Trans-American Performance

Page 6 American Book Review Galindo continued on next page Smith continued from previous page two artists—one a British Caribbean filmmaker, the other a Korean Canadian photographer—as in the writing of the Japanese Canadian author discussed in chapter 3, “Joy Kogawa’s Native Envy,” there is a marked concern for the treatment of native peoples in their work. Through images of Julien’s installations and Yoon’s photography, this last chapter illustrates literally and figuratively the multiple registers of landscape representation and the irreducibility of the identities framed within these successive images .Yoon’s portraits of herself against the backdrop of Prince Edward Island in particular expose the viewer’s preconceived ideas of “the visitor” and “the local” as well as our concept of natural and man-made environments by shifting our perception from one pole to the other in very similar images through the choice of an angle, by changing the position of the people in the images, or by zooming in or out of the landscape. The inclusion of this visual segment is both powerful and effective in the context of the other readings and gives the book an elegant symmetry, since it begins and ends with visual evocations of landscape. It does, however, raise the question of the appropriateness of the book’s title, since the subject is not limited to “contemporary writing.” In the four chapters dealing exclusively with written landscapes, Casteel once again provides a fascinating array of genres, settings, cultural groups, and diasporic experiences in the New World, succinctly tied together by her rigorous theoretical framework. Dividing the book into two parts, “Critical Pastoralism ” and “Marvelous Gardens and Gothic Wildernesses ,” she highlights the capacity of the former to bridge the traditional vein of landscape writing, while at the same time pursuing more innovative and oppositional aesthetic and political agendas, whereas the latter combines a dynamic poetics of space with a historically rooted connection to the experience of colonialism. In addition to the chapter on Naipaul and Walcott and the one on Joy Kogawa mentioned earlier, Casteel also interrogates “the myth of the West” in the writing of two Jewish American writers, Bernard Malamud and Philip Roth, under the rubric of the critical pastoral, contesting critics’ assertions that nature is of little consequence in the Jewish American literary imagination. In the fourth chapter, under the rubric of marvelous gardens and gothic wildernesses, Casteel considers the nonfiction genre of garden writing in Michael Pollan’s Second Nature: A Gardner’s Education (1991) and Jamaica Kincaid’s My Garden (Book) (1999). Vital New World diasporic metaphors such as transplantation , emplacement, and hybridity are addressed in terms of the act of gardening as well as in the autobiographical elements and family garden(ing) memories that emerge during the writing process for these Jewish American and Caribbean American writers. Chapter 5, “Marvelous and Gothic Gardens in Shani Mootoo, Gisèle Pineau, and Maryse Condé,” serves as the cornerstone of this second part of the book, supporting Casteel’s assertion that rural and wilderness landscapes and the botanic imagery they inspire can simultaneously evoke emplacement and mobility while nevertheless resisting the construction of fixed origins and identities. Moreover, an examination of the work of these three Caribbean women writers underscores the multiplicity of literary styles and discursive strategies New World writers deploy not only in their search for an alternative landscape aesthetics, but also in their pursuit of a more flexible relationship between place and belonging. Second Arrivals challenges dominant assumptions in the academy concerning the role of place in the diasporic imagination. Second Arrivals is exceptionally well written and enjoyable to read. Casteel convincingly argues against the prevailing conception of place as inherently rigid and nostalgic in her exploration of diasporic experiences in a broad selection of literary and artistic media. The writers and artists included in this study represent African, Afro-Caribbean, Japanese , Jewish, and Korean second arrivals in Canada, England, Guadeloupe, St. Lucia,Trinidad, and the US of Anglophone and Francophone expression. While they articulate new positions and relationships to landscape, these New World writers and artists do so by acknowledging and revisiting cultural, literary, and visual archives and myths. Danielle D. Smith is a...