Race, Gender, and Comparative Black Modernism: Suzanne Lacascade, Marita Bonner, Suzanne Césaire, Dorothy West (review)

For those who believe that the recovery of literature by women has seen its heyday, Jennifer M. Wilks's Race, Gender, and Comparative Black Modernism: Suzanne Lacascade, Marita Bonner, Suzanne Césaire, Dorothy West has arrived to illustrate the continuing significance of feminist efforts to reassess literary scholarship. Like other important recovery work in postcolonial, ethnic, and feminist literary studies, this book challenges canonical periodization and questions typical boundaries of literary modernity by providing a bilingual, transnational, diasporic, and gendered conception of it. The study focuses on four underappreciated and insufficiently studied African diasporic women writers of the first half of the twentieth century. American writers Marita Bonner (1899-1971) and Dorothy West (1907-1998) are associated with the Harlem Renaissance. Guadeloupean writer Suzanne Lacascade (dates unknown) and Martinican writer Suzanne Césaire (1913-1966) are connected with the Francophone Negritude movement in the Caribbean. The book concludes by connecting the discursive paths these writers forged to two contemporary women writers, American writer Toni Morrison and Guadeloupean writer Maryse Condé.

This book thus forges connections among African diasporic women writers of the early twentieth century who are not often read in relation to one another. These writers did not meet one another in life, nor do the comparisons Wilks makes among their writings meet in a neat answer about how African diasporic women writers portrayed race and gender. Instead, focusing on these four underexamined writers allows readers to see a nuanced, accurate, representative, and egalitarian portrait of modernism, to "correct gender imbalances in studies of the period" (25).

The volume makes an important feminist point about the representation of black women by women of African descent. Rather than represent black women as idealized symbols, icons, or muses—feminist readers know the litany of roles in which women in literature are placed, seemingly flattering but in reality objectifying—Lacascade, Bonner, Césaire, and West write about (and are themselves) modern, African, diasporic women who assert agency and individuality, claim voice and authority over their lives, and, in the process, rewrite our understandings of black women. Each of these writers, Wilks argues, resists the universalizing, essentialist tendencies of the Negritude movement and the Harlem Renaissance by focusing on atypical women rather than on an archetypal man, such as the New Negro. In their own ways and in a variety of genres, each focuses on the historical specificity of her time and place rather than the universality of an idealized African past.

Wilks's consideration contests earlier narratives of black identity in the interwar period by insisting on the intersection of race and gender. It builds on recent efforts to reassess modernism by considering writers outside of its andro- and Eurocentric definition while also adding gender to foundational work in comparative black modernism. In doing so, this study disrupts, but ultimately transforms, our understandings of the Negritude movement in the Caribbean, the Harlem Renaissance in the United States, and modernism, as well as the connections and disjunctures among these significant literary movements of the early twentieth century, temporally and geographically unmooring them.

The comparativist methodology of this project is particularly important. Creating an elegantly wrought literary conceit, Wilks pairs unlike texts and atypical writers for the disorder and creativity this binding brings, a methodology of what she calls "literary disorder" (25). Her model of comparison emphasizes difference and specificity, not sameness and universality. At times her choice of writers and literary texts seems too disparate to warrant being bound together in a book. For example, Césaire seems to be the most tangential to this project, not because her writings do not deserve more scholarly consideration, but because Wilks makes the fewest connections between Césaire and the other writers. Wilks's goal "of provocation" should not be dismissed (2), however, for this study indeed provokes new thinking, fosters new questions, creates new tensions, and ultimately deepens our understanding...