Reclaiming Difference. Caribbean Women Rewrite Postcolonialism (review)

Reclaiming Difference is a timely addition to the University of Virginia's series on New World Studies. Mardorossian provocatively applies the emerging field's methodologies to Caribbean women's fiction. She "marks out a transgenerational, transracial, translinguistic and translocal analytical territory" by reworking traditional conceptualizations of Caribbean identity (p. 5) in her highly theoretical Introduction. She then maps her interpretations of Caribbean (Jean Rhys, Maryse Condé) Victorian (Emily Brönte) and migrant (Julia Alvarez, Edwidge Danticat) women's fiction onto this territory in the four chapters that constitute the body of the work.

As the title of her book suggests, Mardorossian's central claim is that the women authors she examines rewrite postcolonialism by "reclaiming" difference. She proposes a model that foregrounds "relational identity" as an alternative to static "root identities" for reading difference in cultural production. Consequently, in contrast to the "neat" paradigms previously used to define postcolonial literature (earlier anti-colonial and later deligitmizing narratives), this model allows Mardorossian to identify a third phase of rewriting (colonialism)—a phase in which authors "appropriate and rewrite categories of identity" in their fiction (p. 8). This rewriting, she argues, has profound implications for foundational concepts in postcolonial theory: race and hybridity, resistance and agency, and home and exile. The introduction includes ample proof for these claims in detailed summaries of the subsequent chapters, making it perhaps too long and parts of the subsequent essays a bit redundant.

In the book's first three chapters, Mardorossian applies her model to "canonical" texts. She relates the authors' use of characterization to "regimes of visibility" that situate race in the body and thus ignore other influential categories that constitute the subject in the novel. In this way, she reveals that in Conde's Windward Heights and Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea, racial characteristics are simply figurations contingent upon class and gender crossings. Therefore, these rewritings of Brönte's Wuthering Heights question the fixity of postcolonial categories of race and hybridity. In her illuminating analysis of this last novel, Mardorossian reinforces her model's utility by using it to reveal how Brönte's text reveals a surprising fluidity in the late 19^th century discourse on race. Perhaps most interesting to readers of this journal, this chapter shows how alternatives to geographically specific theories transform our traditional readings and interpretations of canonical texts.

Mardorossian also analyzes the authors' focalization of narrative voice to suggest that the novels destabilize rather than fix the notion of "coming to voice" in women's fiction. For example, she juxtaposes two interpretations of Wide Sargasso Sea—the construction of a subaltern voice as agent of an oppositional discourse that Benita Parry sees in the novel and Gayatri Spivak's interpretation that maintains that our efforts to construct this voice impose Western assumptions of embodied subjectivity onto the subaltern (p. 63). Mardorossian distinguishes between narration and the focalization of narrative voice in identifying the text's point(s) of view and offers a third interpretation. She convincingly argues that the ambivalent narrative voice precludes the articulation of an "authentic" subaltern identity without compromising the representation of the character's resistance or agency. When combined with the "relational" logic in her model, this type of narrative scrutiny leads her to query the fixed meanings of the oft-used terms "subaltern" and "agency" in postcolonial studies.

In much the same manner, the book's fourth chapter questions fixed notions of national identity fundamental to postcolonial theory's definition of "home" and "exile" by examining an emerging aesthetic in Caribbean migrant women's fiction. Mardorossian cites Benítez Rojos' definition of "creolization" as foundational to a "relational" poetics in migrant literature. Her contribution to elaborating a New World aesthetic is her argument that just like traditional definitions of "place," such an aesthetic cannot be homogeneous. After elucidating the relational narrative logic in the novel, Mardorossian concludes that Alvarez's Yo! "… offers a portrait of the...