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Robert D. Denham, editor. Northrop Frye’s Uncollected Prose. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015. 445 pp. $95.

Engines of understanding Does literature have a social function? If so, what? Or—wait—that’s a stupid question. Literature must have a social function—otherwise, why would it exist—and in every culture in human history? But if literature has a social function, what is it? What is literature “for”? Then there is that other question: What is literature, anyway? If “literature” is a legitimate category, something that corresponds to a reality, then what characterizes it? Or is the category just a mystification, a kind of illusion? Academics are not that interested in these questions. But the questions are there, in the manner of the elephant in the room. In the manner of the elephant in the room, to ignore it just makes it more pressing, especially if you happen to make your living in the field. What is the social function of literature/ English studies? Why have English departments? After years of “austerity,” these are now “existential questions,” even if no one seems too interested. In fact, despite decades of New Historicism, no one knows much about the relation between trends in literary study and socio-economic-political

ESC 42.1–2 (March/June 2016): 233–258 context. But at least one major figure spent a career on the “existential questions”: Northrop Frye. This collection offers plentiful evidence of Frye’s interest. But Frye himself is now an elephant in the room, someone who is there but not there—a strange figure, an outsider in literary/cultural studies, whose ideas are now rejected but were never really absorbed or digested. Frye is arguably the most original thinker Canada has produced.1 His impact from 1950 to 1975 was enormous. That influence screeched to a halt in the late 1970s. New Historicists would notice the timing—a criti- cal historical moment: the end of the “golden age” of capitalism follow- ing World War II. Then followed stagnation. For about 90 percent of the population real wages today are what they were in the mid-70s, despite unprecedented gains in productivity.2 The 1 percent extracted unprec- edented wealth. But for most, stagnation deepens—indebtedness balloons. In the postwar period, incomes grew; social democracy was normative, with provision of education and health care and infrastructure and spend- ing on the arts as well as on university research. That was Frye’s period: a rebellious period in which words like “liberation,” “vision,” and “imagina- tion”—Frye words—had actual social force. “The aim of education” he wrote, is “to make people maladjusted,” “to destroy their notions that what society” does makes “sense.”3 There remains a hardy group of “Frye specialists,” but it’s small and they tend to treat Frye as a humanist-philosopher—not someone whose ideas one builds upon or applies. In other words, not as a thinker to use, not as an approach for analysis more generally, in the way that one might use Bourdieu or Benjamin or Butler or Eisenstein. That is, they view Frye as an object of study rather than, as he would have preferred, as a method—as presenting a way of thinking. Their concern is naturally with questions like: Is he compatible with Derrida? (He’s not.4) Frye specialists produce

1 See the special sections on Frye of H&L Hamilton Arts & Letters, especially Adamson’s “Maladjusting Us: Frye, Education, and the Real Form of Society.” 2 See my “Fuck Austerity” for some details. 3 Quoted with discussion in my review of Northrop Frye’s Writings on Educa- tion, 379. 4 Of course, if one works at it, contacts can be made between Derrida and Frye. Derrida’s central conception is “aporia” (“pathlessness”—undecidability): not a Frygian conception. In Derrida, as in so much of deconstruction, everything is separate from everything else: “Tout autre est tout autre” in Derrida’s dictum (Aporias 73), whereas for Frye everything is connected to everything else. The French philosopher that Frye really has something in common with is Maurice

234 | Nicholson valuable work,5 but specialists tend to write for specialists. Meanwhile, the mainstream of English studies—if there is a mainstream—long ago decided that Frye and his “myth criticism” were wrong6 and has exiled him and his “myth criticism,” putting Frye in a category somewhat like Frazer or Spengler or possibly Jung—idiosyncratic intellectuals without real scholarly validity, despite flashes of brilliance. Still, the very fact that interest persists is significant. Economic stagnation, our New Historicist would notice, coincided with the tidal wave known as deconstruction, which swept through liter- ary studies by the late 1970s. Then, equally suddenly, the New Historicism (soon indistinguishable from the old historicism, with sociological/gender adaptations) arrived, displacing deconstruction from its throne. Decon- struction continues to fascinate, thanks to a cohort of graduate students trained in its outlook, students who got the last of the jobs before they dried up. But New Historicism remains hegemonic in English studies—if “English studies” can be accurately defined today by anyone. Frye is remote to graduate students or young academics (if there are any young academics, given the vanishing job market and declining English Major). Yet Frye is still there, his ideas largely unexplored, untapped. After thirty volumes of Collected Works, Uncollected Prose is full of interest even if you aren’t a Frye completist. Robert Denham’s editing is impeccable; his introduction furnishes a guide to readers who may not enjoy Frye’s plot summaries of, for instance, some of the lesser-known of . But even Frye’s notes to himself—even for a talk about the stained glass windows at Victoria College—or his detailed sum- maries of Scott—are interesting. Frye was a stylist, a talented writer who produced memorable one-liners effortlessly. His personal notes—acer- bic, sometimes scatological—have a vitality critics rarely match. Frye is unusual as a theorist because he appreciated humour and could be very funny. He understood wit not as decorative but as a means of communi- cating insight—and not about showing how clever one is. But what matters in this collection, as in Frye generally, is the “con- ceptual mythology,” as Frye himself called it. By “conceptual mythology”

Merleau-Ponty. But Merleau-Ponty, after a period of intense interest, has, like Frye, sort of faded from the scene. 5 Particularly impressive is the work of Glen Robert Gill. 6 See Robert Denham for a brief survey of critics who dismiss Frye and treat his ideas in a reductive, caricatured manner. There is something about Frye that provokes anxiety, not just hostility, as I have argued elsewhere.

Reviews | 235 Frye meant primarily the image-assumptions that people take for granted without realizing, image-assumptions that shape their thought, including the most rarefied theorists. Frye shows that thinking is not the same as abstract reasoning. People think in images, not just in abstract ideas. This thinking-in-images is the focus of his work: Frye is one of the few theorists who take imagination seriously—imagination as a form of intellection in its own right, with its own logic and forms of expression. The basis of this logic is metaphor, the identification of two different things with each other: A = B. Frye constantly worked with these metaphor-theorems. Metaphor is equivalent for imagination to the equation in mathematics: the basic means of construction and intellection, the engine of understand- ing. Literature, as the expression of metaphor, constitutes a category—a species—with recurring characteristics; hence every work of literature has more in common with every other work of literature than it has with the social context that produced it, just as birds have more in common with other birds—just as words have more in common with other words. Furthermore, just as birds come out of birds, literature comes out of lit- erature. This does not mean—of course—that literary works do not have crucial reference to the societies that created them—Frye never denied that. But it does mean that they can only be understood by relating literary works to one another—not just to the people who made them. This point has been endlessly misunderstood and caricatured, like so much of Frye’s complex, subtle, and profound thought. For Frye literature does have a social function: human liberation. We create what we live in and have the power to change it. For Frye, reality exists in time rather than in space. Hence everything is a process of trans- formation-in-time. In this respect he was close to Hegel (and to Marx— Arbeitszeit—closer than he realized). In Frye, a text is a focus of swirling forces—not a static object. The reason why every work of literature is connected to every other work of literature is, finally, that everything is connected to everything else—nothing is an isolated entity.7 As Hegel said, “The truth is the whole.” This new collection gives further reason why we need to take another look at Frye. Mervyn Nicholson Thompson Rivers University 7 It’s hard to imagine anything further from Frye than the oft-quoted dictum of Paul de Man, the high priest of deconstruction: “Nothing, whether deed, word, thought, or text ever happens in relation, positive or negative, to anything that precedes, follows, or exists elsewhere, but only as a random event whose power, like the power of death is due to the randomness of its occurrence” (122).

