African Diasporic Women's Narratives: Politics of Resistance, Survival and Citizenship by Simone A. James Alexander (review)

The society that most of us are familiar with is Eurocentric. That means that our culture is based on concepts created by White Anglo Saxon Protestant males. Every aspect in our lives is permeated with this Eurocentric mindset. There are preconceived notions that have been developed by White Anglo Saxon Protestant males for those who are not born in Europe. Literary works are one aspect where one sees these preconceived notions of race, gender, sexuality, migration and identity displayed. Simone A. Alexander has penned her book, African Diasporic Women's Narratives: Politics of Resistance, Survival and Citizenship, to help the reader understand how complex race, gender, sexuality, migration, and identity are when they cross one another in society and in creative works.

In the six chapters of her book, Simone A. James Alexander examines intensely the works of several international women whose works demonstrate how Black women have used their bodily presence to challenge a migratory process forced on them by White Anglo Saxon Protestant males. This book seeks to answer several questions: How does female bodily presence complicate and/or challenge the once "male constructed" migratory process? How is the framework of migratory experiences redefined and reappropriated by female travels? How do women's experiences of migration differ from men's, psychologically and somatically? How do these migrating bodies experience the new diasporas they inhabit? How do these women use their oppressed bodies to reconfigure the discourse on migration, diaspora, citizenship, and identity? How do transnational exchanges engender resistance even as they expand the definition of diaspora via diasporic encounters and relations? How does the circulation of black female identities and sexualities discursively engender a parallel migration that disrupts and debunks hierarchical structures? How do these women employ their migrating bodies as sites of resistance to male hegemony? How do bodies mobilize and destabilize the meaning of race, class and gender? (12).

The book contains in-depth study of selective works by South African Saartjie Baartman, African American Audre Lorde, Guadeloupean Maryse Condé, Haitian Edwidge Dandicat, and Guayanese Grace Nichols to answer the questions posed in the preceding paragraph. Saartjie Baartman's story is one of recovery and recuperation that culminated in her posthumous attainment of citizenship. Audre Lorde is a breast cancer survivor and she self identifies as a black lesbian feminist writer, activist and mother of two. In the story I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem Maryse Condé writes of migration and repatriation. In Breath, Eyes, Memory, Edwidge Danticat demonstrates how the language of nationalism is used to restrict women's public roles or appearances. This process denies them the ability to practice citizenship. Grace Nichols's poetry in The Fat Black Woman's Poems and Lazy Thoughts of a Lazy Woman draw on the age-old racist stereotypes of the Sambo and the Mammy archetypes assigned to black subjects. These archetypes caused black women to be seen as nonpersons, noncitizens.

The major strength of African Diasporic Women's Narratives is the amount of intensive research that the author used. It is obvious as one reads this book, and there are fifteen pages in the bibliography that attest to that fact. It introduces a large number of scholarly works to quench the intellectual thirst of anyone who desires to do research on the African Diaspora. Many of the works included in the bibliography are current, having been written in the 1980s, the 1990s and the 2000s.

When one writes a project of this magnitude, it is impossible to include all diasporic women writers from the Caribbean. Since I have a strong interest in works by and about Afro-Hispanic women, I was curious as to why none of them is included in this study. I feel this is a major weakness of this work. As I think of Cuba, Nancy Morejón comes to mind immediately, as well...