miss Jane Pittman, is cast as novel and film (1974) at the height of the black nationalist moment, when metaphorical she/males emblematizing the masculine heroism of black nation-building are proliferating all over the place in black popular culture. This paper analyzes Miss Jane Pittman in this historical context of the black nationalist gigantic female icon. I argue that while Gaines draws on this black nationalist image as context and subtext, he diverts attention away from this militant and often violent black nationalist iconography of cross-gendering to figure instead a strong, enduring black woman as a pacifying emblem of cross-racial American nation-building. Opting to follow the lead of other black male cross-gendering writers—most notably James Weldon Johnson, W. E. B. Du Bois, Walter White, and Wallace Thurman—Gaines erects Miss Jane as a she/male icon who prophesies the integrated, interracial, harmonious United States nation that emerges ironically out of black folk’s capacity to endure and transcend an entrenched history of state-endorsed racial violence and abjection. Gaines chooses a woman as his medium/subject both to envelope the image of the gigantic black feminine as black nationalist icon and to counter that image in favor of a conscientious black nation within a bloody white nation, the black (wo)man as the purifying conscience of the historically compromised American nation-state. On the one hand, Gaines’s iconography has the benefit of disturbing and subverting the normatively masculine stance of black nationalism by figuring a she/male whose cross-gendering is less aggressively patriarchal in size and intent, more ambivalently feminine in spirit and form. On the other hand, it has the effect of “softening” and thus blunting the militant agency of a defiant black collective conscience and consciousness.

Legacies of Lynching: Racial Violence and Memory

Legacies of Lynching: Racial Violence and Memory

Step-Daughters of England: British Women Modernists and the National Imaginary

Introduction: Conquering new worlds - women, modernism and nationalism. Domesticating empire - British womanhood and national culture Neither English nor civilised - Dorothy Richardson's spectatrix and feminine crusade encoding bi-location - Sylvia Townsend Warner and primitive erotics of Sapphic dissimulation Mary Butt's England - racial memory and daughter's mystical assertion of nationhood mapping the body of our mother - national desire, imperial nostalgia, and language in Virginia Woolf epilogue - rebuilding house of England.

The African Diaspora: African Origins and New World Identities

The African Diaspora: African Origins and New World Identities

Portraits of the Translator as an Artist

Portraits of the Translator as an Artist

African Identities: Race, Nation and Culture in Ethnography, Pan-Africanism and Black Literatures by Kadiatu Kanneh (review)

