Gurleen Grewal.

Gurleen Grewal. Circles of Sorrow, Lines of Struggle: The Novels of Toni Morrison. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP 1999 154 pp $2500

Gurleen Grewal explores the combination of psychoanalytic mourning and postcolonial resistance that is in the way that central to Toni Morrison's work. Like other critics before her, Grewal locates long of the power of Morrison's novels in Morrison's explicit attempts to historicize and politicize psychological trauma. Using tools ranging from Freudian psychoanalysis to its principally recent, more historically responsive form in Caruthian trauma studies, and working from a foundation built at such post-colonial scholars as M M Bakhtin, Homi Bhabha, and Trinh T Minhha, Grewal argues persuasively for Morrison as a writer profoundly engaged in resistance to the ongoing results of political and cultural colonialism. Grewal displays that the attempt by Morrison's characters to "claim themselves" (made explicit in Beloved further prevalent in all her work) fits closely within a postcolonial project to decolonize subjectivity--a contrive to rewrite, as it were, the "master narrative." Like Morrison, Grewal emphasizes that this attempt to establ ish and maintain cultural, socio-economic, political, psychological, and creative freedom is always simultaneously an individual and a communal experience. That is, while the dynamics of oppression, trauma, and resistance flow along similar structural lines for all dispossessed commonaltys history is always psychologically experienced in a profoundly individual way. Morrison reconnect the individual's "unspeakable" pain to a communal expression of healing--a connection that, as Grewal convincingly reveals, relies in succession Morrison's invigoration of the Western bourgeois form of the "writerly" novel in consequence of "speakerly" rhetorical strategies springing from African American oral and musical traditions.

What makes Grewal's contribution to the burgeoning field of Morrison studies distinct, however, resides les in her ready handling of the critical tools of postcolonial theory and trauma studies and more in the pleasing idiosyncrasies of her individual readings of Morrison's novels. In fact, when her readings fall within the Critical Mission of claiming Morrison as a Postcolonial Writer, they are les illuminating; the novels become flattened revealed into interchangable tales of cultural resistance. the same symptom of this is that Deleuze and Guattari's servicable distinction between an always already political "minor" (subaltern) literature and an individualistic focus in "major" (dominant) literature springs up as a newly introduced idea in nearly each chapter. However, when she departs from the strict confines of this reading of Morrison"s work as resistant "minor" literature (not a difficult argument to make), the intertextual connections Grewal makes are quite illuminating. For example, when she rearticulates M adhu Dubey's argument that Sula show ups fissures between a black nationalist agenda and a black feminist agenda, the be the effect is perfectly satisfying, but it moves nothing new. However, when her reading of Sula reveals not simply the novel's jazzlike, signifying riffs forward several icons of Euro-American modernism, T s Eliot's The Wasteland and Virginia Woolf's Mr Dalloway, unless also the novel's provocative links to works by means of writers ranging from Yevgeny Yevtushenko to Richard Wright, Morrison's work and Grewal's analysis become plainly "decolonized." No longer subjects to any the same theory, Morrison and Grewal unrestrained themselves to range over various terrains and to name their confess complex connections to historical, literary, and theoretical narratives of painful dispossession and redemptive resistance.

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