B o o k R e v i e w, Women Writers on American History and Space (122–126) “Umjetnost riječi” LXII (2018) • 1 • Zagreb • January – June

WOMEN WRITERS theoretical and literary contribution is integrated into the book’s theoretical ON AMERICAN agenda, coming to the fore in its final HISTORY AND SPACE part. Chapter one lays out the complex, and at times overdetermined, array of Ksenija Kondali: Prepleti paradigmi: prošlost, textual approaches that mark the three pamćenje i prostor u američkoj ženskoj prozi principal theoretical concepts of the [Interbraiding of Paradigms: History, Memory and Space in Contemporary American Wo- study: history, memory and spatiality. men’s Writing], Sarajevo: Filozofski fakultet Even mentioning these makes it clear Univerziteta u Sarajevu, 2017, pp. 261. what an enormous critical feat it is to enumerate, let alone clarify, how these concepts have developed, circulated, and intersected in contemporary theoretical The theoretical nodes of this American debates. Facing this daunting task, the Studies monograph are: cultural turn, author successfully and competently spatial turn, new approaches to the study navigates the many points of her key of history, memory studies, postcolonial approaches. The reader is taken on a theory, and feminist theory. The central (sometimes too) long journey through the insight is the combination of the three labyrinths of contemporary theoretical axes – history, memory and spatiality articulations of the difference between 122 – into a vibrant and effective approach the past, history, historiography, memory that has generated numerous readings of and remembering, memory, history and a specific corpus in : testimony, space, place, landscape, and ethnic women writers. The representative the gendering of space. The introductory texts illustrating the interweaving of chapter would be more legible and the aforementioned themes are Leslie palatable had it been divided into several Marmon Silko’s , Marilynne separate chapters. Robinson’s Gilead, Anne Proulx’s Postcards One thing that remains in the and ’ The House on Mango shadows, though, is how the minority Street. Kondali’s approach is distinctive (female) writer manages to bypass the as it puts a spatial slant on the forms accomplished deconstruction of the of representing methods in which the epistemological tenor of historical past has been inscribed in space through discourse, achieved by various powerful memory, remembering, and testimony, denunciations of postmodernity, but thus calling for a resemanticization of then succeeds in resuscitating history’s space and the rearticulation of (national) potential to portend a collective past and a history. collective experience, once it signifies for It is no coincidence that the texts a minority group. Since not even ethnic in focus range from the 1970s to 2004 approaches or postcolonial theory have by date of publication, precisely the found a way out of this conundrum, it is time a number of ethnic women writers left unresolved in this study as well. On the emerged. These women were often other hand, what women writers can take African Americans, whose contributions from the contemporary deconstruction are duly noted but are not elaborated on. or scaling down of historical discourse is At strategic points, the African American narrativization in the form of narrative B o o k R e v i e w, Women Writers on American History and Space (122–126) “Umjetnost riječi” LXII (2018) • 1 • Zagreb • January – June perspective (who speaks/narrates), and applicable analysis of what these concepts narrative chronology (in what sequence are expected to do in a culture. Further, events have been laid down, and how they it shows how they have been used to connect [Kondali 2017: 8]). Rather than such an effect (Kondali 2017: 35). Here epistemological absolutism, ethnic women follows another interesting insight, which writers have learned the situational and should have been emphasised more: the communicative value of the discourses mnemonic value and role of the narrative, of literature and history, and have been as suggested by Anne Rigney (Kondali using them to their advantage. In an aside, 2017: 36). At this point, the book usefully the book shows rather than openly asserts elaborates on American specificity in the that the foregoing approach is more usage of cultural memory as a mnemonic effective in rediscovering the potential tool for a particular group, rather than as of counter- or minority history than the its more canonical definition in European assumption that a subaltern voice, by scholarship. This is a distinction that is virtue of its liminal status, eschews the sometimes missed by readers outside the ravages of writing history or representing US (Kondali 2017: 41). the past (Kondali 2017: 18). The second part of the book The study refreshingly, and with analyses the poetic procedures of the great astuteness, applies the apparatus of four representative