New Latina Narrative: The Feminine Space of Postmodern Ethnicity by Ellen McCracken (review)

political economy of the production of "Third-World" identity, difference, and representation. Perhaps this lack has to do with the general — ifnot exclusive — indifference of postcolonial theory to the problems and analytics of political economy. Although Uma Narayan jusdy takes up a whole constellation ofintertwined issues thrown up by contemporary globalization and migration, she does not seem interested in seeing how the racist and patriarchal logic ofglobal/corporate /late capital continues to homogenize, de-historicize, and de-nationalize "Third-World cultures" in the interest ofvalue and profit on both local and global scales, thus perpetrating violences on the land, labor, language, and the body of the Third-World female subaltern. For instance, multiculturalism itself is not merely culturalist but is also decisively politico-economic, connected as it remains to the flow ofcorporate capital. Ofcourse, in all such contexts, the law ofvalue does not wither away. This particular lack notwithstanding, I think Disllocating Cultures is a welcome intervention not only in feminist and postcolonial studies but also in the areas ofcultural and media studies, historiography, and the social sciences. $é Ellen McCracken. New Latina Narrative: The Feminine Space of Postmodern Ethnicity. Tucson: University ofArizona Press, 1999. 233p. María Alicia Garza Boise State University Ellen McCracken's New Latina Narrative: The Feminine Space of Postmodern Ethnicity is a close analysis of 24 U.S. Latina authors whose literary productions were published in either the 1980s or 1990s. In her introduction, McCracken explains how Latinas, through their writing, are able to address the controversial meaning behind the social buzzwords "diversity" and "multiculturalism." Both social activists and academicians have pointed out how instead ofbeing a stratagem to promote inclusion, the meaning ofdiversity and multiculturalism has been mishandled to the point where the culture, history, and politics of under-represented groups remain blind spots in mainstream society. With a focus on gender, Chicana, Cuban American, Dominican American, and Puerto Rican women narrativists deploy discourses on identity politics, memory and autobiography, sexual transgression, and religious revisionism within a historical framework that provides a social representation about individuals ofLatin American descent. The function of these discursive strategies is to subvert dominant discourses that threaten to erase, misinterpret, romanticize, pluralize, tropicalize, and/or locate Latinas/os as the Other. With gender concerns woven into the multilayered new 146 + ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW * FALL 2000 Latina writing, this literary construction gives a heterogenic quality to the representational writing space which McCracken terms a "feminine space of Postmodern ethnicity." The book is divided into six chapters.The first, entitled "Postmodern Ethnicity as Commodity: Containment and Resistance in New Latina Narrative," is a study offour Latina canonical writers: Julia Alvarez, Ana Castillo, Sandra Cisneros, and Cristina García. In this very intriguing chapter, McCracken charts the manner in which publishing houses introduce these Latinas into the mainstream literary scene. Her provocative study of book jackets and book reviews illustrates the mainstream publishers' attempt to commodify the four authors. She also elucidates how, through the thematic and structural content of their work, Cisneros, Garcia, andAlvarez explore the intricaciesofLatino subjectivity. McCracken raises concerns about Castillo's novel, So Farfrom God. She finds that die parody ofhistory , politics, religion, and characters within the novel could possibly mislead readers who are unfamiliar with Latino culture and history to arrive at erroneous interpretations regarding the representation ofNuevomexicanos or Latin Americans. While McCracken is thorough in her critique ofSo Farfrom God, she commits a minor error when she states that "La Loca performs an abortion on her sister and protests Farah jeans" (38). Actually, La Loca helps her sister Caridad with three abortions. And, since this portion ofCastillo's novel is posited in the early 1990s, it is the Levi Strauss, rather than the Farah slacks company, that La Loca is boycotting . This is a slight distraction to an otherwise very informative chapter. In chapters two and diree, McCracken writes about how Latinawriters reinfect language by writing the body, establishing a palimpsest with pre-existing patriarchal texts, highlighting the resilience ofwomen, and experimenting with the reconstruction of the Other. Basing her readings on Ernesto LaClau's theoretical model on populist rupture, McCracken analyzes creative productions by audiors such as Micky Fernández, Aurora Levins Morales, Rosario Morales, Helena...