Another Tale to Tell: Politics and Narrative in Postmodern Culture (review)

reviews 149 In his combination of the personal, political and literary-critical, the lineage which Baker maps out is decidedly male. Hc begins with his father in his reassessment of Washington and examines only the work of male writers and critics. As if to correct this emphasis, in his contribution to his 1989 collection, he asserts that "a theorist of our era" would know that the male voice "is far less effective for theory that a hearing of, say, women's suppcr-gctting-rcady songs, conjuring formulas, or communal storytelling. The mctalcvcls of African embodiment today arc most effectively discovered and negotiated in the sounds of Afro-American women's expressivity" (147). Baker proposes to tum his "autobiographical attention today to sounds of mothers and sisters," and seeks to examine the "essential spirit" of AfroAmcrican women's expressivity as exemplified in the "felicitous poetic image" which generates cultural consciousness. According to Baker, such an emphasis on poetic would "move the criticisms and theory of black women writers beyond merely interested readings" of feminists or critics of black women writers' portrayals of black men (152), both of which have "hampered" the "potentially liberating effects of Afro-American women's creativity" (153). Mac G. Henderson, in her response to Baker's essay, worries about the scopic economy implied by his emphasis on the "felicitous poetic image" in writings of Afro-American women and the limitations imposed by a theory which limits itself to the felicitous at the exclusion of the nonfclicitous image. For Henderson the "privileging of difference" is an important aspect of black feminist writers and critics. She proposes the need to deconstruct the gaze of the other, the need to "deconstruct the notion of the black tradition," and the necessity of maintaining the "multiplicity of 'interested readings'" in order to "resist the totalizing character of much theory and criticism" (162). If Baker's essay docs not promote the type of dialogic relationship of interested readings that Henderson and others call for, his collection of essays certainly does. And Henderson's admonition that "we must continue to recognize and respect that dialogue is necessary to fill in the lacks or deficiencies within and among different and competitive paradigms" and to "promote rival critical paradigms which critique each other's theories and readings," (163) serves as an excellent description of what Baker and Redmond have achieved in the publication of this volume. DEBORAH BARKER Another Tale to Tell: Politics and Narrative in Postmodern Culture by Fred Pfeil. London and New York: Verso, 1990. 288 pp.. $45.00 (cloth), $15.95 (paper). Another Tale to Tell appears on the critical scene when the bulk of theoretical discourse about postmodernism has exhausted its limited descriptive potential and has crossed into overkill on "idiosyncratic" renderings of our "shared" ahistorical condition. Although many of the catchwords of this now familiar discourse (such as "flaneur," "montage" and "postOcdipal ") turn up in this collection of Pfcil's essays (1977-89), his examination of postmodernism assumes the vantage point of such politically engaged leftist/feminist theoreticians as Fredric Jameson, Jessica Benjamin and Stuart Hall. Pfcil's project of "constructing a democratic socialism" (8), however, digresses from the "vanguard" of critical thinking, in at least two significant ways. Unlike many theoreticians of the left (especially before challenges to Marxist explications of the labor process were voiced by the feminist sector), Pfeil successfully resists the notion of the subsuming last instance of class by moving "out beyond the enforced soul-breaking coercions of class and race and gender" (187), while maintaining a "polyloguc" (to use Kristcva's term) of the various sites of oppression. In a related move, Pfeil contcxtualizcs Jameson's portrayal of the "cultural dominant" of the late capitalist production as an ideological choke-hold on radical praxis, by situating the advent of the "postmodern condition" specifically 150 the minnesota review with the PMC, or professional-managerial class, constituted by the generation of the so-called "baby-boomers." This historicizing step enables Pfeil to point out strategic cultural spaces in which decentered postmodem subjectivity can be construed as a potentially emancipatory force in the face of such artificially unifying categories as "high" and "low" culture, "rigorism" and "populism." Pfeil...