Interviews with Writers of the Post-Colonial World ed. by Feroza Jussawalla and Reed Way Dasenbrock (review)

86Rocky Mountain Review paths to arrive at the point of completion" (17). The parallel series of poetic fragments by Char and signes by Miro in A la santé du serpent are, Hines notes, woven together to "provoke a new unity" (55). Kandinsky's synthetic theory ("He then creates a model of 'synthesis' as a natural demonstration of the inner-relations of the arts. To this extent, Der Blaue Reiter was planned to serve as an example of synthesis and collaboration of the arts" [61]) finds echoes in Hines' analysis of collaboration. Schoenberg's "'innercongruence ' of feeling" (97); the mythic, primordial struggles depicted in Kandinsky's Der gelbe Klang, Kokoschka's Mörder, and Nikolais' Triad, all find an appreciative audience in these analyses. I do not mean to suggest that the analysis Hines does of these works is wrong-headed or unsophisticated ; to the contrary these readings are careful, complex, and convincing. The questions I am asking about this study have rather to do with, what seem to me, unspoken assumptions. I believe that at the end of the book when Hines gives us a set of rules for collaborative arts, what we find are less "rules" than "expectations." Within the cultural "expectation" that unity rather than difference is the ground of collaboration, Hines' study is perceptive. Once one moves into the cultural territory that the new Gesamtkunstwerk and the philosophy of difference have revealed, collaborative form complicates itself all over again because the expectations are, at base, quite other. LAURA RICE Oregon State University FEROZA JUSSAWALLA and REED WAY DASENBROCK, eds. Interviews with Writers of the Post-Colonial World. Jackson: University Press ofMississippi, 1992. 312 p. Reading this volume is a refreshing experience. The issue of the relationship between language and culture arises from the ways of dealing with it by a rich and very broad representation of writers. The selection of writers, the scope of the questions, the interview process, and editing should be praised. The editors have assembled the book in such a way that the puzzle or the collage is converted in a mapping text. The reader may go from questions of English domination to the emergence of a new conception of English literature, then move to the conflicts between a universal notion of cultural identities and regional, ethnic, or national claims of legitimacy. The interviews show how these writers reconsider or even break the cultural , linguistic, and social consequences of British colonialism. Thus, Chinua Achebe can disagree with the major decision of another African writer, Ngugî wa Thiong'o, to write in Gíküyü, and even accuse him of political tendentiousness (67); but Achebe does not tell the whole story of how difficult it is to write and publish in Nigeria, something that a woman from that country, Buchi Emecheta, emphasizes as one of the major limitations that Nigerian people, especially women, still face. The limitations go back to the Colonial period and are the result of a colonized mentality (90-91). Book Reviews87 It is also enlightening and disturbing to confirm that many of the conflicts that a colonial conception of language and culture have produced are in fact not reduced to "English," though English supremacy could have been the underlying cause. Thus, while a writer like Raja Rao is able to plainly state that "India is essentially Hindu" (144) and that he does not consider himself "multicultural" (142), a woman writer like Anita Desai expresses on the contrary a rich multicultural and plurilinguistic perspective. She thinks that this cultural wealth is threatened by "the precarious position Muslims have in India" (161). The "deterritorialization" that the editors, following Deleuze and Guattari's notion, think is taking place along the canon is very well represented by those writers with a multicultural background. This background is related not only to genealogical circumstances—though in many cases it is a very distinctive feature—but is also the consequence of the migratory movements that the British Empire provoked. Sam Selvon and Roy Heath are Caribbean writers who are trying to portray in their novels the multiethnic experience of countries like Trinidad or Guyana where East Indian, Portuguese, Spanish, French, African, Dutch, Chinese, and British roots are part...