Woman, Native, Other: Writing, Postcoloniality and Feminism by Trinh T. Minh-ha, and: When the Moon Waxes Red: Representation, Gender and Cultural Politics by Trinh T. Minh-ha (review)

Book R eviews Dames des Roches, the second in the company of his learned daughters with whom he fre­ quently corresponded. Part Three analyzes the relation of female doctors to scientific dis­ course and medical practices, and gives an overview of the roles of charitable and teaching religious orders at the turn of the century. Part Four, entitled La fem m e "sçavante, ” discusses the multiple uses of the ubiquitous compendia of women worthies such as the catalogue of women writers in La Croix du Maine and Du Verdier’s Bibliothèques. The prefaces of works dedicated to women throughout the century reveal women dedicatees’ growing taste for works of philosophy, and the medical and astrological sciences, especially after 1550. Finally, the bulk of the chapter is devoted to the écrivaines who fall into one of three categories: the figure of the Princess (Marguerite de Navarre, Anne de France, Louise de Savoie, Jeanne d’Albret, and Marguerite de Valois); the figure of the dévote (Catherine d’Amboise, Georgette de Montenay, Anne de Marquets, Jeanne de Jussie and Gabrielle de Coignard); and the figure of the middle-class writer (Louise Labé, Pernette du Guillet, and the Dames des Roches). This fascinating study offers abundant appendices consisting of excerpts from a variety of archival sources; a chronology of French Renaissance women’s works; an extensive bibliography and an index. Evelyne Berriot-Salvadore’s contribution is a notable achieve­ ment in that it provides ample leads to materials still in French archives or in nineteenthand early twentieth-century editions that ought to benefit from full recovery and inter­ pretation. A n n e R. L a r s e n Hope College Trinh T. Minh-ha. W om an, N a tiv e , O th e r : W r itin g , P o s t c o l o n i a l i t y a n d Fem inism . Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989. Pp. 173, and W h e n t h e M o o n W ax e s R ed : R e p r e s e n ta tio n , G e n d e r a n d C u l t u r a l P o litic s . New York: Routledge, 1991. Pp. 252. In these two books Trinh, theorist, filmmaker, and professor of Women’s Studies and Cinema, engages her readers in an extended examination of the politics of difference and marginalization. As she writes in “ Yellow Sprouts,” the introductory piece in When the M oon Waxes Red, “ To challenge the regimes of representation that govern a society is to conceive of how a politics can transform reality rather than merely ideologize it” (2). Both Woman, Native, Other and When the M oon Waxes Red directly confront not only the socio-cultural practices and assumptions that have contributed historically to marginaliza­ tion of many “ Others,” but also the successes and failures of various political and theo­ retical discourses to move beyond that ideologization of reality. Although the continuity between these books is clear—and clearly intended—it is a theoretical and political continuity rather than a thematic one, so each book is strong and useful in its own right. Woman, Native, Other is an extended examination of writing (as well as other forms of creativity) by women of Colors in a “ postcolonial” world. Rather than focusing exclusively on the writing/writers and the changes that they bring, however, Trinh aims her multiple-lensed critical gaze simultaneously at the assumptions inherent in the idea of “ postcoloniality,” the structuralist and poststructuralist theorizations of anthropology, and the recent theorizations of subjectivity and displacement. Woman, Native, Other is circular by design, beginning with “ Commitment from the Mirror-Writing Box,” an examination of the subjective nature (both in terms of the non-objective and the non-objectified) of “ Third W orld” women’s writing, written in a poetic, oral storytelling VOL. XXXII, NO. 3 101 L ’E sprit C réateur style. This is followed by a critique o f subjectivity in/and anthropology (“ The Language of Nativism” ) and an exploration of the layers of difference experienced by “ Third World” women (“ Difference: ‘A Special Third...