On the Winds and Waves of Imagination: Transnational Feminism and Literature (review)

In On the Winds and Waves of Imagination, Constance S. Richards invokes the locational idiom of third-wave North American feminism, which marks a shift from the temporal rhetoric of awakening, revelation, and rebirth associated with second wave feminism.Prominent features of third-wave North American feminism include attention to the geopolitical and the politics of location, namely, the articulation of relational subjectivities (Friedman).Richards's analysis of select literary works such as John Edgar Wideman's The Tempest, Viriginia Woolf's The Voyage Out, and Alice Walker's The Color Purple highlights the "female self-construction of identity, the shifting alliances of identity politics, and [how writers] strategically deploy subjectivities as an act of empathy and solidarity" (xii).Richards's promise to attend to the geopolitical and "the influence of the transnational flow of capital resulting in cultural displacement, expatriation, migration, and cultural appropriation" (x) tends to give way to the metaphorics of multipositionality.

Richards views the literary critic as a world traveler entering others' worlds in order to "understand what it is to be them [the Other] and what it is to be ourselves in their eyes" (25), and she configures "empathy as a first step in crosscultural relations" (24). But, we might ask, how can literary criticism enable reciprocity? Into whose worlds are we traveling if literary texts are the sites of visitation?For Richards, the imagination is the means of travel.Richards's emphasis on reciprocity and relational subjectivity is most vivid in her reading of Zoe Wicomb's novel You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town.As Richards puts it, "the novel required of me, a white, U.S., academic, feminist reader, a politically engaged reading practice" (73).Yet it is not self-reflexivity as much as sociohistorical reflexivity that provides the evidence for the persuasive reading of the novel and its relation to the larger tradition of protest literature in South Africa.Likewise, her balanced critical analysis of Woolf's The Voyage Out powerfully demonstrates its function as a "self-reflexive critique of identity construction in colonialist literature" (xi), while also recognizing Woolf's complicity in the colonial literary tradition.

Richards offers transnational feminism as an alternative to bourgeois feminism and separatist feminism.Yet in the final chapter in which she reads Alice Walker "as a literary practitioner of transnational feminism" (xi), distinctions are blurred between these categories and their antithetical relationship to transnational feminism. Richards mobilizes the work of scholars such as Inderpal Grewel and Caren Kaplan, associated with transnational feminism, to validate Walker's stand against female genital mutilation in Possessing the Secret of Joy and in the film Warrior Marks: Female Genital Mutilation and the Sexual Blinding of Women (Walker and Parmar) without full acknowledgment of the critical consequences of what some have called Walker's self-aggrandizing "rescue operation" (Gunning).Thus Richards's deployment of the category "transnational" and the forms taken in its name warrants some scrutiny.

I share Richards's sense of the interdependence of the personal and the political and concur: "Literature can provide one arena for doing the kind of comparative political work demanded of transnational feminism" (90; emphasis added).Richards acknowledges the potentially interventionist nature of transnational feminist literary criticism in proposing alternative forms of political action, though her attention shifts at key moments from the political to the psychological.On the Winds and Waves of Imagination does not in the end offer prescriptions and perhaps this is its strength in as much as it raises key questions about the politics and aesthetics of literature and criticism in an increasingly global world.