TES,3I, 200o TES,3I, 200o 331 331 see it as this, as illustratedwhere Yelin characterizes the conclusion of TheGolden Notebook in terms of Anna Wulf's final representation as 'a citizen of the welfare state, a middle-class, heterosexual female Britishsubject'(p. 87). However, Yelin's work really comes into its own in the discussion of Nadine Gordimer, and it concludes with three fine discussions of Burger's Daughter, A SportofNature,and My Son'sStory.These chapters are richly informed and offer a much more complex account of the relationshipbetween issuesof gender, national identity, and political affiliation. This book offersa thoughtful contribution to the criticalliteratureon Gordimer and Lessing,but unfortunatelyfails to do the samejustice to the work of Christina Stead. UNIVERSITY OF KENT STEPHEN COWDEN AfricanIdentities.Race,Nation and Culture in Ethnography, Pan-Africanism and Black Literatures. By KADIATUKANNEH. London and New York: Routledge. I998. xii + 204pp. ?13.99. Kadiatu Kanneh's book is a testamentto the powerfulway in which culturalstudies can illuminate the practice of 'close reading' in literary scholarship. With African Identities Kanneh has given students of African and African-Americanliteraturesa useful tool to navigate successfully the difficult terrain of reading not only the literature of Africa and its Diaspora but also 'the meanings of African identities' (p. I). Kanneh's study begins with an examination of the ethnographic and cultural production of knowledge vis-a-visAfrica. The 'idea of Africa', he asserts, is constituted in ethnographic cliches: 'the mystery, the violence, the impenetrability of the African forest and African native' (p. 3). And these cliches, however much they are recognized as cliches, conceal African 'modernity' behind a colonial rhetoricof an unchanging Africa.What Kanneh setsout to do is to bring into relief the visibility of African modernity. Through careful and close attention to a wide variety of recent writings by writers of Africa and its Diaspora, Kanneh offers a panoramic view of the politics of resistance and redefinition of meaning(s)within the contoursof the modern notion of race. What distinguishesAfrican Identities is the judicious balance between its efforts to locate African and its diasporic literature within the frameworkof culturalcriticismand its aim to offerfresh readingsof the literaryworksunder scrutiny.The resultof these readingsis reiterationof the need to explore the role of authenticity, history, space, and time in the imaginative relations between Africa and its 'Other': whether that 'Other' is the continent's European colonizers or its diasporic children. For example, in a chapter dealing with African-Americanwritersincluding Toni Morrison,Alice Walker,and Ralph Ellison, Kanneh explores the complicated issue of 'racial memory and mourning' (p. 109)as it shapesthe narrativesof these novelists. Kanneh's reading of Alice Walker'sPossessing theSecret ofJoy adroitlyilluminates 'the conceptual problematics involved in African-American identifications with Africa, and in particular, as an interrogation of the political difficultiesof black feminist organisation across boundaries of nation and continent' (p. Io). Walker's use of 'racialmemory and mourning' in figurativelyrepresentingAfricanwomen's subjectivity 'does not take account of the dividing and transforming effects of diasporicmovement on a people, the new allegiancesthatareformedand cherished, alongsidethe old and priorloyaltiesthat remainto be dreamed'(p. I 6). With each of the authors he treats, Kanneh offers a cogent reminder that the meaning of see it as this, as illustratedwhere Yelin characterizes the conclusion of TheGolden Notebook in terms of Anna Wulf's final representation as 'a citizen of the welfare state, a middle-class, heterosexual female Britishsubject'(p. 87). However, Yelin's work really comes into its own in the discussion of Nadine Gordimer, and it concludes with three fine discussions of Burger's Daughter, A SportofNature,and My Son'sStory.These chapters are richly informed and offer a much more complex account of the relationshipbetween issuesof gender, national identity, and political affiliation. This book offersa thoughtful contribution to the criticalliteratureon Gordimer and Lessing,but unfortunatelyfails to do the samejustice to the work of Christina Stead. UNIVERSITY OF KENT STEPHEN COWDEN AfricanIdentities.Race,Nation and Culture in Ethnography, Pan-Africanism and Black Literatures. By KADIATUKANNEH. London and New York: Routledge. I998. xii + 204pp. ?13.99. Kadiatu Kanneh's book is a testamentto the powerfulway in which culturalstudies can illuminate the practice of 'close reading' in literary scholarship. With African Identities Kanneh...

Racial Memory and Literary History

The national model of literary history—with its developmental, teleological narrative of emergence and its vision of ineffable belonging and uniqueness—has lost much of its traditional pedagogical centrality, but it has not vanished. Rather, it has migrated from the center to what was once the periphery, where it now flourishes as a way of affirming the identity claims of hitherto marginalized groups. Literary historians speaking for such groups may openly acknowledge that the terms associated with the old historical narrative—evolutionary, continuous, organic, and the like—are largely fictive, yet these writers self-consciously embrace the fiction in order to appropriate its power. But this embrace entails serious risks: cynicism, enforced performativity, and repetition compulsion. A more powerful alternative lies in the emerging practice of mobility studies.

Racial Memory and Literary History

The national model of literary history—with its developmental, teleological narrative of emergence and its vision of ineffable belonging and uniqueness—has lost much of its traditional pedagogical centrality, but it has not vanished. Rather, it has migrated from the center to what was once the periphery, where it now flourishes as a way of affirming the identity claims of hitherto marginalized groups. Literary historians speaking for such groups may openly acknowledge that the terms associated with the old historical narrative—evolutionary, continuous, organic, and the like—are largely fictive, yet these writers self-consciously embrace the fiction in order to appropriate its power. But this embrace entails serious risks: cynicism, enforced performativity, and repetition compulsion. A more powerful alternative lies in the emerging practice of mobility studies.

