Scandalous Bodies: Diasporic Literature in English Canada by Smaro Kamboureli (review)

552 letters in canada 1999 Smaro Kamboureli. Scandalous Bodies: Diasporic Literature in English Canada Oxford University Press. xii, 268. $24.95 Smaro Kamboureli's most recent book opens with an essay B the author`hesitate[s] to call it a chapter' B in which `some of the implications of the diasporic critic's location and her cultural and pedagogical responsibilities' are considered. This opening `essai' is offered in lieu of `both a formal introduction and conclusion' to the study's four main chapters, which themselves encompass very distinct `historical and thematic foci,' ranging from novels by Frederick Philip Grove and Joy Kogawa, to `first-wave' ethnic anthologies produced in Canada during the 1970s, and to official documents of state-sponsored multiculturalism and their appropriation /dissemination by popular media as well as philosophical and postmodernist discourses. Kamboureli makes it clear from the outset that her study does not attempt `either a linear reading of the development of ethnic literature [in Canada] or a synthesis of that body of writing,' acknowledging also that her analysis `does not always unfold sequentially, nor does it present a single argument or interpretation, let alone adhere to a single method of reading.' The study's admitted lack of `a cohesive syntax' is legitimized on the familiar theoretical ground that `linearity pays no heed to disjunctions, and synthesis always entails ignoring or diminishing difference' B which is precisely what the book sets out to problematize. Nevertheless, it is this somewhat unsystematic approach which lends to Scandalous Bodies the impression of a series of more or less connected essays rather than of a book which struggles to work through for its audience a `unifying theme' or thesis based on its own particular constellation of literary and historical referents. As it stands, the reader is left to do much of the work of piecing together the study's recurrent concerns and provisional conclusions.`If there is any single privileged approach' in Kamboureli's study, `it is close reading' of a kind that `opens the text in order to reveal the method of its making,' and the author is indeed at her best in skilfully executed and historically informed close readings. In the chapter on Settlers of the Marsh, Kamboureli contests established critical tendencies to read Grove without due reference to the question of ethnicity, arguing instead that his novel `suspends ethnic difference by absorbing it' into a discourse of`universalism' that posits the immigrant as a `generalized subject' presumably representative of `experiences ``common to all immigrants.''' Grove's is a `selective realism' which in effect seeks to forget or mask the social reality of those non-Northern European immigrants the novel at one point refers to as `wastage.' Kamboureli makes a subtle case for what she calls the `ethnic signature' of such texts as Grove's B a concept richly humanities 553 resonant, to my mind, with other recent theorizations of ethnicity such as Pamela Banting's work on the poetics of Fred Wah. Similarly lucid is the analysis of Joy Kogawa's Obasan, which examines `how the female body functions as a site where the constructions of race, gender, sexuality, and nationalism are implicated in each other' in the representation of a diasporic subjectivity which is simultaneously `a product and a reflection of historical events, but also ... a site of resistance.' The `resistance' embodied in the `hysterical script' which is Naomi's response to racialization and sexual abuse is shown to pivot, paradoxically, on the recuperative power of silence as an ironic form of `talking cure.' Taking her cue from theorists such as Shoshana Felman, Kamboureli proceeds with a canny reading of the novel's treatment of pedagogy as illustrating `a double lesson on the way knowledge and ignorance constantly displace each other.' The implications of this chapter's concerns with pedagogy and learning will be especially suggestive for any one who teaches Kogawa's novel. Less successful is the ambitious chapter which sets out to examine the idea of multiculturalism from the tripartite perspectives of law, philosophy, and media discourses. Based on an extremely selective set of sources drawn from each category (Charles Taylor is the representative philosopher, and a `selective review' from the Globe and Mail...