236 | Nicholson Works Cited

Adamson, Joseph. “Maladjusting Us: Frye, Education, and the Real Form of Society.” HA&L Hamilton Arts and Letters 8.1 (2015). De Man, Paul. “Theory of Metaphor in Rousseau.” : Vistas, Instances, Continuities. Eds. David Thorburn and Geoffrey Hartman. Ithaca: Cornell up, 1984. 113–30. Denham, Robert. “ ‘Pity the Northrop Frye Scholar’? Anatomy of Criticism Fifty Years After.” Northrop Frye: New Directions from Old. Ed. David Rampton. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2009. 15–34. Derrida, Jacques. Aporias. Trans. Thomas Dutoit. Stanford: Stanford up, 1993. Gill, Glen Robert. Northrop Frye and the Phenomenology of Myth. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006. Nicholson, Mervyn. “Fuck Austerity.” esc English Studies in Canada 39.4 (December 2013): 25–28. ———. Review of Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education. Eds. Jean O’Grady and Goldwin French (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000). His- torical Studies in Education 14.2 (Fall 2002): 379–83.

Deanne Williams. Shakespeare and the Performance of Girlhood. London and : Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. 296 pp. $105.

In her new book Deanne Williams helps to amend the traditional belief that medieval and early modern English families placed little value on girls. Indeed, while girls were certainly victimized within early modern patriarchal social structures, many enjoyed affectionate relationships with their kin. Girls were also productive, necessary members of domestic economies and, at times, at least minimally educated. More specifically, Williams corrects what seems to be an unbelievable omission: a total lack of lengthy academic studies on girlhood in William Shakespeare’s plays. Although billed as a book on Shakespeare, half of Williams’s work here draws connections to other early modern professional playwrights and, importantly, girls who wrote pieces for performance, placing Shakespeare’s work within a broader early modern conversation.

Reviews | 237 Although she insists on the unique place of girls in early modern the- atre culture, Williams provocatively suggests expanding “the figure of the girl and the subject of girlhood” in order to make both “relevant beyond the limits of gender as well as age, accessible to boys and men,” all the while preserving a sense of girlhood as a special identity for women, an identity that need not be considered temporary and that need not be forsaken as part of a healthy development into adulthood (14). Even as Williams marks out a space for the girl as special and worthy of consideration, she productively suggests that the flexible connotations of the term allow for a range of readings in dramatic work. Importantly, Williams draws attention to the sixteenth century as a period in which “girl” began to refer solely to a female child. During the medieval period, “girl” could be used to describe a child of either sex. The term could imply the expected qualities of sweetness and innocence in an early modern female child, but it also carried connotations of eroticization and sex work, a point confirmed by contemporary dictionaries and their inclusion of terms such as “harlot” and “trull” as synonyms for “girl” (5). Shakespeare’s plays appeared at a moment when the gendered identity attached to girls was in flux, especially given the early modern practice of having boy actors play girls’ and women’s roles. Working with the plas- ticity in the term “girl” encourages a more complicated understanding of Shakespeare’s characters, however. Take Joan of Arc’s position in Henry VI, Part 1, for example: Joan la Pucelle (pucelle another term that simultaneously carries connotations of innocence and experience) is given the moniker “girl” at two points in the play. One of the references to the character as a “girl” can be found as York and Warwick debate the merits of Joan’s pregnancy claim, a conversation that supports Williams’s sense of the term as both virginal and sexualized for the early modern mind (24). A consideration of this sexual duality and the gendered uncertainty inherent in the word “girl” allows for a broader, more engaging reading of the often androgynous Joan’s relationship to men and to larger structures of authority. Shakespeare includes the term approximately sixty-eight times across his various works, usually in moments “when a character’s relationship to authority is complicated or troubled,” according to Williams, who sees the playwright’s use of “girl” shift within larger changes in his social milieu (3, 4). In her initial discussion of Shakespearean texts, Williams attaches keywords to specific girl characters, the keywords also selected from each respective play. Silvia is “perverse” in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, while The Taming of the Shrew’s Kate is “froward,” and Romeo and Juliet ’s heroine

238 | Schechter is “wayward” (43). All three terms are associated with religious disruption and upheaval, a point that Williams opens up in somewhat limited ways. Most exciting in her work on Shakespeare is Williams’s discussion of Richard II’s Isabelle de France. Generally staged as an adult woman, despite the fact that the historical figure was a child who married at seven, Isabelle has overwhelmingly been treated by critics as an imaginative combination of Richard II’s first wife, Anne of Bohemia, and Isabelle, the child bride (52–53). Williams advances an engaging possibility, however, asking read- ers to consider the character as in line with the historical queen. Thinking through Isabelle’s position as a girl minimizes the modern preoccupation with distinguishing childhood from adulthood, simultaneously granting a better sense of agency to the medieval girl child (albeit, the girl child from a politically elite family). Analyzing the character as a child also redirects attention toward the historical Richard’s interest in French cul- ture at a moment when he felt keenly a need to present England as the dominant nation (57–58). At the same time, Williams surmises that the French might have been “gratified” to see a child taking on the role of the English queen (58). Importantly, the author connects girlhood to more general issues of performance, be it the character who plays an instrument or performs a role in the course of the dramatic work, who models her behaviour on past exempla, or who generally carries herself in specific, culturally compre- hensible ways. The lute becomes an important component of Williams’s analysis, for example, as the instrument immediately signaled breeding and education, simultaneously suggesting sexual licence. Williams notes that both sisters in Taming of the Shrew find ways to sideline their music lessons, and the author tracks crucial changes from the first quarto to the 1623 Folio Hamlet, detailing how each text describes Ophelia’s entrance in act 4, scene 5. While the first quarto instructs, “Enter Ofelia playing on a Lute, and her hair down, singing,” the second simply directs, “Enter Ophelia,” and the third shifts noticeably to “Enter Ophelia distracted,” or insane (73). Williams argues convincingly that the lute grounds Ophelia in this scene and gives credence to her thoughts, which are often treated by critics as somewhat incomprehensible (73). Read as a girl with a lute, then, Ophelia becomes a more capable, intelligent character, one who is put in an unfamiliar, dangerous situation (73). Williams also takes up the issue of Queen Elizabeth I’s tumultuous childhood and dramas that use her girlhood as inspiration, particularly Thomas Heywood’s If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody, and she argues that Heywood helps to develop a sense of excitement about narratives that

