Cultural migrations and gendered subjects: colonial and postcolonial representations of the female body. Silvia Pilar Castro Borrego and María Isabel Romero Ruiz, eds.

Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos 16 (2012). Seville, Spain, ISSN 1133-309-X, 167-180 CULTURAL MIGRATIONS AND GENDERED SUBJECTS: COLONIAL AND POSTCOLONIAL REPRESENTATIONS OF THE FEMALE BODY. Silvia Pilar Castro Borrego and María Isabel Romero Ruiz, eds. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011. ISBN (10): 1-4438-2646. 160 pp. CARME MANUEL Universitat de València [email protected] This volume, edited by Silvia Castro Borrego and Isabel Romero Ruiz, bears testimony of its editors’ continuous and praiseworthy efforts to study the gendered subaltern in postcolonial literatures and cultures. Cultural Migrations and Gendered Subjects is their latest attempt to offer an exploration of “the contributions of women to the construction of knowledge through cultural and literary representations in an ever-changing global world as migrant subjects” (1). As a collection of essays ranging from an analysis of nineteenth-century British press writings on prostitution to an in-depth study of black women’s representation in popular hip hop video culture, it poses a challenge to the naturalization of genderbased experiences and histories of European, Euro-American, African and African American women. Furthermore, it attests to Castro’s and Romero’s claim for the need of an interdisciplinary critical method as well as for a rethinking of women scholars as “cultural workers”, as bringers of “a body of knowledge which fosters self-determination and self-representation” (2). The book includes an “Introduction” by the editors and six chapters—two of them written by the editors themselves and the rest by well-known specialists on African-American and postcolonial theories and literatures—that focus “on the historical and literary aspects which are connected with the social consideration of the female body in several academic discourses, as framed by factors such as gender, class, race and ethnicity, challenging stereotypes about women’s representations and women’s identities” (1). In the Introduction, “Repossessing Our Bodies and Ourselves”, the editors explain the theoretical underpinnings of the essays following and chart the methodological perspectives that underlie the different approaches taken by the contributors. Grounding their research of contemporary issues on the colonial past and on the diversity of women’s experiences, Castro and Romero contend that the definitions of women’s identities explored here are based on 168 Carme Manuel Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos 16 (2012). Seville, Spain, ISSN 1133-309-X, 167-180 women’s own experiences, “seeking the ways in which the public marking and marketing of the female body within the Western imaginary contributes to the making of women’s social and personal identities” (1). The editors follow closely Jacqui Alexander’s and Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s call about the need to produce, in the first place, “critical tools and ways of reading our realities that produce liberatory knowledge”, which “‘enable collective- and self-determination for colonized peoples’”; and secondly, to “direct the ethics of our thinking towards producing the kind of knowledge which aims at decolonization in the twenty-first century” (2). Thus they firmly back their approach on Satya Mohanty’s theory of experience (Mohanty Satya, “The Epistemic Status of Cultural Identity”, 1993) as well as on Alexander’s and Mohanty’s feminist analysis (Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures, 1997) on questions such as sexual and gender politics, marginality both in the economic and cultural spheres, and racist and colonial practices in the Western world. In fact, Castro and Romero respond to Chandra T. Mohanty’s call in her Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (2003, xxxviii) when they declare that they would like “to break a new path, together with other scholars, towards an epistemology of anticolonial feminist struggle” (2). Out of the three models for doing feminist theory presented by Mohanty in Feminism Without Borders (the feminist-as-tourist, the feminist-as-explorer and feminist solidarity), Castro and Romero align their efforts to the third model, the relational approach, which relates global and local issues under a commitment towards solidarity across women around the world. Likewise Mohanty, they weave together several thematic approaches. Firstly, they highlight the importance of experience, they address the necessity to renegotiate the politics of identity and to develop a politics of solidarity to establish a truly transnational feminist discourse, connected to the processes of globalization and alert to the connections of race, gender, class, and nation. Thus, they skillfully