Ikenna Dieke.

Ikenna Dieke, ed Critical Essays on Alice Walker. Westport: Greenwood 1999 226 pp $6500

The work of Alice Walker has arguably generated more strive to holded readings than that of any other living African American writer omit Toni Morrison, and this convolution adds some useful essays to extant criticism. Harold Bloom's Chelsea House Alice Walker (1989) not for a like reason notoriously skewed as some other Chelsea House collections forward African American writers, preceded Henry Louis Gates, Jr and Anthony Appiah's Alice Walker: Critical Perspectives Past and at hand (1993), which provides a better faculty of perception of the historical contexts framing Walker's critical reception. the two prior collections accumulate views by means of already well-known critics and provide foundational essays, despite selections that sometimes have the be stirred of a closed literary store The latter volume's selections mirror the editorial choices of Gates's 1990 anthology Reading Feminist, Reading Black, which does not include near of the writing that shows either important theoretical backdrop to evaluations of Walker or athletic readings of particular texts. Wo rk on Sandra Adell, Jacqueline Bobo, Carole Boyce Davies, Ann duCille, Karla Holloway, Wahneema Lubiano, and Susan Willis, for example, helps provide words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] followings for the work of a writer fabricateed as controversial. (Jacqueline Bobo's "Sifting within the Controversy: Reading The Color Purple" might well have introduced any collection because it in this way well explains why it matters that "controversial" describes the connections of a work's reception rather than meanings that inhere in some way in a text.)

Unlike the earlier edited tomes on Walker, Dieke's collection eventuates from a call for essays, single that by design has no theoretically informed principle of inclusion despite a felt affirmation of Walker's value and the editor's confess focus on immanence, myth, and archetype (appropriate to the "monistic idealism" he foregrounds). reject for Dieke himself and David Cowart (not primarily an African Americanist), the selections here advance from relatively new or less-known critics, to this time frequently they operate within the furrow of earlier debates and interpretations. Dieke's introductory list of "six thematic motifs" conveniently clumps individual essays, but does not help much--or aim to help--in sorting not at home the theoretical quagmires at stake in readings of Walker since 1993 In appreciation of this collection's seriousness of end let me outline my understanding of several tensions that inform its pages.

one as well as the other Dieke and several essayists take as opposition those who chided Walker from the vantage point of a history of principle and the sense of literary realism hanging upon it, asking whether or not her work portrays black characters, consciousness, or history with accuracy. still a very sophisticated cultural studies and a whole panoply of theory have documented the construction of social categories that neither simply intersect nor stand as unfashioned analogues for each other. Although generally defending Walker from earlier negative answers more than half of the essays included here nevertheless talk about Walker's characters as however they are real people, repeatedly falling into the terms of an older European realism against which the African American "real" negotiates its differences. And essays may do in the same manner in the act of claiming for Walker the transcendence of romance, reinscribing single in kind of several critical dualisms that survive in this collection.

For me the occasionally truistic nature of one essays' generalizations corresponds to somewhat delimited critical and theoretical frames of respect That is, the absence of plural and negotiated adjoining matters makes some of these readings marginally flat, as although extending or localizing arguments already well known since the time of Gates and Appiah's compass (those of Houston Baker, Barbara Christian, Gates himself, or bell reapers for example). One essay views The Color Purple as "an existential novel" and finds its "true meaning" in "a examination and a celebration, a sonnet of sorrow and of bliss of birth, rebirth, and the redeeming power of love" Certainly, scarcely any would argue with some generalized faculty of perception that The Color Purple corresponds to existential pronouncements by way of de Beauvoir and Sartre, on the other hand this no more gives it primacy as "an existential novel," a defining feeling of genre, than does the difference from Walt Whitman's brains of the "universal" (substituting women's embodiment as figurative focus) make the verse necessarily more relevant to women than to men as readers. (One wishes for at least near cross-reference to James Snead's awe-inspiring essay on the differences between African and European sensations of "universality.") Another essay discussing Walker's quilting metaphor uses citations from Yeats, Alice Ostriker, Elaine Showalter, Miriam Shapiro, and others in order to describe quilting as femmage and cessations with an unproblematized "We have a division in common with Celie" (my emphasis). Clearly, its classification of making relationships makes quilting undivided of Walker's many cross-referential art forms, now plural and frequently critical relation to diverse traditions and audiences at hands thornier interpretive problems than a purely feminized bricolage suggests (if anything, closer to Faith Ringgold's brilliantly ironic unless also beautiful quilts that signify forward icons of European art).