Reviews | 239 focus on girls who experience and ultimately overcome turmoil. Although Williams creatively connects Elizabeth to Shakespeare’s later heroines— Marina in Pericles and Perdita in The Winter’s Tale, for example—her arguments in this section seem less tenable (or perhaps more tangen- tial). As Williams moves into the second and third major sections of her book, her arguments broaden, however, effectively shedding light on girls’ involvement in court masques and closet dramas. Shakespeare’s chang- ing treatment of girls in his plays is then set clearly within larger cultural shifts and political interests. Williams’s discussion of Samuel Daniel’s Stuart court masque Tethys’ Festival gives a clear sense of Princess Elizabeth’s involvement in various performances (both as a patron and as a performer), and the author offers lucid connections between specific plays and the question of Elizabeth’s future marriage, also drawing attention to the princess’s participation in the more general construction of seventeenth-century girlhood. ’s Comus is the point of entry for an investigation into debates about girls’ involvement in masques produced for the Stuart court. The heroine of the masque evades the advances of Comus, engaging in an argument that is nominally concerned with chastity and lust, but, according to Wil- liams, this struggle also indirectly supports a history of girl performers. Williams’s final chapters on Lady Rachel Fane and the Cavendish sisters are important contributions to scholarship on the history of dramatists. Fane’s domestic productions, particularly May Masque, reconfigure tra- ditional masque culture and aesthetic to highlight the home as a site that offers females more visibility and action, and Williams draws attention to Fane’s oeuvre as a response to Shakespeare’s work. In Williams’s discus- sion of The Concealed Fancies Lady Jane Cavendish and Lady Elizabeth Brackley are presented as co-authors who take up relevant political issues and creatively imagine an escape from what is essentially their Civil War house arrest. Like Fane, the Cavendish sisters draw on Shakespeare’s work for inspiration, giving girl characters more agency and subjectivity in the process. Importantly, Williams sees these later girl authors as “[engaging] with and [contributing] to the culture that produces them” (207), increased autonomy the net result of this dramatic work. In short, Williams adds valuable information to the history of girls and performance—in medieval entertainments and community festivals, in convent productions, in court masques and closet dramas, and as play- wrights and public performers on the Restoration stage. Her book would be of interest and use to any scholar in the field of early modern gender and

240 | Schechter drama, but the writing is accessible and clear enough for general readers and undergraduate students as well. Laura Schechter University of Alberta

Armand Garnet Ruffo, Norval Morrisseau: Man Changing into Thunderbird. Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre, 2014. 320 pp. $32.95.

Perhaps it should not have come as a surprise that the growing presence of indigenous people in Canadian cultural and academic life would not only add new perspectives to scholarly discourse but also challenge the very notion of what constitutes scholarship. This is certainly the case with Armand Garnet Ruffo’s Norval Morrisseau: Man Changing into Thunder- bird, a learned biography that does not include a single citation and tests the distinction between the factual and the fictive and the empirical and the mythical. An Anishnaabe from the northern Ontario town of Chapleau, Ruffo is a poet-academic who has made a reputation for himself primarily with biographical long poems about figures like the conservationist and nature writer Grey Owl, the Apache political leader Geronimo, and now the iconic Anishnaabe painter Morrisseau. His best known book is arguably Grey Owl: The Mystery of Archie Belaney, in which Ruffo documents the relationship between the Englishman who pretended to be indigenous and his own family, the Espaniels. In terms of form, though, Grey Owl is a traditional text that borrows heavily from published biographies of the subject. However, this is not what Ruffo does in Norval Morrisseau, which is not only (mostly) in prose but also eschews empirically-based Western research methods in favour of an “Anishinaabe epistemology” (3) that embodies other ways of knowing. Ruffo makes his perspective explicit from the outset. He explains that the impetus for his study of Morrisseau was the 2005 invitation that he received from the art curator Greg Hill to produce a text for the cata- logue of the National Gallery of Canada’s retrospective Norval Morrisseau: Shaman Artist. Since at the time Ruffo knew little about “the acclaimed Ojibway painter,” he pondered the offer and “waited. Waited for something to tell me either to take on the project or let it go” (1). That all changed one fateful night. While in bed, through “a combination of dreaming and remembering,” he thought he heard voices, voices that “had come from

Reviews | 241 the old flat-roof house of my childhood in the north. Perhaps from my mother and the neighbours who had dropped by for a visit, a chat, a drink” (1, 2). Upon reflecting on what he believed the voices had imparted to him, Ruffo deduced that Morrisseau’s “experiences, while extraordinary in their own right because of his unique gifts, were fundamentally connected to something larger than himself. I realized that Morrisseau’s life was rep- resentative of the profound upheaval that had taken place in the lives of Native people across the country” (2). Consequently, the significance of the painter’s achievement could only be captured from an Anishinaabe “mythic worldview” (5), which is what Ruffo proceeded to do. In his book, Ruffo traces the life and career of Norval Morrisseau, Copper Thunderbird (circa 1932 to 2007), from his birth in an isolated Anishinaabe community in northern Ontario, through his emergence as the founder of the Woodlands School of art, to his apotheosis as one of Canada’s most celebrated artists. Since Morrisseau had no formal train- ing in art, many critics have been perplexed by his achievement. Ruffo, however, has a culturally-informed explanation: Morrisseau is a shaman- artist. In fact, he is not only a shaman-artist but comes from a long line of shaman-artists. As Ruffo has the painter explain to a client, “ ‘All the pictures that you bought from me are taken from the dreams of my grand- father.’ ” Or as Ruffo elaborates, “Whatever good fortune [Morrisseau] has he credits to his grandfather, Potan, the man who raised him in a world of manitous and demigods” (64). Ruffo goes so far as to state that by the time Morrisseau has his major success in the early 1960s, he “firmly believes that he is a born artist and cannot learn his kind of painting from anyone—as the sacred drum arises from the earth, his paintings arise from the old sto- ries, and he is merely the instrument of their creation, the drummer” (84). Again, the key to understanding the artist lies within Anishinaabe culture. There is no question that his mythic framework enables Ruffo to situate Morrisseau and his work in a configuration where they have seldom been placed before. This is most evident in a chapter entitled “Man Changing into Thunderbird (Transmigration),” in which Ruffo uses a combination of prose and poetry to convey the complexity and evolution of Morrisseau’s signature 1977 painting Man Changing into Thunderbird (200–08). Indeed, considering the impact of the poetic sequence, one is not surprised that Ruffo would decide to produce “a companion text” to his biography of Morrisseau, “a collection of ekphrastic poems based on the artist’s paint- ings” (5) called The Thunderbird Poems (Madeira Park: Harbour, 2015). Yet Ruffo’s approach in Norval Morrisseau is not without complications. Although Ruffo appears to rely on numerous interviews with Morrisseau,

