The Black Body: Women, Colonialism, and Space (review)

The Black Body: Women, Colonialism, and Space, by Radhika Mohanram. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1999. ISBN 0816635420 cloth.

The Black Body: Women, Colonialism, and Space pieces together various takes on the topic of the body in/of postcoloniality. The resulting "mosaic" (xx), to use Radhika Mohanram's term, reinforces the idea that "the notion of embodiment is central to postcolonial studies [and] in postcolonial discourse several terms converge: identity, place, race, the body" (199). A lecturer at Waikato University in New Zealand, Mohanram begins her book promisingly with a brief excursion into her own changing national/racial (although neither explicitly sexualized nor classed) formation. Her peripatetic migrancy from India to the US and ultimately New Zealand corresponds with her shifting status from "brown" to "black." Her experience gives substance to her argument that "[b]lackness or race [. . .] is a category which serves to trace the recentness of migration to Australia rather than functioning merely as ascription of colour" (93). The text centers on readings of "soiled identity" (183) in which "an articulation of place directly creates our sense of 'rootedness' to our place of origin, an autochtony . . . a sense of being home" (183). It tackles thorny subjects such as the representation of the body in Western anthropological, sociological, literary, psychoanalytic, and historical discourse and the relations between "indigeneity" and diasporia. The central argument concerns women's place in postcolonial space(s). While Mohanram's subsequent critique of "essentialist" postcolonial critics exemplified by interlocutors of Spivak could be more nuanced, she does demonstrate that postcolonial hybridity (she parses Bhabha's understanding of the term) exists not only in the metropole, but also beyond it. Mohanram's epistemological community is extensive and appropriate including Appadurai, Spivak, Butler, Mohanty, Merleau-Ponty, Kristeva, Freud, Shohat, Bhabha, Chatterjee, Lévi-Strauss, the Oxford English Dictionary, Fanon, and Locke. Following in the rows tilled by these predecessors, Mohanram's work goes over familiar ground without turning up new soil. The book "sums up the debates [. . .] and deals with how postcolonial discourse opens up new lands of theory. It describes the significance of postcolonial discourse to an analysis of race, place, the body and identity" (xx). The verbs of the preceding sentence exemplify a weakness of the text. The most original chapters analyze "Aotearoa/New Zealand" texts. The chapters consciously specify the special sociohistorical difference of the New Zealand context, which is "bicultural, not multicultural" (91). RAL readers may be most interested in chapter three, "Woman-Body-Nation-Space," which traces the trope of the veil in North Africa as elaborated by Fanon and Helie-Lucas. The book does a fine job of explicating the vicissitudes of the veil (it is liberating, confining, revolutionary, and traditional--in short, its meaning shifts) and succeeds in asking these important questions: "Is the body prior to discourse? Is place prior to discourse? Is theory an emanation of prediscursive place? Is the production of theory inflected by the indigeneity of the body" (177). The text assures readers that all these questions and any possible answers are inherently political. Because the book "contains no linear argument," it has no singular conclusion (indeed, throughout, the book has sought to "complexify" issues); rather, we are left with the irritating chafing of "the soles of feet of the metropolitan [. . .] planted against those of the antipodean. They kick and rub against each other" (202). So too, by design, do the chapters of The Black Body.

Jennifer DeVere Brody

Jennifer DeVere Brody is a professor in the Department of African-American Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

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