"Shifting Spirits": Ancestral Constructs in the Postmodern Writing of John Edgar Wideman

We are difference....our reason is difference of discourses, our history difference of times, our selves difference of masks. That difference, far from being forgotten and recoverable origin, is this dispersion that we are and make. (Michel Foucault) One of hallmarks of discourses often differentiated by term minority is that they evoke some form of ancestor as a means of negotiating of past. In fact, Toni Morrison has argued that a fundamental aspect of black literature is presence or absence of an ancestor. According to Morrison, ancestor functions as an elder who, rather than constituting a parental figure, is a kind of timeless entity that provides a certain continuum in Black or African-American art. The of ancestor can be seen in work of writers such as Ralph Ellison and Toni Cade Bambara, but Morrison also notes that absence of ancestor in works by writers like Richard Wright and James Baldwin results in an element of destruction and disarray in work itself (Rootedness 343). In another critical essay from early 1980s, Morrison situates her idea of ancestor in African village, where clan provided a collective of community and protection. The ancestor figure in black literature here functions as the matrix of ... yearning for village life and thus serves in capacity of a sage who is advising, benevolent, protective, wise Black ancestor. The wise ancestor values connection and racial memory over individual fulfillment, yet at same time true ancestor, according to Morrison, is frequently a social or secret outlaw in hostile environment of enemy--and in case of black literature in America, enemy is continued of past, oppressive white culture. Like grandfather in Ellison's Battle Royal, Morrison's ancestor strives to undermine system, and offer alternative wisdom in an effort to sustain succeeding generations (City Limits 39-40). Morrison's genealogical configurations demonstrate that literary ties between present and past ancestors are rather than givens, but such nevertheless perpetuate significant suppositions. Analyzing postmodernism and minority literature, W. Lawrence Hogue argues that contemporary minority writers like Morrison finally reproduce themes of wholeness, community, and historical continuity that appeal to essentialist assumptions. Postmodern minority writers such as John Edgar Wideman and Richard Perry, on other hand, are often ignored by cultural critics because their works do not exhibit a similar nostalgia to reconstitute and sanction 'pre-modern values' about identity that no longer exist (Hague 193). Of significance to Hogue is not only that postmodern narratives more accurately address lived experiences of individuals negotiating a multitude of traditional, racial, sexual, political, economical, and psychological configurations, but that critical/cultural advocates discr edit these postmodern experiences as abnormal (194). bell hooks similarly cautions that criticisms of directions in postmodern thinking should not obscure insights it may offer that open up our understanding of African-American experience (28). The portrayal offered by Hogue seems to me a legitimate assessment of a number of current critical perspectives dominating published scholarship on minority literature, yet these arguments create and maintain a polarity between authors of minority discourse rather than examining way in which postmodern writing of John Edgar Wideman, for instance, inscribes a sense of wholeness and historical continuity at one and same time that it subverts and exposes limits of its own desire. My study analyses two of Wideman's works, an early short story entitled Damballah (1981) and his recent novel The Cattle Killing (1996), to show how inscription of what I term ancestral constructs in Wideman's writing both summons and undermines a nostalgic recuperation of elder and continuity. …