242 | Braz his family, and associates, he does not identify a single one. Even when he quotes printed material, which he does frequently, he does not provide any bibliographical data, beyond a short list in his acknowledgments of works that “have been important sources of information” (306). Thus it would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, for anyone else to verify whether Ruffo’s claims about Morrisseau are warranted in light of his sources. Actually, since the modes of knowing that inform both Morris- seau’s art and Ruffo’s interpretation of it are purportedly based on dreams, there just seems to be no way in which they can be contested. There are two other aspects of Ruffo’s portrayal of Morrisseau that are problematic: the painter’s relationship with his family and his apparent laxness about the authorship of some of the work that bears his name. Ruffo discusses at length Morrisseau’s chronic alcoholism and other forms of substance abuse, particularly in order to underline his phenomenal prolificness even during periods when he is often intoxicated. However, Ruffo does not dwell much on the paradox that someone who generates so much money appears to be indifferent to the fact that his wife, Harriet Kakegamic, and their seven children spend much of their lives in extreme poverty. The impression one gets is that Morrisseau is a genius, a shaman- artist, and is entitled to behaviour that society would not accept from anyone else. Similarly, Ruffo does not seem overly troubled by Morrisseau’s apparent sanction of works attributed to him that many people believe are produced by others, notably his legion of apprentices. Ultimately, in Norval Morrisseau: Man Changing into Thunder- bird, Ruffo makes a persuasive case that that his eponymous subject is an “Ojibway renaissance man, a painter, writer, collector of his people’s lore, preserver of language and culture” (74). Yet, given the absence of a bibliographic apparatus, one simply has to accept at face value Ruffo’s assertions that his book is based on Anishinaabe scholarship rather than being the author’s impressionistic take on the painter. Moreover, Ruffo himself reveals doubts about the biographical thoroughness of his study. It is certainly telling that Ruffo ends his manuscript with “About Norval Morrisseau” (303–04), a two-page capsule biography of the subject of the book. Whatever else his closing note may do, it appears to question whether the text proper fully conveys Morrisseau’s life narrative. Albert Braz University of Alberta

Reviews | 243 Melba Cuddy-Keane, Adam Hammond, and Alexandra Peat. : Keywords. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2014. xviii, 266. $112.95.

Modernism: Keywords opens with a direct gesture to its predecessor, Raymond Williams’s 1976 Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Soci- ety, while also marking out its principal differences: the narrower focus on modernism, the integration of digital technologies used in a manner loosely akin to Moretti’s distant reading, and a rich hyperlinking (in print) of the thematic nodes of each alphabetized entry. That is, the print book adopts the curatorial and editorial elucidation of each topic that would be expected from a tertiary source while drawing inspiration from the humanities computing scenarios in which alternate relations might emerge through digital technologies. The accomplishment here is akin to the pros- pects of the Linked Modernisms project that is being developed from the metadata of the Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism. The comparison is not opportunistic. It points to the most valuable element of Modern- ism: Keywords: the relational work it is likely to provoke as readers follow its various suggested connections through overlapping keywords across the book. The prospect of a modernist “choose your own adventure” scenario seems too good to be true, and the invitation to the reader’s agency calls back to later works like Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet or Julio Cortázar’s Rayuela—again, it is not an opportunistic comparison, pointing as it does to readerly organization of narrative and complex interpretive responsibilities that shape the relations among the texts. The reader may move across the volume or dip into specific keyword entries, but in each entry there are gestures to further work through the specific invitations to follow more deeply into the scholarly references or across to other entries. For example, the keyword entry on “Sentimental, Sentimentality” points in its closing to other linked entries, most productively to “Form, Formalism” and “Woman, New Woman” but also in its references out to other important relationships to the Harlem Renaissance through Alain Locke’s “Enter the New Negro” and the High Modernists via E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, and D.H. Lawrence. An additional benefit of this associa- tive method, or what would have called “spiral form” (yet again, a purposive gesture), is that it draws in a cast of figures too often sidelined from the New Modernist Studies. While Ezra Pound, H.G. Wells, Woolf, , Joseph Conrad, Forster, and T.S. Eliot are ubiquitous across the entries, there are also passing inclusions of the too often over-

244 | Gifford looked H. D. in “Reality, Realism”; John Cowper Powys in “Queer, Gay” and “Shock, Shell Shock”; and Mulk Raj Anand in “Personality, Impersonality.” More extensive recuperations across several entries occur for Eugene Jolas, Robert Graves, Zora Neale Hurston, W. E. B. Du Bois, Laura Riding, and Jean Toomer while Rebecca West, , I. A. Richards, and Mina Loy are as extensively integrated across the volume as any of the High Modernists. Cuddy-Keane, Hammond, and Peat describe the method for develop- ing each quasi-encyclopedic keyword entry by recognizing “Research on such a grand scale depends on massive resources” (xv) such as online digi- tal repositories of primary texts such as digitized book projects (ranging from Project Gutenberg through ), historical periodical collections in proprietary and open access resources (jstor to the Mod- ernist Journals Project and beyond), and the expected scholarly resources of bibliographies, repositories of secondary scholarship, and traditional print library holdings. The implications are akin to Moretti’s distant read- ing in that searches across such a large pool of resources can enable con- nections and understandings unavailable to a single reader in a lifetime of reading, but the forms of distant reading through digital technologies for which Moretti’s project has garnered wide attention do not play the same kind of role here. Nevertheless, the curated nature of the volume, reflecting the care and attention of expert readers in the field, means that readers are invited to connect entries in unexpected ways drawn as much from word frequencies as from the interpretive expertise of the project authors. While the entry on “Difficulty, Obscurity” points in unsurpris- ing ways to connections with other entries on “Coterie Bloomsbury” and “Highbrow, Middlebrow, Lowbrow,” it is more exciting to find “Form, For- malism” engendering connections to “Rhythm” and “Advertising” or for “God, Gods” to point to “Hygiene” and “Personality, Impersonality.” To consider the Journal of Social Hygiene in relation to “Fascism,” “Race,” and “Woman, New Woman” is to be expected, but the gesture of concerns with religious faith across such authors as C. S. Lewis, F. Scott Fitzgerald, , T. S. Eliot, Djuna Barnes, Samuel Beckett, and so forth thickens with the book’s linking of such figurations across the Harlem Renaissance, what Amy Clukey has called “plantation modernism,” and more general paganism. The absence of the occult is a bit of a surprise here, although it is perhaps implicit in the inclusion of W. B. Yeats’s “Pan.” As I have commented in another review, the most persuasive and exciting element of Modernism: Keywords is its insistence on contiguities between diverse topical areas in the New Modernist Studies such that “Fas-