women writers, which theory onto the stuff of American culture, correspond to the four principal concepts literature and history. More moments of the study. and her like these are wanting in chapter one early novel Ceremony (1977), which hails 123 – those invigorating passages in which the Native American creative awakening theory comes to life, such as in the that began in the late 1960s, is the first basic but illuminating and far-reaching book to be presented. It illustrates the way observation that the past in American Native Americans interact with space, to literature is generally inscribed in two the extent that it is possibly particular to ways: nostalgically or traumatically them, and unique in American culture. (Kondali 2017: 28). After clearing the way and navigating The other, rather effective strategy between past and present contentions of salvaging history from the clutches of in , the author deconstruction is the rise and blossoming identifies two key points of Silko’s of the memory discourse since the 1980s, contribution to the debate: one is that and especially in the 1990s, marking Silko bypasses the issue of authenticity another theoretical turn (Kondali of Native American/Indian writing by 2017: 31), the privileging of seeing and bringing together oral and written forms witnessing first-hand (testimony), which in a way that calls to and includes both is precisely the etymology of history native and non-native readers; the other is (Kondali 2017: 11; cf. Le Goff 1996). the narrative as a means of mapping local The study alerts us to a productive and tribal spaces (Kondali 2017: 113). application of constructivist historicizing Further reading reveals how the novel in the vein of Benedict Anderson and walks a fine line between capitulating Eric Hobsbawm: while pointing to the before the invasion of space and erasure constructedness of a set of ideas and of the past effected by the encroachment processes (from nation to tradition), of white society on Indian lands on one it still undertakes a serious and highly hand, and the enticing appeal of hybrid B o o k R e v i e w, Women Writers on American History and Space (122–126) “Umjetnost riječi” LXII (2018) • 1 • Zagreb • January – June

forms of culture to resolve the conflict masculinized, and mythic version of the between the two civilizations (native and incorporation of the West: certainly settler) on the other. This easy way out one of the key national myths. Kondali through hybridity is swiftly foiled when shows that Robinson takes issue with the we think of how the topophilia the tribes erasure of unpalatable details and events evince for their places and landscapes passed over in the sanitized version of the translates into the political idea of Western story, as she seeks to activate sovereignty, and the ongoing land claims traumatic individual memories as vehicles that were reactivated after World War II of a different memory project enacted in (Kondali 2017: 122). Juggling the generic a frontier town. expectations of the non-native reader While Robinson revisits the past with more obliging forms of oral and of the West in order to offer a version sacred history, the novel also nods towards of national history, in Postcards (1992) more recent eco-critical perspectives. Annie Proulx hovers closer to the present Kondali correctly contends that the time, considering its embroilment in protagonist Tayo’s memory work in the the questions of space, place, ecology, novel, where he tries to make sense of the and regionalism, and adding her voice trauma of the war in which he fought, to the growing cohort of neo-realists, encapsulates the task of the entire nation, as Kondali clarifies at the beginning while simultaneously being deployed for of this section (2017: 151). Proulx specific native purposes. These include is an interesting author, particularly 124 Tayo’s individual memories as a veteran, because of her deliberate and focused and the tribe’s collective memory of use of the historiographic methods of environmental depredations. the Annales school, whose procedures For Marilynne Robinson in the novel the writer wishes to replicate (Kondali Gilead (2004), the locus of memory is a 2017: 154). The rambling and wayward local site, a small town, which Kondali trajectories of Proulx’s characters are contends carries a strong semantic charge ciphers of the changes and shifts in in American culture. The narrator’s national history, in the decades of the reminiscences, emanating from the titular 20th century that witnessed the depletion small Mid-Western town and covering of the cherished notions of pastoralism the period immediately preceding the and rural America as an antidote to Civil War to the 1950s, destabilises the rampant industrialization, urbanization, underlying myths of American history and the market economy, which tore and nation, refracted through the apart nature and the countryside. Proulx’s regional narrative of the West. They characters are caught up in grand are embroiled in questions of slavery historical processes, but are not simply and race, and infused with a feminine victims of their inexorable logic (Kondali gendered presence (Kondali 2017: 149). 