present the essays as part of their scholarly resistance against the dismantling of what Chandra T. Mohanty calls the politics of solidarity in a common context of struggle. In view of the latest world events, this is perhaps a utopian aim, but respectable and admirable, nonetheless. In Chapter 1, “Toni Morrison’s Love: The Celestial Whore and Other Female ‘Outlaws’”, Justine Tally presents a commendable analysis of how Morrison provides another example of her never-ending project of retrieval of the past of African American history through the present to visibilize aspects ignored by the official record. The novel tells the story of the now dead Bill Cosey and the women who loved him throughout nine chapters that trace the waning of Cosey Hotel and Resort and with it, the moral and physical decline of its family members. The man, deprived of the privilege of being the teller of his own story, is narrated about by these other characters, and thus his omnipresence is a long shadow haunting and darkening the lives of those surrounding him. In the chapters titled “Portrait”, Review Essay: Cultural Migrations 169 Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos 16 (2012). Seville, Spain, ISSN 1133-309-X, 167-180 “Friend”, “Stranger”, “Benefactor”, “Lover”, “Husband”, “Guardian”, “Father”, “Phantom”, Morrison provides readers with different pieces that help recompose the puzzle of Cosey’s enigmatic personality and identity, a patriarch who used and oppressed women in twentieth-century America. The diversity of characters encompasses several geographical locations as well as social and interracial histories. Tally offers a detailed run-down of the history of the places that serve as background to the novel which is instrumental to comprehend the complexity of the black community and, consequently, the layeredness of the characters. In Chapter 1, for example, the focalizer is Junior Vivianne, a run-away from the correctional, who lacks knowledge about her past and relates to the story of The Ramapo Mountain people, in northwest New Jersey, a degenerate race of social outcasts—renegade Indians, fugitive slaves, Hessian mercenary deserters, West Indian prostitutes, known as the Jackson Whites—who lived in isolation and about whom tales have been told ever since the Revolutionary period. Tally sums up here the history of this community as explained by David Steve Cohen in his The Ramapo Mountain People (1974), as well as by William Carlos Williams’s version of their origins in his epic poem Paterson (1947). Chapter 2, focalized through Sandler, introduces the feelings of Vida, his wife. In contrast to the community of the Jackson-Whites, “Oceanside”, probably a seaside town in Florida, might be inspired, according to Tally, by the history of wealthy black people living at Fernandina Beach, on Amelia Island, twenty-five miles north of Jacksonville Florida. Chapter 3, “Stranger”, tells the story of the “Settlement”, Junior’s correctional, and her yearnings for her father. Chapter 4, “Benefactor”, focalizes on Heed and her devotion for Cosey as he saved her from a life of poverty, as well as on Christine and her marriage to a soldier. Chapter 5, “Lover” focuses on Junior’s affaire with Romen, Sandler’s fourteen-year-old grandson, and recalls her escape from the sexual harassment she suffered at the hands of the administrator of the correctional, which ended up with her expulsion one week before she graduated as an exemplary student. Chapter 6, “Husband”, explains the distancing between Heed and Christine as Cosey married the former at age 11. Chapter 7, “Guardian”, tells about Cosey’s protection of Junior. Chapter 8, “Father”, describes Christine’s adolescence and early adulthood as a member of a Black Revolutionary group during the 1960s, then her life as the mistress of a rich doctor and her return, once discarded by this man, to Cosey’s house. Chapter 9, “Phantom”, concentrates on the disappearance of Cosey from the lives of all the women except “L” and “Celestial”, who are also both dead. These female characters, “outlaws” escaping from “patriarchal determination” (16), provide descriptions that conform what Tally calls “pictures of extremes” (16), and through these valuable allusions to their “disremembered’ circumstances”, Morrison presents readers with an exceptional account of “the ‘historical origins’ of a variety of black people currently in the U.S.” (15). What 170 Carme Manuel Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos 16 (2012). Seville, Spain, ISSN 1133-309-X, 167-180 matters, though, is that, Morrison’s characters carry the burden of their communal past, be it one of poverty and abandonment or richness and social affluence, even without being aware of it. For Tally, Love is, then, a text about the Civil Rights Movement and its contradicting consequences. This is so because if, on the one hand, it was clearly a turning point in the advancement of