Reviews | 245 cism” must look carefully at its overlapping interests with “Woman, New Woman” or “Race” but also more pointedly to W. H. Auden’s conflation of the anarchist Dada and Communist with the “irrational” atroci- ties of Fascism (88) and Du Bois’s sense of Fascism as force in the physical state forms of Mussolini and Franco as well as its spiritual manifestation in American Fundamentalism. By setting Ernest Hemingway and Woolf beside each other as critics of Fascism, other comparisons are invited as well. This insistence on connections and a hypertextual approach to the relations among entries in the print product is most overt in the “High- brow, Middlebrow, Lowbrow” entry. By setting The Nation and Punch in relation to Harper’s and Life while organizing the differences among Q. D. Leavis, Leonard Woolf, and Arnold Bennett, the authors point to the impossibility of separating these into unrelated areas of interest. This is important to what Erica Brown and Mary Grover have called the battle of the brows, but it also emphasizes the inescapably overlapping nature of these areas just as the volume as a whole argues for the network of rela- tions and influences among entries ranging from “Avant-Garde” to “Primi- tive.” While noting that The Little Review could cast aspersions on the low brow or mainstream, it “printed lists of best sellers in its early issues” (18) just as Publisher’s Weekly included Conrad, Eugene O’Neill, West, Woolf, Hemingway, and Lawrence on its bestseller lists. This propinquity between the high brow and low brow is a particularly persuasive instance of the overall gesture of the collection as a whole: that Fascism and democracy not only occupy overlapping times and places with adjacent concerns and rhetorics but that they are also bound up with akin aesthetic categories of taste, the epistemological categories of “Reality, Realism” and Fantasy, and social categories of “Queer, Gay” and “Negro, New Negro.” The insistence on connected discussions drives the work here in a way that would not be possible were it to serve a single interpretive agenda or thesis. The limitations of space mean that Surrealism and Dada do not have their own entries, nor are any national schools given priority, and “Democ- racy” and “Fascism” do not find companion entries for materialism or socialism, even though all of these appear in discussion. The index is in some instances slim, with Dada and Surrealism in the book but not the index or “anarchic” twice with no indexical gesture to . However, the method of the book means that many figures typically left out of such surveys have increased roles, as noted above, for too often overlooked authors, and the index proper is supplemented by a highly suggestive sec- ond index of only the thirty-nine keywords (and their cognates) across the book as a whole (263–66). The fact that the keyword index of thirty-nine

246 | Gifford terms occupies four pages gives ample proof to the underlying rationale for the book: that modernism exists as a network of interconnected relations among often disparate or contradictory categories, concepts, movements, and tastes. The primary audience of the volume is sure to be undergraduate stu- dents who will benefit from the concision of brief entries summarizing complex concepts in modernist studies and secondary references that open broader discussions. However, the book’s lateral movement across topical fields will be useful to graduate students and researchers as well. In many instances this will be less based on its tertiary format that makes information and references available, many of which may already be widely recognized, but rather for precisely the disruptions its connections posit. When “Shock, Shell Shock” sends the researcher not only the expected work of W. H. R. Rivers but also to Dada, surrealism, and the ideologically- fraught “Hygiene,” the fact of these connections may prompt the totally unexpected to begin taking place. Everyone at work in the New Modernist Studies should spend time exploring this book, not only for the pleasure of its “choose your own Modernism” but for the other modernisms and modernist others it makes us confront and that it encourages the reader to deploy in her or his own work. James Gifford Fairleigh Dickinson University

he following cluster of three reviews of recent studies related Tto the areas of life writing, appear in esc in simultaneous publication with their online publication on the website of the Life Writing and Graduate Student New Scholar Network (sns) of the International Auto/Biography Association (iaba). Thesns , launched in September 2014, is a network of emerging scholars dedicated to facilitating intercollegiate and interna- tional discourse and collaboration in life writing practice and scholarship. Since then, the Public Dialogues interview series, Conversations blog, an active social media presence, and a series of roundtable events have estab- lished a growing, diverse fellowship of emerging scholars interested in all aspects of life writing. The sns network has launched Writing Back, an interdisciplinary review series focusing on book-length academic schol- arship related to life writing. In accordance with the network’s mandate,

Reviews | 247 Writing Back seeks to introduce the voices of emerging scholars in con- versations that revolve around life narrative research and practice, as well as promote engaged and critical readership of these topics among a wider audience. These three reviews by new scholars Samantha Balzer, Richard Moran, and Sarah McRae are the first sns network reviews to appear in esc, and do so on the initiative of Orly Lael Netzer and Meredith Snyder, two of the sns contacts for Canada and the Americas. Cecily Devereux University of Alberta

Anna Poletti and Julie Rak, editors. Identity Technologies: Constructing the Self Online. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2014. 286 pp. $34.95.

The collected essays in Identity Technologies provide not only a timely examination of contemporary digital identity practice but serve as “an experiment in interdisciplinary dialogue” (Poletti and Rak 3). Contributors come from diverse academic backgrounds including (but not limited to) auto/biography and new media studies, borrowing theories and method- ologies from each other’s fields as means of interrogating the potentially limiting assumptions of their respective areas of expertise. The volume’s commitments are largely concerned with interdisciplinarity: to demon- strate how auto/biography studies’ recent troubling of notions of subjec- tivity and concern with how the “self” is produced through representa- tion (5) could nuance work from new media studies and to indicate how auto/biography studies might benefit from imitating the work of new media theorists in their study of “non-narrative forms of identity work” (7), which could rectify auto/biography studies’ previous tendency to focus on those digital genres that most resemble offline autobiographical genres (for example, text-heavy blogs their predecessors online diaries). Recur- ring concerns in this collection include the situatedness of digital identity within “offline” geographical, economic, and racialized contexts; how the “affordances” of digital interfaces influence the kinds of writing—and by extension, the kinds of “selves”—that are produced; and how the formation online identity is inextricable from digital community and the technologies that enable and direct communities’ formation. Contributors demonstrate how attention to the offline contexts of digi- tal identity work can add nuance to analyses of how online sociality fits into

