Cultural Sites of Critical Insight: Philosophy, Aesthetics, and African American and Native American Women's Writings (review)

Although one does not usually find research on Phillis Wheatley and Paula Gunn Allen in the same book, the essays in Cultural Sites of Critical Insight: Philosophy, Aesthetics, and African American and Native American Women's Writings contribute to an emerging scholarship that is changing the ways in which we examine cross-cultural relationships between Native Americans and African Americans. Angela L. Cotten's and Christa Davis Acampora's edited collection adds to an already existing conversation by Daniel Littlefield, Tiya Miles, Claudio Saunt, James Brooks, Jonathan Brennan, and Matthew Restall, among others, on the historical and cultural exchanges between Native Americans and African Americans and works that signify on both traditions. Cotten and Acampora refer to a "crossblood literary aesthetics" that has grown out of these shared histories of and contact between African Americans and Native Americans, and they hope their collection encourages comparative approaches that examine overlapping traditions and cultures as well as aesthetic and philosophical innovations. Their collection challenges disciplinary boundaries that discourage comparative investigations of African American and Native American literatures.

In addition to the editors' introduction, the volume includes three additional sections entitled "Transformative Aesthetics," "Critical Revisions," and "Re(in)fusing Feminism," suggesting methods for connecting the essays cross-culturally and comparatively. Part 2 uncovers the innovative structures created by Paula Gunn Allen, Phillis Wheatley, and Sherley Anne Williams to express healing, celebration, and their unique visions and experiences. Part 3 explores how Linda Hogan and Alice Walker revise literary and critical traditions, inscribing themselves into and speaking back to psychoanalytic, feminist, and Marxist theories. Part 4 examines how the writing of Toni Morrison, Luci Tapahonso, and Zitkala-Sa (Gertrude Bonnin) questions feminism's narrow focus on gender and sexuality and how their early manifestations excluded race, colonialism, violence, and poverty.

The editors note a dearth of scholarship on African American and Native American women's writing in the fields of aesthetics and philosophy, and their goal is to fill this gap by creating models for future comparative analyses. AnaLouise Keating takes a second look at Allen's Grandmothers of the Light, defining it as a different kind of self-help book. To distinguish it from other self-help books, Keating refers to Allen's book as a "womanist self-recovery" book that contains stories of empowerment rather than approaching it as an American Indian text. Elizabeth J. West uncovers in Wheatley's poetry examples of traditional African cosmologies combined with colonial American religious views, which would become the narrative core of contemporary African American women writers. Michael A. Anttonucci finds a blues aesthetic expressed in Williams's poetry, claiming that the blues had more of an aesthetic and cultural impact on American culture than is currently recognized.

The essays in part 3 reveal how distinct literary works signify on other texts. Ellen L. Arnold brings Linda Hogan's Solar Storms and Margaret Atwood's Surfacing into dialogue, demonstrating their common goal of cultural recovery and healing gained through ecofeminist insights that claim an alliance between women and nature. In separate essays both Barbara S. Tracy and Angela L. Cotten discuss the ways in which Alice Walker's Meridian signifies on or engages in an African American call-and-response ritual with John Neihardt's Black Elk Speaks. By claiming that Walker's novel is a revision of Black Elk Speaks, Tracy points to Meridian as a multivoiced text that refuses to silence the complexities inherent in multiraced identities. Cotten analyzes Meridian through the lens of Karl Marx's historical materialism in order to see how Walker shares some of Marx's perspectives for social change. In comparing their views on social struggle Cotten demonstrates the value of comparative analysis for enriching Marxian and black radical traditions.

Part 4's essays focus on women-centered themes and insights in Morrison's Paradise, Tapahonso's "Leda...