In Praise of New Travelers: Reading Caribbean Women's Writing (review)

Isabel Hoving’s In Praise of New Travelers: Reading Caribbean Women’s Writing analyzes, in the author’s own words, “the extraordinary position of Caribbean migrant women’s writing” in postcolonial studies by examining the three interrelated tropes of “place,” “voice,” and “silence.” As Hoving points out, Caribbean women writers have been carving a position of speech for themselves by engaging the various discourses and binaries that have dominated the field of postcolonialism in recent years (such as, for instance, postmodernism vs. postcolonialism, or Caribbean vs. European modernism). Hoving traces these negotiations in the work of a wide range of Anglophone Caribbean-born women, namely Beryl Gilroy, Merle Colins, Grace Nichols, Jamaica Kincaid, Michelle Cliff, and Marlene Nourbese Philip. She argues that these writers adopt gender-specific and complex narrative strategies of mimicry and subversion through which they rewrite colonial discourse. For instance, Kincaid is shown to engage in colonial mimicry through the appropriation of the motherly voice, while by contrast, the Canadian-Caribbean author Philip exposes the irreducible and radical otherness of a Black feminine discourse. Merle Collins’ Angel celebrates the Creole community through a refusal of the oral/scribal dichotomy that has animated so much of postcolonial criticism, while Nichols spatializes the body and black womanhood as a “wet, fluid, and flowing” site in contrast to the “dry, stable geography of the patriarchal world.”

The book’s title is particularly well chosen since Hoving’s approach to Caribbean women writers is indeed one of enthusiastic praise and celebration. Epithets such as “extraordinary,” “wonderful,” “miraculous,” “unparalleled,” and “exquisite” are meant to highlight the uniqueness of Caribbean women’s writing, which Hoving ascribes to the transnational and crosscultural dialogues these women establish both in fiction and poetry. In her unmitigated celebration of Caribbean women’s writing practices, Hoving is careful to acknowledge her use of postcolonial theory as a frame for reading and insists on the necessity for a self-reflexive reading practice that respects rather than appropriates, and that challenges the exotic tourist fantasies through which non-Western cultural forms are too often interpreted.

The strength of In Praise of New Travelers consists in its close readings; its weakness resides in the theoretical questions it raises but does not always answer. For instance, Hoving argues that her practice of “reading closely and attentively” is the answer to the crisis in cultural criticism and the splitting of postcolonialism into literature and theory. It is unclear how this is indeed such a novel approach since the “high” theorists of postcolonialism—Said, Bhabha, and Spivak—who are in fact deemed responsible for the splitting of the field have always provided the kind of attention to the literary and its contexts that Hoving advocates. Inversely, “reading self-reflectively” is part and parcel of what theory has brought to postcolonial criticism and a practice to which all critics, whether tourists or not, indiscriminately lay claim.

Furthermore, Hoving’s emphasis on the “irreducible difference” (2) of Caribbean women’s writing is puzzling in light of her subsequent discussion. The author argues that the multiple diasporic, dialogic, and transnational elements of Caribbean women’s writing distinguish it from a masculinist tradition, but it is unclear how such elements do indeed provide the grounds for a separate aesthetics. How exactly are Caribbean women’s writings different from, for instance, male writers like Caryl Phillips or Emile Ollivier who also adopt a diasporic and transnational aesthetic that is invested in representing women as speaking subjects? The very aspects that Hoving identifies as defining Caribbean women’s writings (hybridity, dialogue, the tropes of place, silence, and voice) also characterize many of their male counterparts’ work in postcolonial literature. And most importantly, why does Hoving subsume a Caribbean female aesthetic under a black female aesthetic? In Praise of New Travelers assumes an equivalence between Caribbean women’s writings and black women’s literature that is neither theorized nor addressed. On the one hand, we are told that, unlike its masculinist counterpart, Caribbean women’s writing has always...