Riemenschneider, Dieter

English

University of Calgary Journal Hosting

134 B O O K R E V I E W S drama, with elements of myth, dance, and song carried along by muscu-lar vocal rhythms. T h e works inc luded here achieve Highway's ambi-t ion, stated i n the highly informative Notes on Authors, that being to "show and to celebrate what funky folk Canada's Indian people really are" (375). O f the many fine samplings of poetry I would l ike to single out the Archie Belaney sequence by the Ojibway poet A r m a n d Garnet Ruffo. T h e sequence is from his unpubl ished work Grey Owl: The Mystery of Archie Belaney. It is a moving yet unsentimental exploration of the strange life of that famous Canadian Indian whose existence was i n reality a masquerade. Ruffo indel ibly captures the fear of unmasking that must have been Grey Owl's constant c o m p a n i o n i n "Archie Be-laney, 1935": H e l p l e s s , I f a l l t o t h e k n e e s . A n d a b o v e m e , t h e r e s h e is, Ivy, t h e y o u n g a c t r e s s B e l a n e y o n c e l o v e d a n d a b a n d o n e d . A n d b e s i d e h e r , a l l h i s o l d H a s t i n g s G r a m m a r S c h o o l class m a t e s l a u g h i n g at o d d - b a l l A r c h i e w h o ' s sti l l p l a y i n g I n d i a n a f t e r a l l t h e s e y e a r s . (322) Rather impressive are two recent stories contributed by writers associ-ated with this province: Thomas K i n g , part Cherokee, who has taught for ten years i n the Native Studies program at the University of Leth-bridge, and E m m a Lee Warrior, a member of the N o r t h Peigan (Black-foot) band. K i n g uses coyote i n an amusing fashion a n d reworks the role of the trickster figure within a contemporary i d i o m . Warrior provides an adept take o n the meaning of authenticity i n relation to Indian culture. There are other compel l ing works f rom Indian, Inuit, and Métis writers that bode well for the future of Native writing i n Canada. T h e last word should go to one of the writers inc luded i n this fine book, a famous one in her time, Pauline Johnson: "There are those who think they pay me a compl iment i n saying that I am just l ike a white woman. My aim, my joy, my pride is to sing the glories of my own people" (378). R O B E R T J . N O R M E Y H e n r y Louis Gates, Jr . Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars. New York: O x f o r d UP, 1992. pp. xix, 199. $19.95 pb. H e n r y Louis Gates, Jr. 's Loose Canons is a book of miscellaneous essays, most of which were published between 1989 and 1991 i n weeklies and journals as diverse as the New York Times Book Reviewand Newsweek, Critical Enquiry and Dissent, South Atlantic Quarterly, PMLA, and American Literary History. "Integrating the A m e r i c a n M i n d " a n d ' T h e B i g Picture" are first publications, while "Writing, 'Race,' a n d the Difference It Makes" dates back to 1985. A l t h o u g h the ten essays are thematically related by variously discus-sing the urgent need and the critical and institutional potentialities of establishing a black canon as part of a comprehensive mult icultural B O O K R E V I E W S 135 A m e r i c a n Studies concept without, however, erasing the discreteness of an African-American canon, their textual performance differs widely. This is, no doubt, due to the differing audiences Gates is addressing and, as he himself concedes, "the occasion that produced them" (xvii). Besides, as their titles might already suggest, "Canon Confidential : A Sam Slade Caper" and "The B i g Picture" testify to Gates's power of satirizing the A m e r i c a n critical scene and the publ i sh ing industry. Both texts are gems of black [sic!] h u m o u r and wit and demonstrate a deep insight into the mechanisms of post-industrialized a n d capitalist culture practices and a sharp eye for the intellectual profile a n d personal vagaries o f contemporary A m e r i c a n high culture representatives. T h e majority of texts, however, are serious contributions to the current debate on ethnic differences, mult icultural ism, a n d literary studies i n the U n i t e d States and are meant to examine "the implications of nationalistic eruptions and the politics of identity for the future of A m e r i c a n society and culture, for our university and publ ic school curricula, and, to be sure, for literary and cultural studies themselves" (xii) . T u r n i n g i n the first section of this col lect ion to "Literature" (and later to "The Profession" and "Society"), Gates castigates as essentialist any attempt at grounding cultural and literary studies i n a concept of 'national identity' which rests o n a one-sided presupposit ioning of either nationality or ethnicity, race, class, or gender. Rather, as these divisions mark our world, they should be transcended through an "education that seeks to c o m p r e h e n d the diversity of h u m a n culture . . . to forge, for once, a civic culture that respects both differences and commonalit ies" (xv). After point ing out the—basical ly "essentialist"—adversaries of the contemporary "culture wars i n the academy" (xvi) as "the new cultural right" and "the cultural left" (17), Gates, i n what is perhaps the central piece of this col lection ("Trading on the M a r g i n : Notes o n the Culture of Criticism") rejects both camps and advocates instead a "humanist" (174) and, more important, a "l iberal pluralist" approach (175) to culture, which to h i m as a black scholar is in formed by the experience of "African-American culture . . . [as] a m o d e l of mult icultural ism and plurality" (xvii). However, as Gates is obviously not satisfied with merely ascribing a m o d e l function to Afr ican-American culture but maintains that it is a discrete black cultural practice a n d tradition, the question naturally arises of how both a pluralist approach to culture (and culture studies) i n general and the discreteness of a long-silenced voice might relate to each other within the purview of a concept of A m e r i c a n studies. There can be no doubt that Gates, on the one hand, in "The Master Pieces: O n C a n o n Formation a n d the African-American Tradi t ion," "Writing, 'Race', and the Difference It Makes," and "Talking Black: Crit ical Signs of the T i m e " is primari ly concerned with the existence of 136 B O O K R E V I E W S an African-American canon which valorizes the discreteness of the black voice, or the black race a n d its experience as represented i n black culture a n d tradition. A