On the Margins: Race, Gender, and Empire, and: Africa Writes Back to Self: Metafiction, Gender, Sexuality (review)

O. R. Dathorne’s study provides an important snapshot of this distinguished scholar’s thinking. Broad in its temporal range; moving from antiquity to the present; and wide in its geographical scope, encompassing Africa, the Caribbean, North America, Asia, and Europe, On the Margins offers a panoptic view while remaining attentive to the peculiar textures of time and space. The first six chapters focus on the evolving roles of women in a range of settings, from their representations in aesthetic texts, to their status as religious icons, to their labor in political activism. Dathorne moves breathtakingly, and fluidly, covering figures as diverse as Lady Mary Wroth, the English poet, and Alice Auma Lakwena, the Ugandan prophetess. These chapters on gender demonstrate how race has subtended certain feminist imaginings and actions in the West, and stress that women across the world demonstrate agency. The next two chapters turn to intertextuality, and here Dathorne explores how a range of postcolonial and minor authors write back to texts in the Euro-American canon. A final chapter assesses the current state of postcolonial scholarship.

Assembling a range of primary texts and influential secondary criticism, Dathorne acknowledges the labor of writers and scholars in multiple fields, demonstrating a keen sense of intellectual generosity. Never diffident, Dathorne explores how figures like Lady Anne Clifford, Countess of Pembroke, and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu construct their ideas of race and gender as they engage foreign others, Blackamoors and Turks, respectively (76–87). He asks how white women’s agency depends on their racialized relations to others. He then extends this interest in women’s agency to how black women authors write about their own agency, and he explores the conflicts and contradictions that mark the work of Jamaica Kincaid, Alice Walker, and Terry McMillan, especially on the question of how black men should be represented. Along the way, eh draws from seminal work by Kim Hall, Anne McClintock, and other important thinkers on the intersections among race, gender, and sexuality.

The book’s scope makes it difficult to nail down one central argument, and this might be the point. Race, gender, and empire are so expansive, so intertwined, so mobile, that one must think in unexpected ways. That said, On the Margins is frequently impressionistic, rather than analytic. Dathorne’s wide-ranging archive offers multiple points of entry, and I found myself wishing he had taken them on more thoroughly. For instance, in a rich passage, he criticizes Terry McMillan for depicting the Caribbean as a place where young black men are sexually available (145). At that moment, Dathorne might have mapped more precisely how diasporic affiliations of race are often modified and ruptured by inequalities of class and national origin. Although On the Margins breaks little new ground, it reminds us that even well ploughed fields reward constant revisiting. A provocative and personable book, it works well for a general audience and as an introductory text to the complexities of thinking race, gender, and empire across space and time.

Evan Maina Mwangi, drawing from a rich selection of contemporary African novels, and attentive to their local histories, and sensitive to the nuances of linguistic and cultural translation, offers a bracing, nuanced, and yet surprisingly obvious thesis: contemporary African novels write back more to their local contexts than to the West. The thesis is obvious in the way that paradigm-shifting ones tend to be, and Mwangi provides conceptual provocation and pedagogical orientation that will engage students and scholars of African literature. The heart of this argument is rooted in how novels use elements of metafiction, that is, self-reflexive formal techniques, to rewrite and overwrite dominant narratives, be these foundational literary texts, nationalist discourses, or postindependence development-drive paradigms. Mwangi is especially interested...