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  • The New North American Studies: Culture, Writing and the Politics of Re/Cognition
  • Amy J. Elias (bio)
Winfred Siemerling. The New North American Studies: Culture, Writing and the Politics of Re/Cognition Routledge. vii, 210. $24.95

This book is a thoughtful revisiting of the notion of ethnic and racial difference, identity, and assimilation in North American (predominantly Canadian) postcolonial cultural contexts. The overall argument of this book is that American literature and 'American' cultural boundaries need to be [End Page 360] reconceived as a confederation of North American cultures, and that 'patterns of possibilities in which to think North American culture(s) are created in stories of cultural emergence, difference, and transformation.' For Winfred Siemerling, the notion of 'doubleness' provides 'a structure of translation' through which new or minority ethnic and racial identities are introduced, reintroduced, or revealed within the majority cultures. Siemerling's paradigm for this doubleness is articulated by W.E.B. DuBois in his notion of double consciousness. This concept is analysed fruitfully as a delineation of unbreachable difference and splitting of identity but also as an opening to the possibility of new identity constructions and cultural formations.

A key term in this study is 'recognition.' For Siemerling, the processes of recognition run counter to those of double consciousness. Recognition 'depends on a stable system of reference that establishes perspective, hierarchizes foreground-background relations, and allows for pattern matching,' and thus tends to serve the interests of the dominant culture that wishes to assimilate (or fetishize) difference. Double consciousness, in contrast, 'implies continuing vacillation between at least two frames of reference, a state of doubling, doubt, and unresolved encounter.' To 'recognition' Siemerling opposes the term 're/cognition,' a reformulation of identity without reconciliation to established paradigms and without recourse to dialectical synthesis. Introducing work by Pierre Nepveu and Edouard Glissant, Siemerling contends that 'narratives of emergence' – narratives that tell of encounters between cultures and the emergence of ethnic or racial identities – first attempt recognition by contextualizing the new in terms of the old, yet they always exceed replication within the older model, in the forms of double consciousness. This is most apparent in the New World itself, which both attempted (and succeeded at) replication and recognition and also spectacularly failed to reproduce and reinscribe the Old World.

Siemerling distinguishes between United States and Canadian pluralism, particularly in the last sections of the book where he discusses the journals Parti pris and Vice Versa in relation to French-Canadian cultural emergence and statements about it by Northrop Frye, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Frantz Fanon. Earlier chapters compare and contrast DuBois's 'double consciousness' to theories of subjectivity and/or North American identity by, among others, Hegel, Sacvan Bercovitch, Henry Louis Gates, Houston Baker, Robert Stepto, Gerald Vizenor, Thomas King, Linda Hutcheon, and Charles Taylor. Siemerling is particularly good at discussing the differences between DuBois's and Hegel's theories of recognition; the book also nicely distinguishes between Gates's and Taylor's definitions of multiculturalism and contrasts them to what Siemerling sees as the more radical implications of DuBois's formulation. Yet while he addresses African-American and Native American difference in relation to assimilative North American [End Page 361] cultural identities, and is concerned to interrogate easy definitions of multiculturalism by revisiting the relation between racial and postcolonial identity formation, Siemerling does not address how 'double consciousness' would be applied differently in the context of Asian-American, queer, or Latino/a American identity. These are unexpected omissions, since Spanish-speaking peoples are now one of the largest minority populations in the United States and Canada hosts a large population of people of Asian descent. Siemerling also does not deal with many, now critically popular, theories of dialogism (vs dialecticism), such as those by Mikhail Bakhtin, Emmanuel Levinas, or Homi Bhabha (in a postcolonial context), or with postmodern theories of alterity; given his critical acuity, these omissions are regrettable. Nonetheless, the study is an important new contribution to discussions of dialogism and alterity in relation to postcolonial and racial identity, and the critical distinctions made here are clear and precise.

Amy J. Elias

Amy J. Elias, Department of English, University of Tennessee

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