2017: 158). Loyal, the unlikely hero of The intensely personal perspective of the this anti-myth, plays “an ironic vision narration (the principal character writing of a pioneer of the Western settlement” a letter to his son for him to read after (Kondali 2017: 158), while his desultory his father’s death), and its relay through journey across the country takes place communicational memory (Assmann in an automobile: a true icon of post- qtd. in Kondali 2017: 139), acts as a war American consensus, social and salutary corrective to the monumental, geographic mobility, and the economic B o o k R e v i e w, Women Writers on American History and Space (122–126) “Umjetnost riječi” LXII (2018) • 1 • Zagreb • January – June boom, all of which are foreclosed to some aspects of that culture open to the Loyal. Proulx, even more presciently public. The poignancy of the book lies than Silko, enacts towards the end of her in the fact that Esperanza’s development novel “a scene of ecological and societal reflects Cisnero’s coming into her own catastrophe,” an apt commentary on the as a writer. In her reading of Cisneros’ destruction of landscape and space in seminal novel (which was re-released (post)modern America (Kondali 2017: as a special edition in 2009, marking its 165). 25th anniversary) Kondali invites us to For Sandra Cisneros and savor the contradiction of the writer’s Esperanza, the protagonist of her novel feminist voice ranging over less palatable (or short story cycle) The House on Mango aspects of her ethnic culture, but finding Street (1984), the experience of space resilience and strength in the past of her and place is crucially refracted through family, and the broader history of her gender, allowing Cisneros’ vigorous and group (2017: 204). Esperanza’s longing feisty questioning of the inscriptions of for a house of her own is not simply a femininity made by her local Chicano later variant of Virginia Woolf’s famous culture and by the nation. As Kondali claim, but a critical reinscription of both claims: “Gender is, therefore, just like the nation’s spatial logic and Chicano’s ethnicity, deeply linked with the way historical appropriations of their own in which we occupy space and place, spatial imaginaries, which often sit and the ways we experience these, uneasily with the dominant ones. To namely, as Doreen Massey claims, with comprehend all these layers, we must 125 the ways in which we are placed within mine the potential of the aforementioned the new relations of temporal-spatial interpretative models, whose capacity compression” (2017: 90, translation Kondali further exemplifies in the final mine). part of the study. Cisneros, as Kondali shows, is at Given that this is the first study of pains to render an ethnic and gendered such scope and theme in the broader experience legible to a national audience, regional field of American Studies, we but not at the expense of Esperanza’s should only fleetingly note the theoretical emotional and memorial legacy. Kondali overkill in the first part of the book, and rightly points to the ethnic (woman) gratefully acknowledge the ultimately writer’s dilemma of “selling out” or successful and clever conjoining of the inadvertently exoticizing one’s cultural theoretical paradigms of space, memory, milieu, which is, despite its shortcomings, ethnicity and gender: the four pillars still a vibrant place, as is the family house of this valuable study. The book will in a local barrio of Chicago. Cisneros certainly find its place in the regional uses the renowned generic format of canon of American Studies, where it the Bildungsroman to allow Esperanza’s should be required reading, in the hope voice and her changing perspective to that it also will also be recognized in color our understanding of the Mexican the context of the related disciplines American sub-culture, a significantly of feminist, gender, postcolonial, and expanding segment of American cultural studies. society. Cisneros’s great contribution, Jelena Šesnić as Kondali reminds us, is that she was one of the first Chicana feminists to lay B o o k R e v i e w, Women Writers on American History and Space (122–126) “Umjetnost riječi” LXII (2018) • 1 • Zagreb • January – June

WORKS CITED ženskoj prozi. Sarajevo: Filozofski fakultet Univerziteta u Sarajevu. Assmann, Jan. 2005. Kulturno pamćenje. Le Goff, Jacques. 1996. History and Memory. Pismo, sjećanje i politički identitet u ranim Trans. Steven Rendall and Elizabeth visokim kulturama. Trans. Vahidin Claman. New York: Columbia Preljević. Zenica: Biblioteka tekst. University Press. Kondali, Ksenija. 2017. Prepleti paradigmi: prošlost, pamćenje i prostor u američkoj

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