Workings of the Spirit: The Poetics of Afro-American Women's Writing by Houston A. Baker, Jr. (review)

224Rocky Mountain Review The final integrative chapter focuses on how novels of magic realism and fantasy can appeal to the late twentieth century-reader's imagination and wonder since the modern storytellers use myth within the framework of these two genres. Attebery emphasizes once more the value of fantasy and eloquently argues for its acceptance by serious readers and critics. He admits that he enjoys modern fantasy and science fantasy; his book is a well reasoned, scholarly, cogent defense of the fantastic. Those of us drawn to the large fantasy sections of our local public library or bookstore can now read and enjoy without any remaining guilt—fantasy is part of metafiction postmodernism and the revolt against realism and Modernism. The bibliography is extensive and helpful; the volume is well edited and proofread. Bonuses all around. DIANE PARKIN-SPEER Southwest Texas State University HOUSTON A. BAKER, JR. Workings of the Spirit: The Poetics of Afro-American Women's Writing. With a Phototext by Elizabeth Alexander and Patricia Redmond. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. 239 p. Houston Baker's work in African-American literary theory is deservedly well known and well established. This book is the third in a trilogy that began with Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (Chicago, 1987) and Afro-American Poetics: Revisions of Harlem and the Black Aesthetic (Chicago, 1988). The two earlier works argued for the importance of literary theory and introduced Baker's concept of "spirit work" as the wisdom of African-American expressive culture. The third work turns attention to African-American women's creative expression and makes an extremely important contribution to literary and cultural theory as means of explicating African-American literature and culture. Baker's project in Workings of the Spirit is the analysis of literature and other creative forms of expression by African-American women from the point of view of theory rather than historical or racial essentialism. AfricanAmerican women's expressive and creative production includes handicrafts, blues, culinary arts, quilting, conjuring, oratory, storytelling, and letter writing. Nonmaterial transactions were of importance in early AfricanAmerican communities, especially in an environment in which material transactions were impossible. The metalevels of cultural negotiation were nonmaterial, focusing importance on the traditional roles of conjurers, griots , and other spiritual leaders. Baker finds explanatory models of AfricanAmerican women's writing coming from these sources. This is an important idea since most of the work on African-American women writers has been undertaken from non-theoretical or historical points of view. According to Baker, Black Studies, as a discipline, is a discourse that gives an historical basis to subjecthood and subject status in the university and the university curriculum. Baker believes that critics who propose such arguments are trapped in a project that he calls "historical Book Reviews225 conservatism" (23), or a validation of a literarily textualized past. Valorization of the past gives new currency to the modes of white patriarchal production that they represent. For example, in the book's introduction, entitled "The Daughter's Departure," Baker claims that early black women's writing, such as Pauline Hopkins' Contending Forces (1900), Frances Harper's Iola Leroy (1892), and Anna Julia Cooper's A Voice from the South by a Black Woman of the South (1982), is the embodiment of white abolitionism and mulatto utopianism. These movements simply presented the mulatto as the ideal of white abolitionism and lead to the novel of "passing," which also consolidates white hegemony. What Baker sees as a danger in focusing on the novel's significance as primarily historical is the elision of black, southern vernacular energies which mark AfricanAmerican texts. Baker argues that this escape from history can be negotiated by moving into a refigured space, place, and time of black women's creativity, a journey that must be made through theory. In the most difficult section of the book, Baker calls on Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics ofSpace (1969) to explain the conception of the "poetics " of African-American women's writing. For Bachelard, poetic images are the origin of consciousness. Baker argues that the poetics of AfricanAmerican women's writing is a theory that seeks to explain the guiding spirit of this writing through the study of...