Proceed with Caution, When Engaged by Minority Writing in the Americas (review)

Doris Sommer has written a fascinating and insightful book about the discursive strategies present in minority writings. It is an important book of criticism giving us a compelling theoretical approach, and covering a vast range of discourses from colonial to postcolonial narratives, music to film, race to gender, and writing to ethics.

The book is organized around the "Rhetoric of Particularism," a claim that Sommer discusses as being the various discontinuities that mark certain minority narratives in order to establish distance or intimacy between reader and text. In an innovative, courageous, and passionate study of narrative in the Americas she emphasizes the need to pay attention to dynamics between self and other, particularism and universalism, as well as in what social, economic, and political context they emerge. Inquiring not only into the writer's role in representation but also into the dynamics of reading itself, she points out the limits of comprehension and understanding in narratives.

The book is divided into three sections which examine the problems of translation, testimonial narrative, and representation in writing. In the first section, Sommer addresses Walt Whitman's reception by Latin American writers and the capacity of his poetics to accommodate every discourse, aligning his "democratic poetry" with the discourse of liberalism and democracy. Moving to Peru in "Mosaic and Mestizo: Bilingual Love from Hebreo to Garcilaso," she gives us a fine discussion of the importance and social meaning of writing and translation in the colonial context by discussing how translation works as way of legitimating knowledge and subjectivity for Garcilaso de la Vega. The section ends with an analysis of the historical episode in Texas, where Gregorio Cortez shot the sheriff in 1901. She shows how the story of Cortez travels in time since the original episode, passing through multiple genres (oral, written, film), and how meaning becomes problematic when it slips away from a monolingual and non-target audience.

The section "Taking a Life" is dedicated to testimonial narrative. Sommer starts by discussing Rigoberta Menchú's narrative, pointing out how in Menchú's text readers are kept distant from the possibility of knowing the absolute Other that she represents. She shows how her narrative tends to be a combination of different discourses that escapes any totalizing ideology of politics of gender, race, or class. The refusal imposed to the knowledge of the other is revealed in a discussion of Elena Poniatowska's novel Hasta no verte, Jesús mío. Here Sommer discusses the reception of Poniatowska's work, as well as the refusal of the reader by Jesusa Palancares, whose life story is the subject of the book. After showing how Poniatowska's text avoids partnership with reader, she moves on to the analysis of a Toni Morrison novel. Insisting on the distance established between the novel and its readers, Sommer shows how silence plays an important role in Beloved; creating an expectation for the readers throughout the narrative by holding back, until the end of the story, the revelation of truth. She also makes a cross-cultural attempt to read Morrison's novel in light of the Jewish tradition, bringing together the historical similarities between Jewish and African-American culture.

In the final section of the book, "White Writing on Dark Subjects," Sommer discusses Cirilo Villaverde's novel, Cecilia Valdés, and Villaverde's political agenda regarding slavery and Cuban independence. Emphasizing the problematics of race in a slave society, she shows how telling becomes dangerous, and demonstrates "the importance of positionality in the circulation of knowledge" (p. 193). The subsequent chapter is dedicated to an analysis of Julio Cortázar's short story "The Pursuer." Cortázar addresses the limits of knowing the Other by telling the story of a jazz critic who fears the impossibility of knowing the subject of the biography he is writing...