Circles of Sorrow, Lines of Struggle: The Novels of Toni Morrison by Gurleen Grewal (review)

beyond, the limits that, akin to the Berlin Wall, were not totally capable ofkeeping GDR citizens in line ("party line," that is). Although Kuehn's focus is primarily on the development of GDR photography and its major artists, he doesn't neglect the importance of photographers and photographic developments elsewhere , especially in the U.S. and Western Europe, and he frequently mentions the various kinships between individual GDR photographers and their Western counterparts. Considering that this book is not a technical study ofphotography, but rather an ambitious discussion ofGDR photography in a broad historical, political, and cultural context, Kuehn provides remarkably accurate information about the topic. One ofthe very few and minor exceptions to accuracy occurs on where he claims that the GDR was founded two months after the founding ofthe Federal Republic (27). In fact, the GDR was established five months after the FRG. All in all, this book is a very significant contribution to our knowledge of this important but little understood artistic medium in the GDR, providing in the process an accessible and remarkable new angle on GDR cultural history in general. % Gurleen Grewal. Circles ofSorrow, Lines ofStruggle: The Noveh ofToni Morrison. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998. 154p. Madonne M. Miner Texas Tech University In Circles ofSorrow, LinesofStruggle: The NoveL· ofToniMorrison, Gurleen Grewal applies the lens of a postcolonial critic to the first six novels ofToni Morrison. The analyses that result are fresh, insightful and compelling; CirclesofSorrow adds to our understanding of Morrison's texts as well as to our appreciation for postcolonial theory. In a short preface and introduction, Grewal clarifies that "postcolonial" should not be read as that which follows after the end of the colonial, but rather, as "the legacy of colonialism that is carried and continued into the present" (x). She argues , along with black historians of the 1970s, that black Americans have been subjected to an internal (or domestic) colonization: colonization "maintained in the 'home' country in close proximity to the dominant racial group" (Harold Cruse, qtd. in Grewal 7). Reading Morrison's novels within this framework, Grewal highlights the ways these texts "revise dominant historiography, reconsidering the scene ofcolonial violation from the inside, from subaltern perspectives hitherto ignored" (8). She also calls our attention to the movement, in each novel, from individuals to communities, from specific characters to sociopolitical histo104 Hr ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW Hr FALL 1999 ries and economies in which the characters exist. Like Morrison, Grewal shows us that the boundaries ofthe selfare "permeated by die collective struggle ofhistorical agents who live the long sentence of history by succumbing to (repeating), contesting, and remaking it" (14). Grewal devotes a chapter each to Morrison's first six novels (Paradise appeared too late for inclusion in Grewal's study). Common to each chapter is an examination ofMorrison's representation oftraumatic losses within a colonized black community and of the necessity of remembering those losses, re-experiencing those traumas, in order to move into a future. Also common to each chapter is an interpretation of intersections between Morrison's texts and various pre-texts, both written and oral. Rather than describe major insights of all six chapters, here I focus on two which for me illustrate both the strengths and weaknesses ofGrewal's approach. In chapter one, "The DecolonizingVision: The BluestEye," Grewal argues that the power ofMorrison's first novel "lies in its démystification ofhegemonic social processes — in its keen grasp ofthe way power works, the way individuals collude in their own oppression by internalizing a dominant culture's values in the face of great material contradictions" (21). Grewal effectively substantiates her argument by offering us a new way to read the three versions of the "Dick and Jane" narrative that open and structure The Bluest Eye. Grewal sees these three slightly different versions of Dick and Jane (versions progressively less "standard") as "an allegory ofclass formations and ofthe first world's authorizing ofthird world identities " (23). Versions two and three "mimic" version one, repeating it, with a difference ; so too, black characters are encouraged to mimic/repeat the values and desires ofwhite characters (to be Shirley Temple, for example) but this repetition always produces difference (Pecóla Breedlove...