Rezensionen 124 denied or ignored all earlier revolutionary activity, accusing those not in agreement with the Communist’s ‘Popular Front’ strategy of being in league with the fascists. This time frame corresponds exactly with the rewriting of “Jarama Valley” by a political commissar, as recounted by Glazer, putting it in a much more sinister context. Glazer seems unaware of the connection, however, or at least unwilling to bring it out. In the same way, Glazer does not probe deeply or critically concerning the role of the CPUSA in the VALB. When he does mention at one point that through to the end of the 1970s the former possessed the veteran organization’s complete archives and refused free access to them, he finds it only “disconcerting” (138). Later the issue is just touched upon lightly. Unfortunately, shying away from dealing with the unpleasant underside of the VALB has meant that Glazer has left unwritten a significant part of the history of that organization. Glazer’s reticence seems to come from lack of a modicum of distance from the object of his study. He clearly wants to emphasize the positive, perhaps both out of commitment to the cause and loyalty to friends. Also, doubtless, in support of his thesis that the ‘nostalgia’ of the Lincoln Brigadiers is indeed ‘radical’, that is, progressive and promising for the future. Yet on closing this book it is that very optimism which seems most open to doubt. Glazer tells us that in recent times the commemorative organization has largely overcome its disagreements by laying emphasis on what all have in common: anti-fascism. Yet this reference to a surface unity was precisely the ideological cover used as a means of repressive control in the first place. How, we would have to ask, can commemoration of the VALB be ‘radical nostalgia’ if the group devoted to it has not confronted head-on the demons of its past? Although, to his credit, Glazer does voice some tentative doubts and does not altogether brush the issue under the carpet, this question is never really fully posed in his study. In spite of these limitations, though, and judged for what is does do, Radical Nostalgia constitutes a significant contribution to the literature of the Spanish Civil War. Robert Sayre University of Marne-la-Vallée France Pultar, Gönül (ed.), On the Road to Baghdad or, Traveling Biculturalism. Theorizing a Bicultural Approach to Contemporary World Fiction. Washington, D.C.: New Academia Publishing, LLC, 2005. Patrycja Kurjatto-Renard. Contemporary fiction can no longer be confined within the limits of a single culture or a single nation. The articles composing the volume On the Road to Baghdad or, Traveling Biculturalism aim to offer a new way of analyzing texts which have been born out of a union of two or more cultures (in a narrow sense). This phenomenon AAA Band 32 (2007), Heft 1 Rezensionen 125 can be encountered more and more often in global literature. By putting the volume together, Gönül Pultar, the founding president of the Cultural Studies Association of Turkey, wanted to draw the readers’ and the scholars’ attention to the existence of “a growing body of fiction that possesses a significant dimension other than the one quite manifest for the linguistic culture - the so-called audience - in which it is published” (5). Today, many scholars still keep dismissing the idea that the subaltern may draw on more than the colonizers’ culture alone, thus neglecting the writers whose works do not fit within the confines of national cultures. Others, while working on bicultural fiction, may attribute unequal weight to different influences and treat bicultural texts as evidence for the writers’ accepting hegemonic culture. The present volume shows why the term hegemonic is problematic: in the world where the dissolution of national literatures is taking place, no culture can be seen as really hegemonic any more. And yet, scholars neglect the bi-/ multi-cultural nature of nascent world literature, which leads to severe flaws in the critics’ understanding of numerous literary works. So On the Road to Baghdad fills a gap in literary studies. But in reality, this book is more than a work of literary theory - it is also a meditation on cultures and civilizations in today’s globalized world. The title of the collection is taken from Gönül Pultar’s essay about a novel by Güneli Gün entitled On the Road to Baghdad. A Picaresque Novel of Magical Adventures, Begged, Borrowed, and Stolen from the Thousand and One Nights (1991). Pultar reads this text as a work characterized by a strong narrative tension between the two cultures that inform it: Turkish and American. These two source cultures have been combined to make a new entity: “Transformed into both object and subject interchangeably, the two cultures are so imbricated that it is almost impossible to distinguish components of one from those of the other” (51). Therefore, Gün’s novel is different from the widely read texts by Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan in the way it addresses the representation of a bicultural experience. Pultar proposes calling this narrative perspective travelling biculturalism. The book contains fourteen essays, divided into four sections titled “Biculturality” (including Gönül Pultar’s text), “Transculturation and Cultural Translation”, “Hybridity and Interculturality”, and “Transnationalism and Postmodernism”. Perhaps the most amazing quality of the collection is the fact that it offers a discussion of so many totally different fiction writers, publishing in various languages, living in different countries, and belonging to a wide array of cultures. Indian writers using English or Bengali are well represented in the volume: Vikram Chandra, Chitra B. Divakaruni, Attia Hosain, Manju Kapur, Arundhati Roy, Salman Rushdie, and Rabindranath Tagore. Another large group are hyphenated Americans such as Chicana Sandra Cisneros, Chinese American Maxine Hong Kingston, Cuban American Dolores Prida, Greek Americans Nikos Papandreou and Catherine Temma Davidson, Japanese American John Okada, and Turkish American Güneli Gün. The other authors whose work is discussed are Black British Caryl Phillips, Danish Isak Dinesen, Kenyan Ngugi wa Thiong’o, New Zealander Patricia Grace, and Peruvian José Maria Arguedas. Through its presentation of such a wide array of writers, the book helps to build a rich picture of contemporary literature and to erase, or re-examine, the strict boundaries between national and ethnic literatures. And yet, there is unity in diversity. One