Of Cannibalism

Page 7 July–August 2008 slaves that migrated to the Samaná Peninsula in the Dominican Republic. This essay by Don E. Walicek not only underlines a language studied (and spoken) less than Creole, but brings the Dominican Republic into Caribbean and US South studies, from which it has been historically excluded. The collection succeeds in presenting performance as a transnational idea that moves outside the realm of the nation and that has been taking place, as articulated in this book, since at least the nineteenth century. In this regard, it is also the aforementioned essay by Evans Braziel that suggests a different category for this line of inquiry, trans-America. Frankly, Caribbean studies have benefited from less new jargon and more questioning of old categories, and thus, trans-America, as a concept to relate the Americas to each other (and include the Caribbean in this process) does not change these lines of study, but the performance of relating historical events from the Caribbean region and the US South to the production of culture at the same historical junctions proves to create very fruitful research questions. A productive example of this type of work is presented with precision in Kathleen M. Gough’s essay on the national organizations that instituted Civil War reenactments in the US and the Trinidad Carnival during 1957. In both cases, history had to be represented and recreated for a new public, and simultaneously were informed by similar national ideological practices that sought to exploit tensions linked to race and slavery. The essay also brings to attention that these kinds of performances are not only a historical artifact, but are currently presented across the globe. Just Below South entertains so many different notions of performance—namely performance of gender and race, the use of language, and performance in dance and theater—that instead of reading as an encompassing collection of essays, it reads as a project slightly out of focus. The upside to this situation is that it introduces a variety of intellectual directions that would each merit its own collection. Perhaps in this way, the Spanish-speaking Caribbean and US South would be presented along with works focused on performance in Dutch, English, French, and Creole. AlbertoS.Galindoisassistantprofessorof USLatina/o literature and culture at Whitman College. Galindo continued from previous page Of Cannibalism Marie-Hélène Koffi-Tessio The sTory of The CanniBal Woman Maryse Condé Translated by Richard Philcox Washington Square Press http://www.simonsays.com 311 pages; cloth, $24.00; paper, $14.00 Published in its French version in 2005, Maryse Condé’s The Story of the Cannibal Woman is a novel that explores themes familiar to its author: ostracism, racial intolerance, and the dark side of nomadism: exile , loneliness, and isolation. To that list, we can add a sense of alienation from oneself and one’s culture, destroyed lives, and distorted family ties. As a Guadeloupean woman and descendent of slaves whose history has been erased, Rosélie Thibaudin feels deprived of a culture of her own, one she could fight for and feel chauvinistic about. Instead, there is only void, and she envies her South African friends Dido and Papa Koumbaya for their sense of belonging and their fierce defense of what they see as their culture. A woman of fifty when the story starts, Ros élie struggles against loneliness and the need to survive after the death of her companion of twenty years—Stephen Stewart, a university professor. But what we learn is that her feeling of loneliness is not new. It had been there all along in their years of “marriage.” A reflection on the past, this story tells of both historical “collective traumas” (slavery, colonialism, and apartheid) and personal trauma, as example after example of shattered lives is presented to us: the sculptor Anthony Turley from Alabama, whose family fled the South to end up in a povertystricken ghetto in Detroit; Judith, an eight-year-old girl abducted and raped by a gang; Deogratias, who escaped the Rwandan genocide but lost his wife; Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello and Robben Island, once places of suffering and humiliation, turned into tourist attractions. The Cannibal Woman is also a dysphoric view...