African Americans, on the other, it increased the differences between their middle classes and the underclasses. Morrison’s condemnation, Tally clearly foregrounds, falls then on those African Americans who betrayed racial communal responsibility and sold themselves out to the gilded attractions of what Zillah R. Eisenstein in Against Empire: Feminisms, Racisms, and the West (2004) calls “capitalist racialized patriarchy”, embodied in the novel in the character of Bill Cosey. In Chapter 2, “Women’s Identity and Migration: Stead’s Articles in the Pall Mall Gazette on Prostitution and White Slavery” by María Isabel Romero, analyzes William Thomas Stead’s innovative journalistic work on child prostitution, published under the title of “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon” in the summer of 1885 in the Pall Mall Gazette. These articles triggered two relevant consequences—the enactment of the Criminal Law Amendment, popularly called Stead’s Law, and the creation of the National Vigilance Association. In previous articles Romero had thoroughly studied Stead’s contributions to the fin-de-siècle Victorian British debates on white slavery and child prostitution and how his articles provoked an uproar that led to the final enactment of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 (“An Act to make Further Provision for the Protection of Women and Girls, the Suppression of Brothels, and Other Purposes”), a legal statute designed to protect women, and specially young girls, from sexual exploitation (it raised the age of consent from 13 to 16), and criminalize those profiting from prostitution as a business. Her studies on nineteenth-century prostitution and reform institutions (the London Lock Hospital, for example) are particularly instructive to an understanding of the different discourses regulating sexuality and the role of reform movements in Victorian England. In this particular essay Romero seeks to study “issues of women’s and children’s identities and the role of their bodies in the construction of such identities”, on the one hand, and, on the other, “issues of the effect of mass media like newspapers on society” (27). Taking into account Judith Walkowitz’s City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (1992) and her research on Elizabeth Armstrong’s case and its consequences based on an approach to working-class identities, Romero extends the exploration of what Walkowitz calls “the technologies of power” to the testimony of the women recruited for prostitution, as well as that of other individuals involved in these transactions—procurers, procuresses and traffickers, among others, as well as to an analysis of how notions of working-class and middle-class respectability informed the construction of Victorian women’s sexual identities. Review Essay: Cultural Migrations 171 Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos 16 (2012). Seville, Spain, ISSN 1133-309-X, 167-180 To fully grasp the significance of W.T. Stead’s sensationalist journalistic contributions, Romero, firstly, traces the significance of two prevalent notions in Victorian society, purity and innocence, and how they referred to the lack of sexual knowledge in both women and children, as well as their relevance in the discourses related to sexuality and sexual deviancy (Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor, 1851; William Acton’s Prostitution Considered in its Moral, Social and Sanitary Aspects in London and other Large Cities with Proposals for the Mitigation and Prevention of its Attendant Evils, 1857). She presents an enlightening examination of the role of middle-class morality and how women were constructed as asexual subjects in contrast with men who were controlled by their lusty impulses. Women’s traits, as defined by the Victorian cult of the angel of the house, were propagated throughout all types of literature, conduct manuals and periodicals. Men’s and women’s differences, articulated on these binary oppositions, affected their economic and political rights. Prostitution, the Great Social Evil, was considered to be the result of industrialization, and a great threat to the patriarchal family and social moral order. Yet, as Romero rightly explains, the attitudes in public opinion and legal status towards the prostitute or the fallen woman were rather ambivalent and she was simultaneously regarded as a threat (as a figure of contagion and disease, a criminal deserving punishment) and a social victim to be pitied and in need of help. As far as children are concerned, they were also constructed in terms of their moral innocence and lack of sexuality. Deviancy from these images was linked to social class. Moreover, whereas sexual abuse of boys was silenced, girls’ loss of their innocence transformed them into polluting figures and a potential menace to other children. As Romero concludes, these two images of both figures are “contradictory” since “they are viewed as victims of corruption and seducers, as social outcasts” and “dangerous individuals” because their sexual knowledge was in opposition to the ideals of purity and innocence, predicated on behalf of their constructions as women and children (50). These public ideas towards the moral and physical welfare of prostitutes and children explain how Victorian efforts were directed towards the reform of the legislation and the establishment of rescue movements to protect them from exploitation, even though these middle-class efforts were ridden by social hypocrisy, as she shows in her reading on W. T. Stead’s articles. Stead’s concern for child prostitution sprung out of engagement with reform causes. Yet they must be seen in the light of his new journalistic techniques and a style of writing embedded in Victorian sensationalism and melodrama. At a time where what Matthew Arnold described as “the New Journalism” was expanding and the liberal press was sympathetic to working-class aspirations of respectability, Stead introduced themes and voices, before unheard, that recounted their first-person narratives of sexual exploitation and abuse in his Pall Mall Gazette. Prostitution was regulated as far as it had consequences on public disorder, vagrancy and protection against venereal 172 Carme Manuel Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos 16 (2012). Seville, Spain, ISSN 1133-309-X, 167-180 diseases infections, that is to say, it was not regulated as a crime in itself. Yet, as Romero argues, Stead aimed his investigations under the belief that “it was not vice but crime which needed the enforcement of the law” (33) and, for that aim, he established the “Secret Commission”, a group of three o four people charged with the task of exploring “the sale and purchase, and violation of children, the procuration of virgins, the entrapping and ruin of women, the international slave trade in girls and the atrocities, brutalities and unnatural crimes” (33). Differently from other social investigators on prostitution—William Tait, William Acton or William Miller, for example—who blamed the low moral fiber of women for their own sexual exploitation, Stead, according to Romero, “did not want to criminalize vice when it was a free choice on the part of women”, but “to put an end to the recruiting of innocent girls for the ranks of prostitution by force or fraud”, and also to “the trafficking in women who were obliged to be prostitutes against their wills” (36-37). To expose his criticis m of child prostitution in his articles entitled “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon”, Stead used the myth of the Minotaur. Romero agrees with Walkowitz’s understanding of the way Stead characterizes the Minotaur as “a feminized monster”, a characterization that “was meant to make women responsible for sexual disorder in the London world of vice which Stead identified with the Labyrinth” (35). Yet, Romero goes beyond Walkowitz’s analysis of the story of Elizabeth Armstrong provided by Stead, since she reveals that his concerns extended to other individuals implied in the process of exhibiting the criminality of child prostitution. Thus, the interviews of two brothel-keepers and other characters involved in the practice (an ex-trafficker and foreign imported girl) come under Romero’s scrutiny and she reveals how Stead’s use of dramatic language and melodramatic plots were strategies to provoke outrage and disgust in his readers, awaken their awareness of the existence of these practices that violated precisely their own ideals of Victorian femininity. Furthermore, she explores an aspect overlooked by scholarship on Stead—the trafficking of women inside British national boundaries and between England and Europe. For her, the system transformed these women into “migrant subjects in the hands of vile, heartless slave traders” (41). Unfortunately, even though she presents this concept of migration as part of the identity of women who were involved in the slave market, readers are left wondering why she does not delve into this approach more thoroughly. In fact, the language she uses becomes dangerously close to the melodramatic tones used by Stead himself in his descriptions. In her analysis of the trials, Romero draws attention to the fact that they were conducted in a way that highlighted a moral judgment of the working classes, as they were described as elements of depravation and immorality, a conception that revealed the biased opinions reigning among the middle-class reformists. The poor were considered to be responsible for their own moral and physical debasement, and Review Essay: Cultural Migrations 173 Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos 16 (2012). Seville, Spain, ISSN 1133-309-X, 167-180 at the same time, the figure of the Minotaur (compared to the upper-class seducer exploiting virgins) was condemned, instilling class