New World Regionalism: Literature in the Americas by David M. Jordan (review)

210 LETTERS IN CANADA 1994 to round itself out in the company of other analyses of photography and colonialism - for example, the superb essays by aboriginal authors in Lucy Lippard's Partial Recall (New Press 1992). My other quibble is with the title: if native people called cameras 'face pullers,' as Silversides claims, why is this book of photographs of native people titled, in effect, The Cameras? The subtitle is also misleading: 'Photographing Native Canadians' suggests the book is about the photographers or the act of photographing, when in fact Silversides includes little such discussion. Despite these complaints, Silversides is surely to be commended for collecting and publishing the photographs, especially in such an attractive and affordable format; the book will provoke much productive speculation , admiration, anger, and learning. (LAURA MURRAY) David M. Jordan. New World Regionalism: Literature in the Americas University of Toronto Press. vi, 148. $21.75 Regionalism, it seems safe to say, is making something of a comeback. As David Jordan observes in New World Regionalism, 'from the early decades of the twentieth century to the present day, regionalism has been relegated to the periphery of North American literature and criticism,' but in light of a series of cultural and political paradigms - poststructuralism, postmodernism, post-colonialism, and post-nationalism - critics are beginning to develop more sophisticated and engaging approaches to regionalism. Jordan's New World Regionalism, part of the University of Toronto Press's Theory/Culture series, makes an important contribution to this reappraisal, as Jordan does a great deal to reclaim regionalism from its traditional obscurity and to demonstrate regionalism'S renewed relevance. New World Regionalism, as the title suggests, is concerned with literary regionalism in the New World, focusing principally on Brazilian, Mexican, American, and Canadian writing. Jordan's project in the book is not to give a comprehensive overview of the subject, but rather to provide'a conceptual framework capable of accounting for a phenomenon that spans two continents and includes three linguistic and two cultural heritages.' The result is a slimmer book than the topic warrants, but Jordan is fairly adept at re-theorizing regionalism and demonstrating its potential as a context within which to approach literary texts. Jordan's book takes roughly the form of a comparative literary history, as he charts the changing shape of regionalism in narrative fiction in the New World. He demonstrates the influence of regionalism - in the general sense of a concern with 'the effect of specificity of place on human identity' - in conjunction with the dominant poetics of the last two centuries: romanticism, realism/naturalism, modernism, and post- HUMANITIES 211 modernism. In each chapter Jordan provides a brief critical preface outlining the epistemologies and conventions of these poetics, and develops through examples their impact on New World regionalism. In general, Jordan goes in for fewer and more extended literary analyses to develop his critical position on regionalism, and though at times his textual explorations may seem to stray from the central purpose of the book, they certainly serve to reclaim regionalism from its association with a simplistic representation of place and to illustrate its compatibility with a more sophisticated poetics. Furthermore, his analysis of regionalism takes him into interesting territory: he looks at New World writing in a' post-colonial context, addresses questions of mimesis and space, examines the relationship between regionalism and nationalism, and enters running debates about specific works such as Euclides de Cunha's as sertoes, Faulkner's Go Down, Moses, Sheila Watson's The Double Hook, and Carlos Fuentes's La region mas transparente. As a comparative study, Jordan's book lacks a certain balance because, as he notes, regionalism has played a more important role in Latin American fiction than in North American writing, but he makes a fairly good case for approaching regionalism in a hemispheric perspective because of the colonial histories of the two continents and the shared strategies and concerns of the writers he discusses. However, while Jordan's project reclaims regionalism from the critical margins and shows its possibilities in light of contemporary literary and theoretical currents, his conception of regionalism is problematically limited. In his introduction, Jordan extends the existing debate on regionalism as a sense...