248 | McRae subject formation overall, an approach that poses productive challenges for auto/biography studies as a field heavy in the text-centric approaches familiar to English departments. Several authors in this work (Kennedy, Cover, Nakamura, Gray) contend that, where possible, scholarship should consider the offline contexts of digital identity construction. Online and offline selves are not separate entities; rather, they are continuous, mutu- ally influential, and involve many of the same self-fashioning practices insofar as both online and offline performances operate in response to the “ongoing cultural demand that we process our selves and our actions into coherence, intelligibility, and recognizability” (Cover 56). The authors in this collection criticize the tendency in scholarship to focus on the novelty of the technologies themselves, a tendency that promotes the misconcep- tion that communication technologies are producers of effects, rather than “cultural elements of the complexity of human interactions” (Gray 171). Authors in this volume set a precedent for how to read closely in online environments, a practice that must take into consideration the various contexts and contingencies that contribute to online identity performance. The concept of “affordances,” which is key to this collection, refers to those properties (overt and covert) of a digital interface that determine how it will be used and, consequently, the kinds of identities that will be enacted using a particular social platform in the context of computerized environ- ments. Essays in Identity Technologies (notably those by Gregg, Morrison, Rivard, and McNeill) are nuanced by an awareness of how the tools and functions built into the platforms we use impact the character of our self-disclosure, and therefore shape the selves we create. This concept is most explicitly referred to in Aimée Morrison’s study of the history of the Facebook status in its various iterations over time, analyzing how subtle changes in how the empty field coaxes information affects the kind of updates and narratives that are registered. This volume contains several essays about digital communities (Gray, Banner, Micalizzi, Bouclin, Kennedy). One insight that emerges is that digital identity develops in relation to digital community in ways that are continuous with offline communities: we find that identity in the context of digital communities is a result of both “interior process” and “relation- ships that contribute to the creation of an interwoven fabric of ontological stories” (Micalizzi 218). However, authors are cognizant that digital com- munities come with affordances and interest specific to their platforms, and which move subjectivities in often new directions, as we see with Banner’s examination of how online self-monitoring communities (often health-focused) have the effect of “making the subject informatic” (198).

Reviews | 249 The collection features fourteen essays and reflections, which are cat- egorized by theme under four headings: “Foundations,” “Identity Affor- dances,” “Mediated Communities,” and “Reflections.” Some of the entries are reprints of key essays related to digital identity: Helen Kennedy’s work on anonymity (and lack thereof) in personal home pages, Mary L. Gray’s study of how digital resources influence rural lgbtq youth, and Lisa Naka- mura’s “Cyberrace.” Many of the essays employ case studies where the objects analyzed tend to be either digital platforms or groups of users on those platforms (or both). In addition to entries on online identity performance in general (Nakamura) and on social-networking sites (Cover), many of the essays are case studies. Topics include personal home pages created as part of a women’s distance-learning course (Kennedy), “Spousebusting” sur- veillance technologies (Gregg), Facebook (Morisson), national memory/ history archives (Rivard), “six-word memoir” microblogging community (McNeill), lifelogging and health-tracking technologies (Banner), perinatal death mourning forum communities (Micalizzi), a Montreal-based plat- form created for and by the city’s homeless community (Bouclin). Smith and Watson’s “Digital Toolkit” and Poletti and Rak’s introduction both balance a summary of the current state of the study of digital identity with predictions and suggestions for future directions. The future also looms large in the collection’s concluding reflections by Philippe Lejeune and Lauren Berlant, who discuss the future of auto/biography studies, autobiography in general, and new directions for academic research and how it is disseminated. The collection reflects a recent turn in auto/biography studies that is also evident in a 2015 special edition of Biography, titled Online Lives 2.0. Both collections of essays use case studies and interdisciplinary methods, and the editors of Online Lives 2.0 propose that scholars in auto/biography studies have much to gain by “drawing on the qualitative and quantitative work of our colleagues in other disciplines” (McNeil and Zuern xxxix). Although the individual contributions to Identity Technologies will no doubt be useful for scholars interested in the specific cases they describe, the book as a whole provides a sense of future directions in interdisci- plinary scholarship in digital identity. In addition to Smith and Watson’s exhaustive “digital toolkit,” which features topics and questions that could facilitate productive discussion in the interdisciplinary study of online identity, the rest of the essays collected in this volume will likely stimulate future scholarship in this field through their function as examples of the

250 | McRae kinds of theoretical frameworks and methodologies that can illuminate digital identity work. Sarah McRae University of Alberta

Work Cited

McNeill, Laurie, and John David Zuern. “Online Lives 2.0: Introduction.” Online Lives 2.0. Eds. Laurie McNeill and John David Zuern. Special issue of Biography 38.2 (Spring 2015): v–xlvi.

Claudia Malacrida. A Special Hell: Institutional Life in Alberta’s Eugenic Years. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015. 302 pp. $32.95.

A Special Hell is an important contribution to scholarship on eugenics that both supplements and extends our understanding of the broad spectrum of eugenics in Canada. Malacrida’s primary interest is in what she calls “a passive form of eugenics,” namely the “lifelong internment of ‘mental defec- tives’ ” (4) at the Michener Centre, a provincially-run institution located outside of Red Deer, Alberta. Although described by the province as a centre for “the residential care and training of mentally defective Alber- tans” (3), Malacrida’s analysis leads her to conclude that Michener is more akin to a “gulag” (30) or prison than a care facility. Founded in 1923 as the Provincial Training School, at its peak in 1970 the Centre housed upwards of twenty-three hundred inmates. It is no surprise, Malacrida argues, that the 1920s and 1970s are important in the history of the Michener Centre as well as Alberta’s Sexual Sterilization Act, enacted in 1928 and repealed in 1972. A Special Hell expands our understanding of eugenics beyond ster- ilization alone, reminding readers that institutionalization is both driven by eugenic logic and itself a form of eugenic programming. The text also decentres sterilization as the eugenic practice in twenti- eth-century Canada: although medical experimentation and sterilization appear in Malacrida’s study, they are not the focal point until chapters 8 and 9. Such an organizational choice reinforces Malacrida’s argument that institutionalization and the dehumanization that accompanies it were important preconditions for Alberta’s Sexual Sterilization Act. Malacrida notes that social reformers lobbied heavily for eugenic sterilization because