resentment and bringing out the success of Stead’s campaign. For Romero, Stead’s focus on girl children and women as victims of male lust overlooked a fundamental manifestation of Victorian prostitution: male prostitution and the sexual abuse of boys, as well as the concealment of homosexuality. W.T. Stead’s articles spurred the enactment of the Criminal Law Amendment Act and the National Vigilance Association, but paradoxically originated a higher degree of surveillance of women and more social condemnation for working-class mothers as unsuccessful Victorian angels of the house. As a conclusion, Romero provides new insights into “the representation of women and children through the media in terms of sexual identities, and the violation of these identities through prostitution and white slavery” (28). Thus her contribution stands as an in-depth overview of the moral, social, and medical implications of prostitution on Victorian life and its contemporary writings. In Chapter 3, “Black Bodies in History: Bernardine Evaristo’s Fiction”, Pilar Cuder analyzes Bernardine Evaristo’s four novels—Lara, The Emperor’s Babe, Soul Tourists, and Blonde Roots—, published in the approximate span of ten years (1997-2008). As a black British writer, Evaristo can be included in the group of non-white British women writers whose way to publication only fully emerged in the final decades of the twentieth century. Evaristo’s project of building a collective historical memory through the rewriting of the past of slavery and racism echoes previous and contemporary African American and black British writers’ endeavors of Morrisonian re-memory. Cuder, then, studies how Evaristo rewrites History inscribing the black presence into it and places her fiction in the context of recent British fiction which is concerned with this reclamation as well as a consciousness of the constructedness of the past. Relating Evaristo’s novels to other black British writers’ works, Caryl Phillips’s Cambridge (1991), David Dabydeen’s A Harlot’s Progress (1999) and Andrea Levy’s Small Island (2004), Cuder argues that, similarly to these authors, Evaristo’s “main aim is didactic” since “she purports to revisit the past from a fresh perspective, to lay open the workings of race in Britain throughout its history and to fill in the gaps of the official record” (57). Evaristo’s literary project resituates Britain’s past and present and allocates it into a transcultural relational web of cultural hybridity. This revisiting, however, changes throughout her fiction, Cuder alerts. Her first and second books, Lara and The Emperor’s Babe, are novels in verse. Lara is the first to deal with the historical as a source of identity. History becomes genealogy in the sense that the protagonist’s access to it comes through her familial roots. As a Bildgungsroman, the narrative traces the formation of Omilara, a woman whose lineage comes from Nigeria, England and Ireland, a fact that triggers her identity conflict and her exploration of what it meant to be black in the London of the 60s and 70s. Lara’s pains of growing are ridden with racism and stereotypical 174 Carme Manuel Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos 16 (2012). Seville, Spain, ISSN 1133-309-X, 167-180 images of blackness. The death of her maternal grandmother will precipitate an eagerness to look for her roots, not in Ireland, but, surprisingly, in Africa. The quest for an identity, then, takes her to the geography travelled by her paternal family— Nigeria and Brazil, in what can be understood as a narrative of return in which she finally comes to terms with her mixed ancestry and cultural hybridity. The Emperor’s Babe delves into the meaning of black British identity retracing London multicultural history to its root in Roman times and, thus, subverts, according to Cuder, the Windrush myth, that is, the traditional idea that the black presence in Great Britain can be dated back to 1948, the beginning of the arrival of migrants from the West Indies. A text influenced by Antigone, it traces the story of black Zuleika and her oppression at the hands of a patriarchal racist society. Differently from other critics, for Cuder, The Emperor’s Babe is tragic and shows her defenselessness against the gender and race limitations imposed by British society. Soul Tourists, Evaristo’s third novel, uses prose and verse and, in contrast to the two previous ones, has a male protagonist and focuses on the constructedness of black British masculinity. Stanley Williams’s journey for self-knowledge becomes thus a constant interrogation of different national official histories as he is a witness to the apparitions of eleven ghosts of color—from a black prostitute in Elizabethan London to Alessandro de Medici, the mulatto son of Pope Clement VIII—who act as mediators to awaken his sense of belonging to European history. Yet, Cuder argues that Evaristo’s use of these ghostly