of the issues which bind the different texts together is the question of identity formation in a subject for whom universal human- Rezensionen 126 ism may not be the best choice, or even a possible one. The opening essay questions the political implications of the dissolution of subjecthood in contemporary critical discourse; its author, Theodora Tsimpouki, focuses her analysis on the premise that ethnicity cannot be viewed as fully performative. Paloma Fresno Calleja (section one) evokes Charles Taylor’s concept that identity is based on “external contact and understanding between cultures” (32) and that it cannot be acquired in solitude. In her essay on Isak Dinesen (section three), Rachel Trousdale shows that appropriation of a culture that is not one’s own can be a tool for the reinvention of one’s self. Paul Smethurst (section four) analyses Caryl Phillips’s fiction and focuses on the instability of the postmodern subject. In section one, Mita Banerjee analyses the difficulties of claiming ethnic identity in today’s world, positing that intercultural encounters are impossible without abandoning the search for the authentic elements of each culture; since the authentic can only be imagined rather than become real. Certain essays invite meditation on contemporary social problems, in particular, on the strategies necessary to build a harmonious society out of various ethnic groups. To achieve this aim, which underlies most of the literary works discussed in the volume, the members of society need to engage in a “complete communication” (the term has been coined by Patricia Grace, a New Zealand novelist). Sharing the values of different cultures is seen as one of the prerequisites for building a productive and healthy community. As Trousdale says, “unity is impossible without difference” (172). Likewise, shared experience and emotion can help overcome the differences of culture. An important point stressed by many scholars in the collection is that postcolonial writers often struggle to avoid representing the members of ‘subaltern’ communities as victims, showing instead well-educated, urbane characters who can defend themselves efficiently against the dominant (white) society. In certain essays, the historical roots of strained relations between various communities are examined along with the literary expression of the clashes between these social groups. For example, Nadia Ahmad (section three) discusses the literature of Partition, evoking the historical trauma of the split between India and Pakistan. The tension between modernity and tradition constitutes another topic of interest in the collection. For example, Ahmad shows how modernity can be seen as ambiguous, being at the same time a liberating force and a tool of patriarchy and colonialism. She also points out the inadequacy of certain assumptions well-established in Western thought for dealing with non-Western societies, for instance the conception of religion as non-modern. Dora Sales Salvador (section two) celebrates the flexibility of tradition in bicultural literary works. The second section of the book is devoted to the problems linked to translation, its necessity and its limits. The objects of translation are words, of course, but also cultural paradigms, systems of knowledge and belief. Dora Sales Salvador compares the work of José Maria Arguedas and Vikram Chandra to examine the relationship between the languages they write in - Spanish and English respectively - and the languages of the marginalized cultures they were shaped by. Katrina Daly Thompson questions the strategies involved in translating an English-language novel by a Kenyan writer into Shona; this scholar also looks at the issue of choosing a language of expression when one is an African writer. Esther Alvarez Lopez speaks about using non-English words in English-language novels by Chicano writers, arguing that Rezensionen 127 this strategy increases the distance between readers and the text and at the same time invites the readers to look these words up, thus contributing to a better understanding of the culture described in the text. The volume will be helpful to students of literature, for it includes clear definitions of critical terms often used in contemporary research. For example, terms such as hybridity, transculturation, bicultural, transnational writers, historiographic metafiction, and narcissistic narrative are defined and discussed. At the same time, the usefulness of these heuristic tools in the study of contemporary world fiction is evaluated. And as William Boelhower notes in the introduction to the volume, “the notion of ‘world literature’ is as much a critical construct on trial as it is a global reality in the making” (11). Through its multi-cultural and multi-disciplinary approach, the collection explains how literature is a telling of the world rather than a mere artistic discipline. The telling need not be realistic to be truthful. Patrycja Kurjatto-Renard independent scholar France Kornelia Freitag, Cultural Criticism in Women’s Experimental Writing: The Poetry of Rosemarie Waldrop, Lyn Hejinian and Susan Howe. (American Studies - A Monograph Series, vol. 128). Heidelberg: C. Winter, 2005. Flutur Troshani At the heart of Kornelia Freitag’s study, Cultural Criticism in Women’s Experimental Writing: The Poetry of Rosemarie Waldrop, Lyn Hejinian and Susan Howe, lie three questions about women’s experimentation: how do women operate with language under the influence of contemporary critical developments of language theory, which are the bonds between the domineering paradigm and poetry, and to what extent are gender issues part of their writing? These three points of reference serve as safe anchorages for Freitag to develop her argument, because they insightfully reveal the progressive drive of women’s experimentation. On the whole, Freitag proposes to expand on the inner workings of women’s experimentation and to investigate why and how women experimentalists were able to assert themselves - albeit only relatively recently - inside the whole gamut of developments in Western thought and culture. The exact nature of the problem she deals with is to determine “the theoretical accomplishment and critical power” of women experimentalists “against assumptions that they wrote ‘just’ poems, and ‘pretty strange’ ones” (348). Freitag has developed an intelligent strategy to investigate this problem. She begins by locating its various dimensions - contemporary poetry by women, Rosemarie AAA Band 32 (2007), Heft 1