Reviews | 251 “segregation was not adequate in containing the threat of degeneration” (28). It strikes me as surprising that, although this text places institutional segregation and sexual sterilization on a continuum of eugenic practices in twentieth-century Alberta, Malacrida maintains the distinction between passive and active eugenics. These terms distinguish structural practices through which “potentially ‘bad breeders’ are removed from society and the sexual arena to prevent breeding” (63) from medical interventions that cause individual infertility, respectively. I wonder if Malacrida’s argument might be made even more provocative through terminology that connects the eugenic practices of segregation and sterilization rather than distin- guishing between them. Divided into ten chapters and two appendices, A Special Hell offers a detailed history that clearly demonstrates the depth of Malacrida’s research. Chapter 1, “Introducing the Michener Centre,” provides readers with some general academic work on institutionalization, engaging most closely with Foucault’s theories of surveillance and discipline as tools that construct the normal and abnormal subjects. Through concepts including normalization, medicalization, and the development of the professional (a series of terms that will likely feel familiar to academic readers), Malacrida outlines the birth of the Michener Centre. A Special Hell engages closely with the specificities of one institution as a reflection on institutionaliza- tion as a general practice. Drawing such connections, Malacrida reminds us that “the benign motives described in the institution’s history were firmly embedded within broader and more draconian discourses concern- ing the segregation, devaluation, and eugenicization of people who were deemed to be deficient” (5). Language is a primary point of consideration for Malacrida, and this book opens with a note on language that precedes the text. Here, the author explains her use of historical terms such as mental defective, feeble-minded, idiot, moral taint, and moron without scare quotes “so as not to whitewash the violence embedded in much of the historical language” (np). Language and its companion, silence, are central not only to Michener’s history but also to our current understandings of institutionalization. Through the text Malacrida offers many terms to describe people living in Michener, including inmates, children (in a footnote Malacrida explains that the term “child” was applied to any resident regardless of age), residents, survivors, and prisoners. The title of chapter 2, “Entering the Gulag, Leaving the World,” is similarly worth dwelling on for a moment. This title positions the world of the institution and the world beyond it as entirely separate from each other. Malacrida’s text complicates this divide, reminding the

252 | Balzer reader that they flourished precisely because of connections between the institution and the world adjacent to it, most clearly because the Centre required a substantial amount of direct and indirect labour. Yet the sepa- ration of the institution from the “World,” A Special Hell explains, was often utilized by Michener employees to establish and maintain extreme levels of control within the facility. Characterizing Michener as a gulag, Malacrida actively reminds the reader of the deeply political implications of this research. A Special Hell is an “emancipatory history that comes from the positions or standpoints of survivors” (243). Perhaps the most valuable element of this text is Malacrida’s primary research, namely the first-hand accounts of Michener’s architecture and the interviews she has conducted with nearly two dozen survivors, families of former residents, and former employees. The material from these interviews is extensive and wide-ranging. The notable exception here concerns sterilization: as Malacrida notes, survivors and the family of former residents often don’t know or refuse to disclose personal sterilization history. A Special Hell details the range of violence residents experienced at Michener. With the exception of chapter 5, the middle chapters of Malac- rida’s text focus on specific forms of violence, including acts of dehuman- ization, quotidian violence, extreme physical and sexual violence, exploita- tion and inhuman labour practices, and exposure to the Eugenics Board. Each form of violence experienced by inmates at the institution entailed a bodily intervention: “From clothing to haircuts to food choices to den- tal extractions, routine institutional practices conveyed a clear message about the inhumanity of residents and telegraphed that inmates’ bodies were not their own but instead belonged to the institution, which had the right to do to those bodies whatever it deemed necessary or conve- nient” (88). Convenience for workers, Malacrida reminds us many times, is consistently prioritized over care of the patient. The author draws this conclusion from a wide range of resources and archival materials, includ- ing patient files and reports written by Michener staff; correspondence between staff and the families of patients; reports from local news outlets; historical and contemporary provincial documents concerning the treat- ment of persons with disabilities; scholarly work; tours of the Centre; and perhaps most centrally a series of interviews with Michener survivors, their families, and former employees. The interviews are also the most powerful critical resources in A Special Hell, and ultimately Malacrida’s concerns about institutionalization are established strongest through the words of ex-inmates and their families.

Reviews | 253 Working with survivor testimony and against official historical docu- ments, Malacrida’s text speaks back to the dehumanizing function of the institution. In short, A Special Hell participates in the important political process of rehumanizing ex-residents, whose humanity was stripped away through normal institutional practices and extraordinary acts of violence. As an emancipatory history, interviewees “name hurts, describe exploita- tion, acknowledge power relations, and remember history as it occurred for those most oppressed by it, rather than reproducing memories that serve dominant interests” (243). I understand Malacrida’s participation in this process, and the text that results from her impressive level of multi- modal research, as an act of allyship. A Special Hell names perpetrators of extraordinary violence when possible, but it also reminds us that per- petration is complicated and that the complicity of the general public of Red Deer (and Alberta) helped Michener thrive for decades. As Malacrida puts it, ordinary and extraordinary violences were “permitted to unfold precisely because these children did not have allies outside to expose the institution and make it accountable for its actions” (58). A Special Hell is, broadly speaking, a contemporary expression of solidarity with former residents of the Michener Centre. A Special Hell does not relegate the history of institutionalization to the past. Contemporary discrimination against disabled Albertans and “the threat of continued or renewed institutionalization” (233) are central con- cerns for Malacrida and her work. Michener may not admit new patients at this point in its history, but “leaving the bricks and mortar of the place standing means that there remains a too-easy alternative in the form of reinstitutionalization when the will and resources to support community living fall short” (231). In the final pages, then, Malacrida returns to the importance of the structure of the institution. Because economic argu- ments so often motivate eugenic projects, from segregation to sterilization, and because discrimination of disabled people remains today, Malacrida makes clear that to leave the architecture of Michener intact means to make reinstitutionalization too easy and too likely to recur in the future. A Special Hell, which begins with the story of this specific institution, con- cludes with a call (indeed, an insistence) to bring about the destruction of all institutions like Michener. Samantha Balzer University of Alberta

254 | Balzer Gillian Whitlock, Postcolonial Life Narratives: Testimonial Transactions. Oxford: Oxford up, 2015. Oxford Studies in Postcolonial Literatures Series. 242 pp.