IV. TheAeneid

At the heart of theAeneidthe hero descends to the world of the dead and in its innermost recess is reunited with his father. Anchises, Aeneas’s link to his destroyed Trojan past, reveals to his son the future of his race in the form of a procession of the souls of Roman heroes as yet unborn. In this place where time past, present, and future is held together, theAeneidalso comes to a heightened consciousness of its own literary genealogy, as literary memory is overlaid on family and racial memory. The whole of the Underworld episode is modelled on Odysseus’ visit to the land of the dead inOdyssey11: Aeneas’ meeting with his father reworks Odysseus’ meeting with his mother Anticleia (Od.11.152–224), which is immediately followed by the Catalogue of Heroines (Od.11.225–332), the formal model for Virgil’s very masculine Parade of Heroes. But the tears and words with which Anchises greets his son (6.684–9) allude to the Roman epic of Ennius and specifically to the scene at the opening of theAnnalsin which Ennius established his own place within the epic tradition, by narrating a dream in which the phantom of Homer explained to the sleeping poet how, through a Pythagorean metempsychosis, the true soul of Homer was reincarnated in the breast of Ennius himself. In restaging this scene of succession in the dreamlike setting of the Underworld Virgil hints at his own relationship to the dead epic poets to whose company he seeks admittance. The encounter of Aeneas and Anchises occurs within a set-piece of Homeric imitation; Anchises’ running commentary on the Parade of Heroes functions as a summary of the matter of Ennius’ historical epic, which it ‘completes’ by extending the story to Augustus’ achievement of world-empire and restoration of a Golden Age (6.791–800). Ennian historical epic is thus framed in a Homeric mythological episode; in the first part of his speech (6.724–51) Anchises encapsulates another branch of the hexameter tradition, with a philosophico-theological account of the nature of the world and of the soul that is indebted both to Anticleia’s explanation to Odysseus of what happens to humans after death (Od.11.216–24) and to the Ennian Homer’s more philosophical account of these matters, but couched in markedly Lucretian language: a miniature didactic ‘de rerum natura’ to set beside the miniatureAnnalsthat is to follow.

Memory, Narrative and Identity: New Essays in Ethnic American Literatures

The fourteen insightful essays in this timely volume focus on the different ways in which ethnic American writers use memory as a device to redefine history and culture, to validate both a personal and a collective identity, and to shape narrative. The contributors articulate how the works of diverse American writers of African, Mexican, Irish, Chinese, South Asian, Jewish, and Native American descent chart memory's forays into language, narrative, and identity. The cultural and political realities of race and ethnicity in American life - as refracted through memory and imagination - give a special meaning to the identity crisis of hyphenated Americans. In examining the complicated issues of cultural memory, the contributors pay attention to historical conditions, hegemonic discourses, and differences of gender, class, and region. Some of the essays consider a single writer, while others adopt a comparative approach. Some are multi-disciplinary, drawing on insights from anthropology or semiotics, while others provide close textual analysis. Rather than providing systematic coverage of major ethnic writers of all ethnic literatures, Memory, Narrative, and Identity: New Essays in Ethnic American Literatures demonstrates the broad range of suggestive and provocative approaches that may be employed in studying the traces of memory in language and narrative. In their introduction, the editors have provided a valuable backward glance at how issues of race and ethnicity have come to be acknowledged as central to current literary debates. This group of critical essays not only approaches issues of memory, narrative, and cultural politics in defining the complex realities of American ethnicityand cultural identity, but also focuses on the roles of time and orality in validating both historical and narrative experience. This collection also addresses the ways in which immigrant or racial memory filters through the expanding net of language and consciousness, at the same

Cultural Narratives Passed On: African American Mourning Stories

Rehearses some 20th-century narratives as they have appeared in United States history and as they have been represented in African-American literature. Suggests that some of these narratives are insufficiently critical in their construction of stereotypes or in their over-romanticized notions of racial memory, which mask the complications of color and racial identity in the United States.

The Many-Headed Hydra of Theory vs. the Unifying Mission of Teaching

Rehearses some 20th-century narratives as they have appeared in United States history and as they have been represented in African-American literature. Suggests that some of these narratives are insufficiently critical in their construction of stereotypes or in their over-romanticized notions of racial memory, which mask the complications of color and racial identity in the United States.

Organic Memory: History and the Body in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (review)

