Confronting Visuality in Multi-Ethnic Women’s Writing by Angela Laflen (review)

In her compelling monograph Confronting Visuality in Multi-Ethnic Women’s Writing, Angela Laflen offers an insightful perspective on a diverse selection of acclaimed contemporary women writers, including Toni Morrison, Bobbie Ann Mason, Margaret Atwood, Louise Erdrich, Gish Jen, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, and Alison Bechdel. Laflen seeks to break new ground with her discussion of visuality in texts by these authors in the interest of moving beyond what Rosalind Gill calls a “postfeminist sensibility” for engaging with extant visual imagery (quoted on p. 1). Her claim is that reading and/or viewing these writers’ works alongside one another helps us to create productive links between feminist criticism and today’s oversaturated digital media culture: “Via literature, writers are able to situate images of women within larger contexts of visuality and provide a fuller picture of how images serve the interests of dominant power structures” (p. 4). As Laflen demonstrates, multiethnic women’s visuality is much more than just a fragmented explosion of aesthetic and/or political feminist experimentation; these texts form a collective counternarrative to the twentieth- and twenty-first-century fascination with images of women governed by the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. Laflen’s study argues that Morrison, Mason, Atwood, Erdrich, Jen, Divakaruni, and Bechdel ask their audience to fill in the gaps predicated by dominant perspectives on the representation of women throughout history—especially more recent history. These writers “take an activist stance with regard to visuality and intervene in visual relations by seeking to train their own readers to be critical viewers of images” (p. 5). Further, these writers “model alternative ways of reading and negotiating the meanings of images” in order to “impact how readers will read images they encounter in the future” (pp. 10, 11). Instead of being a threat to literature, then, visuality “is an important subject for literary treatment and actually underscores the importance of critical reading” and enhanced media literacy (p. 15).

Laflen’s utilization of such critical frameworks as Nicholas Mirzoeff’s concept of the colonial and imperial influence of visuality (p. 4), W. J. T. Mitchell’s “pictorial turn” (p. 6), Rita Felski’s “queer spectatorship” (p. 8), bell hooks’s “oppositional gaze” and “black looks” (p. 9), and E. Ann Kaplan’s “imperial gaze” (p. 9)—among others—work well to show that these writers’ inversions of visual representation resist dominant accounts of history, which rely upon fixed ideas of gender, race, and class. Laflen’s close readings of images and texts are engaging, proving these women writers’ use of “literature as a critical space within which to reflect on the ethics and politics of representation” both provocative and productive (p. 13). Confronting Visuality in Multi-Ethnic Women’s Writing offers literary scholars and teachers alike the prospect of grappling with the power of visuality in the current and future digital ages.

In part one, “Coming-of-Age with Mass Media,” Laflen examines the ways in which Morrison and Mason, in the novels The Bluest Eye (1970) and In Country (1985), respectively, re-envision history and thereby transform their characters’ perceptions of self within the spectacle of modern mass media. As Laflen contends, “Morrison makes visible the ideological functions of families, educational institutions, and popular culture, and she seeks a different, though not formal or authorized, place from which to visualize” (p. 22). The narrator’s perspective in Morrison’s novel offers a viable strategy for avoiding “internalizing racist ideologies” (p. 23). As readers, we become as “compromised and implicated” by the scopic regimes of the world in the novel and must identify our own “critical position for examining the way authority visualizes itself and capture that act of looking in some tangible way” (p. 41).

Resistance also becomes possible in In Country as Mason similarly encourages her readers to evaluate the capacity of consumerism to present the working class with a kind of “hyperreality” (p. 46). The protagonist of Mason’s novel engages with televised media...