The introduction of Gillian Whitlock’sPostcolonial Life Narratives: Tes- timonial Transactions immediately alerts readers to its impressive scope. The book successfully draws connections between life writing produced and read in disparate places at disparate times by disparate audiences in order to demonstrate the ways in which life writing can articulate the impact of conflicted human subjecthood on bodies, lives, and peoples. The book is divided into two parts along a temporal logic, but variations on the term “divided” are inappropriate descriptors for Whitlock’s text, given its constant attention to unexpected connections between groups of texts. Part 1 focuses on what we might broadly call “pre-contemporary” case studies. Chapter 1 traces and compares the textual histories of two life narratives published in 1789: Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative and Watkin Tench’s Narrative of the Expedition to Botany Bay. While the two texts are written from starkly different perspectives, those of an emanci- pated slave (Equiano) and a British Marine Officer (Tench), both “offered an autobiographical account that gave witness to the previously unseen, and in turn called upon the reader to bear witness to unknown and scarcely imaginable scenes from the ‘New World’ ” (16). In chapter 2, Whitlock compares the two texts from chapter 1 to a 1796 letter from an Australian indigenous man, Woollawarre Bennelong, and argues that, similar to the first two narratives, the letter testifies to the individuality of Australian indigenous people and the dynamics of first contact. Chapter 3 analyzes Saartjie Bartman’s (famed as the “Hottentot Venus”) 1810 argument that the “freak shows” in which she was featured were not exploitative but, rather, reflected her free will. This decision, in Whitlock’s estimation, gives us “insight into humanizing discourses in colonial modernity” (36) because she refuses to be subject to discourses that frame humanitarian actions as necessarily compassionate (40). In chapter 4, Whitlock contrasts Mary Prince’s 1837 History with Equiano and Bennelong’s texts, arguing that the Prince’s text “reveals how gender and sexuality constrain the voice, embodiment, and agency that become available for women in the slave narrative” (46). She further argues that Baartman and Prince’s texts indicate that cultural discourses limit the extent to which women’s bodies are legible in testimonial narra- tive. Chapter 5 turns to Susanna Moodie’s Roughing it in the Bush, written between 1832 and 1852. Moodie’s humanitarian sensibility and white civil-

Reviews | 255 ity reflect on her portraits of indigenous women, “resulting in a portrait of the noble savage, which is implicated in discourses of indigenous peoples as a dying race” (56). Chapter 6 reads what is usually identified as the first autobiography by a Canadian indigenous man, The Life, History, and Travels of Kah-ge-ga-gah-Bowh (1847). Kah-ge-ga-gah-Bowh (known in English as George Copway) testifies to traditional practices and mobilizes the Christian language of suffering to demonstrate the negative impact of the eradication of these practices by settler colonialism. Chapter 7 takes stock of the whole of Part 1 and Rousseau’s into conversation with these case studies. Here, Whitlock accurately summarizes Part 1’s accomplishments in mapping the opportunities provided by life writing and suggesting the various texts’ ideological (humanitarian, democratic, and recognition-based) proximities to one another. Part 2 consists of four chapters that tackle contemporary case studies. Chapter 8 considers texts produced in the aftermath of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (trc), anchoring its argument in Antjie Krog’s trilogy of memoirs collectively known as Country of My Skull. Using Sara Ahmed’s theory of economy of affect, Whitlock demonstrates that a memoir can become an authoritative account of bearing witness at the trc but can be co-opted and appropriated by well-meaning “ethical engagement” when it is circulated. As always, Whitlock draws connec- tions here to earlier chapters, indicating that Krog’s testimony, like Prince’s and Baartman’s, uses the “resources that were available to resist the gift of benevolent recognition” (93). Chapter 9 reads representations of Dian Fossey as “gorilla girl” against testimonies of rape warfare in Central Africa. Fossey’s work, particularly Gorillas in the Mist (1983), contests speciesism and brings gorillas into “ ‘civilization’ ” (120), suggesting that their lives are grievable. But accounts of Fossey’s life also tend to obfuscate issues of rape and gendered violence. In total, then, Fossey’s corpus refigures the limits of recognition and speakability to include non-human lives but re-inscribes the unspeakability of gendered violence. Chapter 10 is centred around Sally Morgan’s 1987 “autobiographical account of indigeneity and belonging, My Place” (136). Whitlock places this text, which speaks to the trauma of the Australian indigenous Stolen Generations, in conversation with residential school testimony from Can- ada, Dalit testimony, and the South African testimonies cited in chapter 8, in order to question why some texts inspire conversation in disparate places and analyze the ways in which indigenous life narratives reckon with truth and reconciliation discourses. Whitlock ultimately argues that indigenous testimonial discourses tend to be appropriated for processes of

256 | Moran national renewal, resulting in particular kinds of settler shame and affect, but also testify to the enduring fact that “Indigenous peoples are […] vic- tims of benevolence” (162). Chapter 11 discusses the ends of testimony via a reading of refugee and asylum seeker testimony. She ultimately argues, using Edwidge Danticat’s Brother, I’m Dying (2007) as a case study, that refugee and asylum seeker testimonies remain unspeakable and unintel- ligible. Danticat’s accomplishment, Whitlock argues, is not in recording her uncle’s death but in reimagining it using literature. Whitlock’s epilogue usefully frames this book’s accomplishment in two ways. First, she notes that, in the most recent edition of Mary Prince’s History, Sara Salih refers to Prince as an asylum seeker, which suggests the proximity of this “early” life narrative with refugee and asylum seeker nar- ratives written in the twenty-first century. Second, she succinctly sums up her broad argument: “Testimonial life narrative is embedded in the history of anti-colonial resistance” (203). Indeed, Postcolonial Life Narratives’ chief accomplishment is that it manages to bring together more than two hundred years of life writing to make what appears on the surface to be a relatively simple argument. In doing so, Whitlock successfully draws con- nections between texts and suggests their relationalities without writing over their historical and cultural specificity. This achievement is perhaps best summarized by Whitlock herself in chapter 10, discussing the vari- ous indigenous testimonies of removal: “These testimonies are specific in place and time, indicating how the policies of assimilation were effective because they were precisely keyed to local jurisdictions and institutions. Yet collectively this testimonial literature maps out a shared imaginative geography of a ‘total institution’ ” (148). Each of the texts that Whitlock reads in this book contributes to a shared history, but each also reflects its unique history. Whitlock’s greatest strength, her scope, also opens up questions that will hopefully be taken up in future research. Because her readings of each text, concept, and theoretical discourse are necessarily relatively brief, this work will be instrumental to scholars working in a variety of fields insofar as it opens up avenues for deeper reconsideration of the implications of said discourses on specific texts. One example stems from Whitlock’s focus on recognition as a result of indigenous testimony. While Whitlock usefully frames a consideration of the ways in which said recognition produces particular kinds of settler affect, and how this affect might ulti- mately re-inscribe indigenous peoples as victims of benevolence, a reading of recent indigenous scholarship on recognition would certainly extend Whitlock’s discussion here. Such a consideration could usefully further

Reviews | 257 frame the relationship between such recognition and the re-imposition of settler colonial structures and policies ostensibly designed to “help” indigenous peoples. While one might be tempted to read Postcolonial Life Narratives’ length as limiting the claims it can make, then, it convincingly and comprehensively argues for these texts’ shared history and should also be tremendously productive of new scholarship. Richard Moran University of Alberta

258 | Moran