Reviewed by: Organic Memory: History and the Body in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries John Limon Organic Memory: History and the Body in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries. Laura Otis. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994. Pp. 297. $37.50. “Organic memory” is a tidy phrase for a messy confusion of what can be inherited and what can be remembered. Especially in the last third of the last century, according to Laura Otis’s [End Page 164] compendious study, scientists and litterateurs alike were preoccupied with bad analogies of genetic inheritance, cultural heritage, and memory. Lump them sufficiently, and peoples (defined by geography and /or culture and /or race and /or language) may be conceived as corporate people; just as human individuals are integrated by personal memories, nations may be united by racial ones. Not for nothing would the portentous muddles of organic memory seduce German polymaths. But wherever national identity was at issue in the late nineteenth century into the twentieth, as for example in Spain after 1898, the organic memory idea was a temptation. Otis’s study is largely a history of that idea, born out of Lamarckian biology and Haeckel’s law that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny; refined at the border of experiment and prophecy by such thinkers as Ewald Hering and Théodule Ribot; adapted for fictional purposes by Emile Zola and ironized by Thomas Mann and Thomas Hardy; translated into twentieth-century intellectual culture by Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. (I have named only a few of the major players in Organic Memory. Otis’s book is nothing if not populated.) The book crosses several frontiers (national, epochal, disciplinary) with nonchalant courage. And Otis’s scholarship excavates a deep source of material on questions of transcendent modern importance. What is the relationship of individuals and nations? Can memory be located in a place? Can spatialized memories find their way to the genetic blueprint of bodies? All literary criticism must now, by a universally observed rule, pass as metacriticism; my only basic reservation about Otis’s book is that on that level, I am not sure what she has shown. Otis opens Organic Memory quoting an incredulous challenge from a graduate student in neuroscience: “Why would anyone want to study the literature from past times?” (vii) Metacriticism, apparently, is the first order of business; the working hypotheses of Organic Memory are that we study literature because it foregrounds metaphors that inform all thinking, even scientific thinking, and that we study “literature from past times” because the past hardly ever does us the favor of dying. Of course, some ideas do fade away, scientific ones, preëminently—for example, organic memory. But they fade away only as science. Done in as science by their essential metaphoricity, they may linger elsewhere precisely by virtue of metaphoric power. The study of literature brings that hidden source of power to light, where it can do us less damage. At the beginning and end of her book, Otis is explicit about what damage organic memory has already done: Nazis and Serbs are much on her mind. The unexamined assumption (barely qualified on a couple of occasions) is that bad ideas have bad consequences. But implicit throughout the book is a lesson murkier than the one Otis herself infers from it. Part of the problem is that “organic memory” conflates, I think, two ideas: first that genetic inheritance should be conceived as a kind of memory; second, that actual memories are transmitted genetically. The former is probably more conducive to racist appropriation: racial similarity would seem, in its terms, to imply national identity. The latter, Lamarckian conception could be essentially inclusive, since hundreds of years of shared memories (as by Germans and Jews) would begin to produce genetic overlap. No wonder that two German Jews, Moritz Lazarus and Heymann Steinthal, are near the center of Otis’s story. And the presence of Freud (with Jung—but not as distinct from Jung as one had thought) at the culmination of the narrative makes it clear that exclusive conceptions of race did not have to be, by any logical entailment, essential to conceptions of organic memory. Racial memories might be shared...

Collective Memory and Cultural Identity

Problem and Program In the third decade of this century, the sociologist Maurice Halbwachs and the art historian Aby Warburg independently developed' two theories of a or social memory. Their otherwise fundamentally different approaches meet in a decisive dismissal of numerous turnof-the-century attempts to conceive collective memory in biological terms as an inheritable or racial memory,2 a tendency which would still obtain, for instance, in C. G. Jung's theory of archetypes.3 Instead, both Warburg and Halbwachs shift the discourse concerning collective knowledge out of a biological framework into a cultural one. The specific character that a person derives from belonging to a distinct society and culture is not seen to maintain itself for generations as a result of phylogenetic evolution, but rather as a result of socialization and customs. The survival of the type in the sense of a cultural

A Cognitive-Developmental Approach to Racial Stereotyping and Reconstructive Memory in Euro-American Children

To examine the role of cognitive skill and racial stereotyping in Euro-American children's processing of race-related information, 75 Euro-American children, aged 4–9 years, were asked to recall stories that were either consistent with or inconsistent with cultural racial stereotypes. In 6 trait stories, a Euro-American main character encounters both a Euro-American and an African American child. A negative trait is attributed to either the African American (stereotypic story) or the Euro-American child (counterstereotypic story). In 6 social relationship stories, main characters interact with neighbors, friends, or married couples, portrayed either intraracially (stereotypic) or interracially (counterstereotypic). Individual difference measures were used to assess subjects' racial stereotyping and their classification skill (ability to sort stimuli along multiple dimensions). As predicted, lower degrees of racial stereotyping and the ability to classify persons along multiple dimensions were associated with better memory for counterstereotypic stories. Implications for intervention programs aimed at reducing racial stereotyping are discussed.