n d by recapitulating the development of African-American literary studies i n the U n i t e d States i n "Tell M e , S i r . . . What Is 'Black' Literature?", Gates underpins his view of the existence o f a black literary canon by substantiating the history of critical and educational practices which have "come a l o n g way since the early twenties . . . " (90) and have arrived now at the understanding "that critiques of 'essentialism' are inadequate to explain the complex social dynamism of marginalized cultures" (103). O n the other hand, "race" is the central category which l inks method a n d object, the pluralist approach a n d the discrete black culture (or, for that matter, any discrete culture). N o w race, or to put it differently, "the concepts of 'b lack ' and ' w h i t e ' . . . [are not] preconstituted; rather, they are mutually constitutive and socially p r o d u c e d " (102). "Race," accord-ingly, "is a text, (an array of discursive practices), not an essence" (79). T h e question for the black cultural and literary critic then is not one of altogether discarding white critical theories and o f establishing a dis-crete black theory but rather making them function as integral parts within a black critical tradition. A n d this is the basis f r o m which Gates deduces his arguments i n "African-American Studies i n the 21st Cen-tury" to contribute, as he feels, towards ending "the culture wars" i n the academy. Logically, this essay is followed by '"What's i n a Name?' Some Meanings of Blackness," where the idea of race as a text is given shape by o u t l i n i n g the literary practice of signifying "blackness," which, after all , contributes to and forms an essential part of the African-American cultural tradition. By way of conclusion, two points should be raised here. First, the determination of "blackness" i n the language used—"the black lan-guage of black texts, that expresses the distinctive quality of our literary tradit ion" ( 7 9 ) — i s not such an easy task to perform i n a mult icultural world which after al l is characterized by "[m] ix ing and hybridity" (xvi), a n d it remains to be seen how the reading of "race" as a text is being practiced i n culture criticism. A n d second, to argue against the centre-periphery model by merely suggesting that "transnational capital, trans-national labor, and transnational culture" (190) have superseded (or is i n the process o f superseding) this dichotomy rather naively occludes the cont inuing existence of asymmetrical polit ical , economic, and cul-tural power relations i n the world for the sake of preaching a concept of A m e r i c a n studies as the site of "both the globalization of A m e r i c a and the Americanizat ion of the globe" (192). What Gates, quoting A r j u n Appadura i , loosely refers to as "the new global cultural e c o n o m y . . . as a complex, overlapping, disjunctive order, which cannot any longer be understood i n terms of existing center-periphery models" (191), re-quires precise analyses based on empir ical research of indiv idual cul-ture "cases" before sweeping generalizations can claim some sense of B O O K R E V I E W S 137 truth. However, i n spite of this excursion into a k i n d of an American critic's dream, Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars offers thought-provoking interventions into the ongoing debate o n multicultural ism and the reading of black cul ture—intervent ions which incorporate contemporary theorizing i n a critically balanced manner. D I E T E R R I E M E N S C H N E I D E R E m m a n u e l s . Nelson. Reworlding: The Literature of the Indian Diaspora. NY: Greenwood Press, 1992. pp. xvi, 184. $45.00. Migrat ion brings with it questions of identity and rootlessness, cul-tural difference and assimilation. Expatriate writers deal with the exile's d i l e m m a about self and home, a n d the psychological and polit ical effects of alienation. Expatriates are, to use Salman Rushdie's term, in between; their works are interstitial, capturing the texture of their lives at the very crack between cultures. Reworlding: The Literature of the Indian Diaspora, which is a compen-d i u m of critical analyses of writers of the diaspora, is one of a k i n d . Expl ic i t ly designed to study the writers of the diaspora together, and encompassing an exhaustive bibliography, it explores the contiguous and variant themes of identity, community, home, and homelessness. O n e knows of Sam Selvon, V. S. Naipaul , Bharati Mukherjee, and Salman Rushdie as simply writers of Indian origin. But only recently have scholars seen i n these a n d other writers of subcontinental or ig in "a c o m m o n diasporic experience." E m m a n u e l Nelson, i n his Introduction to Reworlding: The Literature of the Indian Diaspora, argues that the writers of the diaspora l iv ing i n different parts of the world share a c o m m o n experience of colonial dislocation. Therefore, the experiences of In-dian indentured workers who left India to work i n the sugar industries of Fij i and T r i n i d a d are comparable to the recent professional émigrés, for example, i n Europe a n d the U n i t e d States. What is striking about Reworlding: The Literature of the Indian Diaspora is its organicism; the shape of the diaspora, the grain of expatriate experi-ences i n different cultures, a n d the similarity of motifs, such as the journey, are the contours of this book. Vijay M i s h r a analyzes the writings of Subramani, Raymond Pi l la i , Satendra Nandan, and Sudesh Mishra, who explore the beginnings o f the Indian experience i n Fi j i , f rom the indentured workers to the present day Fiji-Indian populat ion. H e finds that central to their works is the "Girmit consciousness" (a vernacular form meaning "agreement"), the fossilization of the diaspora through its refusal to merge with the native populat ion. N o t only d i d this fossilization of the past breed insularity, but it also trapped the Indian émigrés i n a linguistic vacuum, thus making them vulnerable to exploi-tation by the colonizers. Elsewhere i n the book, H e l e n Tiff in picks up the subject of Fiji-Indian literature a n d provides a broad historical sweep, f r o m indenture writ ing to the hybridized present. She ends her 

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars.

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Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars.

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