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  • Activism and the American Novel: Religion and Resistance in Fiction by Women of Color by Channette Romero
  • Robin E. Field
ACTIVISM AND THE AMERICAN NOVEL: RELIGION AND RESISTANCE IN FICTION BY WOMEN OF COLOR, by Channette Romero. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012. 232 pp. $55.00 cloth; $22.50 paper; $22.50 ebook.

Activism and the American Novel: Religion and Resistance in Fiction by Women of Color is literary criticism of the finest sort. Channette Romero argues that fiction by American women of color since the 1980s attempts to shift reading practices from the private and the passive to inspire instead a politicized and socially engaged community of readers. To do so, these texts draw upon the multitude of religions and spiritualities practiced by people of color, as well as forgotten or ignored interracial communities and histories, to challenge the dominant cultural narratives of the Americas. Romero contends: “Fiction by women of color since the 1980s enlists the political potential latent in novels and the belief traditions of people of color, seeking to inspire readers with visions of resistance to [End Page 259] injustice” (p. 2). Activism and the American Novel underscores the role of literature in overcoming oppression by stimulating political awareness and urging social activism in readers.

The first of Romero’s five chapters lays the groundwork for the in-depth engagement with specific authors and texts of the book’s latter chapters. Entitled “Reconstituting the Public Sphere,” this chapter explores modern literature’s connection to the public sphere, specifically the novel’s traditional affiliation with the nation. Romero grapples with Jürgen Habermas’s notions of the bourgeois public sphere and argues for an alternative, more democratic public sphere that offers new freedoms and allows more complex cultural identities to people of color. She then explicates the narrative strategies used by women of color in fiction since the 1980s that stimulate a political consciousness in readers: the primacy of oral storytelling; a focus on communities, rather than individuals; the representation of diverse spiritual and religious beliefs; an explicit presentation of competing world-views; and a refusal of narrative closure. These strategies lead to a more participatory experience with the text, as “the choice these novels present among competing ideologies attempts to reempower readers, to encourage them to question their notions of identity and community” (p. 52).

The ensuing four chapters combine rigorous theoretical insights and meticulous close readings of individual novels to explicate the formal characteristics and thematic concerns seen in fiction by American women of color since the 1980s. Romero productively transcends the ethnic and cultural boundaries set by the 1970s ethnic nationalist movements, building on the groundbreaking work of Caroline Rody in The Interethnic Imagination (2009) by highlighting the interracial connections—both historical and literary—found in recent fiction by women of color. Additionally, she gives equal attention to lesser-known novels, reminding scholars not to neglect underexamined texts in favor of critical and commercial favorites. Hence Romero uses Cristina García’s Monkey Hunting (2003) and LeAnne Howe’s Shell Shaker (2001) in her second chapter to examine the nonlinear temporalities that powerfully connect traumas of the past to present oppressions in order to imagine a new kind of future where interracial coalition-building offers better opportunities for self-governance. Chapter three, “Rewriting America’s Exceptionalism: Toni Morrison,” uses Paradise (1997) to underscore how the formation and maintenance of a monolithic communal identity (in Morrison’s novel, the all-black town of Ruby, Oklahoma) inevitably leads to violence and exclusion (of the racially and culturally diverse community of women living just outside of town), ironically replicating the flawed concept of American exceptionalism. Romero explains how “the Black Church’s traditions of political mobilization, social justice, and anti-exceptionalism are shown to offer a possible alternative to the stagnation of American exceptionalism” (p. 92). [End Page 260]

The fourth and fifth chapters explore how the ethnic nationalist movements of the 1970s continued to replicate the violence and exclusiveness of American nationalism and how American women writers of color positioned the religions and spiritualities of people of color as fertile grounds for growing community and sowing justice and freedom. In texts such as...

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