Wright, Faulkner, and Mississippi as Racial Memory

Wright, Faulkner, and Mississippi as Racial Memory

The World of Harlequin: A Critical Study of The Commedia Dell Arte by Allardyce Nicoll

Reviews 181 AUardyce Nicoll. The World of Harlequin: A Critical Study of The Commedia Dell Arte. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976. Pp. xv + 243. $9.95. It is a rare thing indeed to have the opportunity to review a book that is a reprint of a volume now 14 years old, and which was highly esteemed at the time it originally was issued. In 1963 Cambridge Uni­ versity Press brought out Allardyce Nicoll’s The World of Harlequin. The edition sold out within a reasonable time and has remained out of print since then. The Cambridge Press has recently reissued the book (1976) in paperback format, possibly to make it more economically available. The new edition is the identical book reprinted from the original plates of the 1963 edition with a single change; the colorplate frontispiece has been omitted, which is regrettable, but hardly a monu­ mental loss. There is little need here to reinforce the pretensions of Allardyce Nicoll to theatre research or theatre scholarship. From the publication of The Development of the Theatre (1927) his writings have gained world recognition. This early book, which presented the whole panoply of Western theatre from its beginnings on up, touched perceptively but briefly on all great theatre forms and periods. Many of his publications since then have been attempts to “flesh out” these several periods in greater detail. Such books as Masques, Mimes and Miracles, Stuart Masques and the Renaissance Stage, British Drama, and others were part of this process. To these now must be added The World Of Harle­ quin which provides form and detailed color to the account of the Commedia Dell Arte. One may hazard a guess that Professor Nicoll was spurred on to this research after seeing a performance by the Piccolo Teatro of Milan of Carlo Goldoni’s II Servatore Di Due Padrone featuring a stunning characterization by Marcello Moretti in the role of Arlecchino. Indeed, Mr. Nicoll implies as much and his enjoyment is reflected in the title of the book The World Of Harlequin. The fascination of our modem theatre for the Renaissance improvised stage of the Commedia Dell Arte has produced many, many books. Some are brilliant, such as Pierre Louis Duchartre’s The Italian Comedy; some are palpably thin and tend toward mere adulation. Mr. Nicoll’s volume must now be included in the list of excellent studies, for within its own self-imposed limitations it provides many new insights. The World Of Harlequin begins in the year of 1550. At that time the Commedia had already achieved the superb comic form, characteri­ zations, individualized and distinctive costumes so familiar to us. Du­ chartre’s book takes the Commedia story back to its possible roots in Roman Comedy and the Atellan Farces, pointing out the amazing parallels and similarities to the ancient comic plots and type characters of classic Rome. Professor Nicoll avoids this by suggesting that the record of origins is too dim and that there is no evidence to explain this extra­ ordinary notion that these plots and characters remained in the Italian racial memory for some 1700 years. He states: “Nothing is said here concerning the origins of Commedia Dell Arte . . . partly because it 182 Comparative Drama throws but little light on the qualities inherent in the Italian improvised theatre from 1550 onwards.” This results in the picture of a theatre that burst, like Athena, fully formed from the forehead of Zeus into the exciting world of the Renaissance. This is all very well, and is no doubt excellent scholarship; yet one can hardly help wondering how it evolved into such glory. Nevertheless, once launched, the accounts of the troupes from that magical date of 1550, are full and detailed. The evidence he summons, and there are records galore by this date, is presented with affectionate and enthusiastic care. As with Duchartre, Nicoll relies heavily on the existing scenarios; most notably on the collection assembled by Flaminio Scala in his 11 Teatro Délie Frivole Rappresentative of 1611. To these scenarios he brings an imaginative and recreative sense, fleshing out the bare plot outlines with a sure knowledge of the characteristic perform­ ances of each actor shown in the...