presences evinces a didactic intrusiveness which verges on overstressed preachiness (68). This sense of didacticism can also be detected in her fourth novel, Blonde Roots, which has an ironic title echoing Alex Huxley’s celebrated novel Roots as well as its film version. The narrative examines the history of the triangular slave trade, and can be classified as a neo-slave narrative aimed at young readers to examine the origins of a black Atlantic identity which transcends the borders of national and continental limitations. Yet what makes it different from previous postmodernist rereadings of slavery is the way Evaristo reverses racist categories—white people are enslaved while blacks are the slave owners—and challenges readers to rethink the past through the coinage of a new language which exhibits the structures of political oppression, echoing George Orwell’s use of “Newspeak” in 1984. As a whole, for Cuder, Evaristo’s purpose in rewriting European master historical narratives bringing to light the presence of blacks including racial, gender and class categories is laudable in that it complicates the understanding of black British identity as encompassing both new Afro European and black Atlantic dimensions. In Chapter 4, “Gender, Migration and Identity: Agnès Agboton’s Canciones del poblado y del exilio”, Mar Gallego studies Agnès Agboton’s poetry as a decisive example of the impact of migration in contemporary Spain and a challenge to the homogenization of migrant identities. To counteract given identities and general assumptions, Gallego argues for the need to foreground migrant women’s agency Review Essay: Cultural Migrations 175 Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos 16 (2012). Seville, Spain, ISSN 1133-309-X, 167-180 and, specifically, their cultural contributions, since they allow us “to transcend monolithic and homogenous definitions of their subjectivity revealing their proactive role as cultural agents too” (85). As an internationally reputed scholar on gender and migration studies, Gallego accurately places Agboton’s work in relation to the issue of migration and diasporic movements, and the public discourses’ construction of the gendered migrant subject in Europe from a multicultural and interdisciplinary perspective, and studies how this affects the constitution of new transnational subjectivities. For Gallego, there is a pressing need to integrate migrant women into the inclusive paradigm of historical femininity and, following Chandra Tapalde Mohanty, to incorporate their voices in order to draw new “cartographies of feminist struggle”, particularly in Spain, where before the beginning of the third millennium, they had remained practically invisible. Yet that invisibility, she is alert to foreground, when transformed into visibility reaffirms a hypervisibility which encapsulates a problematic category in some public discourses as they are always viewed as victims and not agents. In the first two parts of her essay, she presents a remarkable argumentative exposition of theoretical approaches to the idea of women, migration and transnational identities. Gallego establishes the need to address the fact of migration from a gendered perspective. Taking into account the views of Paul Carter, Carmen Gregorio, Deborah Boehm and Elisabetta Zontini, among other theorists, she reflects upon the new forms of femininity and masculinity originated by these transnational movements. Migration, according to Gallego, implies three consequences: a linguistic and cultural displacement, associated with concepts of belonging, citizenship and processes of inclusion/exclusion (78). In migrant women writers she identifies two main ideas related to their role as protagonists: their new status thanks to their own sense of autonomy and empowerment, closely linked to their economic and social status as the keepers of the family both in the destination society and back at home; and their major autonomy closely linked to the transformation of traditional gender roles, both in origin and destination societies (79). At the same time, this sense of autonomy enters into conflict with the patriarchal stereotypes encoded in their communities, where they are disciplined to become keepers of culture and traditions, active agents of cultural reproduction who, at the same time, must also facilitate the access to a new culture. From Gallego’s perspective, “the cultural consequences of transnational migration entails an invigorated reading into the territorial and cultural configurations this migration is forging” (82). She adheres to the notion that foregrounds not only “transnational communities per se” but “how they affect transnational subjectivities”. Ian Chamber’s (1994) idea of migrants ’ “oblique look” and Rosi Braidotti’s (2004) “nomadic subjectivity” are, for her, two suggestive articulations of transnational subjectivities. The former confirms the crumbling of