"Doers of the Word": African-American Women Speakers and Writers in the North (1830-1880) (review)

238Reviews lected texts, European thinkers and writers set up a mythology that Cooper inevitably "had to" engage. In turn, Cooper set an agenda for later European exoticists up to Karl May, but also for Latin American writers such as Alencar, whose "Indian" novels (O Guarini [1857], Iracema [1865], and Ubiraiara [1874]) drew on the Leather-stocking Tales as well as Cooper's own "sources," such as Scott and Chateaubriand. The intriguing point as Wasserman sketches such webs of influence is that mere influence is not the key issue; rather, it is the idiom of the exotic that matters, an idiom first created by Europeans as a means of distancing the colonial periphery from the homeland. As with "Yankee Doodle," however, the idiom evolved into a means of self-representation and circulated among the writers of the periphery, giving them the means of achieving fame there and abroad. The terms in which Wasserman traces this circulation are more novel than is the substance of what she describes. Nowhere does she muster the kind of detail and inclusiveness that would make her account and her explanation as compelling and complete as they might be. But perhaps the most instructive aspect of her argument is not its theoretical pretensions but rather her opening of a discussion about the North-South dialogue, as it were, that Europe's invasion of the Americas and ultimate ejection from them served to initiate. We very much need more treatment of the Pan-American dimensions of New World writing, and it is especially refreshing to find Wasserman skip the more obvious U.S.-Spanish American examples and consider instead the case of Portuguese-speaking Brazil. Her own Brazilian origins and U.S. citizenship make her sensitive to the slipperiness of nationalist categories as well as to the complexity of the exchanges to which she directs our attention in this timely, thoughtful book. Wayne FranklinNortheastern University Peterson, Carla L. "Doers of the Word": African-American Women Speakers and Writers in the North (1830-1880). New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1995. 284 pp. Cloth: $35.00 This complex study offers insightful correctives to several oversimplifying tendencies in some scholarship on African-American women's writing in the nineteenth century. First of all, by exploring genres other than the slave narrative, "Doers of the Word" emphasizes that the cultural work of many black authors of that century was aimed at a variety of audiences for a range of purposes—not simply guided by white abolitionists who promoted such now-canonical texts as Frederick Douglass' and Harriet Jacobs'. In fact, one of the major strengths of "Doers ofthe Word" is its marshaling of genres which only a few years ago might have been seen as stretching the boundaries of Studies in American Fiction239 literary study. From Maria Stewart's Meditations to Charlotte Forten's articles for the Commonwealth and the Christian Register, Peterson's survey of texts by about a dozen authors aptly demonstrates her contention that, to better understand their influence, we must historicize our sense of the "literary ," since nineteenth-century "black women appropriated many different cultural discourses ... in order to become producers rather than mere consumers of literary expression" (p. 22). Equally significant, though, is this study's incisive merging of the social histories of composition and reception for such texts as Jarena Lee's autobiographies and Frances Harper's 1870s paper on the "Coloured Women of America" with detailed close readings that should prove useful to readers who lack easy access to the wealth of primary materials Peterson reviews. For example, an engaging treatment of Sojourner Truth's post-war women's rights speeches underscores such issues as the difficulty African-American "doers of the word" faced in balancing gender, class, and race uplift goals; yet it also provides summaries of the addresses themselves and interpretations of their crucial rhetorical moves. Peterson's study adeptly shows how a late twentieth-century scholar can use critical theory to illuminate specific texts and larger social movements in the previous century without framing her analysis too reductively within any single interpretive perspective. Peterson's use of figures like Frantz Fanon, Homi Bhabha, and Donna Harraway in the introductory chapter occasionally veers...