Rezensionen 155 This book is dedicated to Berndt Ostendorf, aptly characterized by the editors as “one of Europe’s most important […] trailblazers in the study of the American cultural landscape” (xiii). He is a dedicated and prolific scholar perhaps best known for his study of African-Americans, but he also has contributed to the study of American music and religion as well as cultural nationalism, to name just a few areas of his interest and expertise. Many of the essays in this volume are penned by his friends, colleagues, and former students. He has been and still is one of the leading German Americanists. He has also really been one of the “good guys”. This collection seems to me, moreover, to be a tribute to the American practioners of public diplomacy; there was a willingness, in the words of Patricia H.H. Guy, Consul for Public Affairs, U.S. Consulate General Munich, “to provide financial support for this volume” (xv), even though it must have been clear that not everyone in her bailiwick would be happy with the themes of at least some of the essays with their less than positive response to current U.S. policies. Still, although this book is slim (only 210 pages), it is rich in content and ideas; it and the conference from which it is spawned, as she points out, not only happily “fête” Berndt Ostendorf and his “grand legacy,” but also “enhance the scholarship of transatlantic relations and […] contribute greatly to improving mutual understanding on both sides of the Atlantic” (xv-xvi). Daniel Leab Department of History Seton Hall University New Jersey, USA Nieves Pascual, Laura Alonso-Gallo and Francisco Collado-Rodriguez, eds., Masculinities, Femininities and the Power of the Hybrid in U.S. Narratives: Essays on Gender Borders. (Anglistische Forschungen Band 373). Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2007. Patrycjia Kunjatto-Renard As Julia Kristeva put it, “‘A ‘fixed identity’ [is] a fiction, an illusion’” (106). This lack of stability moved her to create the term “subject-in-progress”. A subject is always a temporary result of becoming, a constantly evolving and unstable flux. Identity is multiple, a sum of various elements whose relative importance depends on the situation of the subject at a given moment in his or her development. Western culture posits identity questions in either/ or terms: one is either male or female, from here or from elsewhere, a stranger or familiar, etc. Some subjects will accept these dichotomies and seek to construct their self in agreement with them, while others will resist them. But those who resist, even if they face more difficulties and existential angst, enjoy greater freedom. Such are some premises underlying the essays comprised in AAA Band 33 (2008), Heft 1 Rezensionen 156 Masculinities, Femininities and the Power of the Hybrid in U.S. Narratives: Essays on Gender Borders. While the title of the book insists on the gender dimension of identity, and while this dimension does provide cohesion to the book, other elements such as race, ethnicity, place, nationality, and the loyalty to a group (or groups) are also subjects of the essays collected in this volume. Some scholars would say that Kristeva’s instability results from the post-modern revolution in thinking and conceptualizing the self, that is to say, while everyone in the USA belongs to a hyphenated space, this is a relatively recent development. However, the essays in the volume generally show that the awareness of the composite nature of identity, inviting a continuous invention of the self, is far from being a new phenomenon: indeed, it may even date back to pre-Columbian societies, as suggested in Sylvia Martinez Falquina’s interesting text on the berdache, or two-spirit people (233). Thus, the volume helps to root this concept and place it in a wide historical context. The editors of the book, composed of eighteen papers originally written for the 2005 International Conference of the Spanish Association for American Studies, should be given credit for selecting insightful essays looking at gender from a wide variety of angles. The texts address the issues of the human condition, and the editors’ aim is to propose a heuristic tool which will help readers make sense of the public debates regarding the state of Western civilization and gendered identities in a globalized world. It does so by providing analyses of narratives created at different points in American cultural history. The tool is a linguistic one, which is problematic, given that language is “declaratory and, therefore, discriminating” (5), but this can hardly be avoided. The book also sees itself as more optimistic than certain other contributions to the field and intends to free its readers from “traditional and categorical binaries” (4). The contributors invite the readers to look at gender performance and at hybridity in a wide array of contexts, as the articles deal with literary texts, theater, socio-cultural activism, social practices, womanhood and masculinity paradigms, cinema, as well as literary and cultural theory. The essays are divided into three parts: “Femininities”, “Masculinities” and “Cultural and Gender Borderlands”. The editors draw the readers’ attention to the fact that such a division is ironic, given that the first two categories cannot really be neatly separated. Indeed, it is easy to notice how porous the boundaries between the two categories are: many essays would just as well fit into another section than the one they have been put in. For instance, one of the contributions to the first part of the book deals with the social and political activity of Charlotte Cushman, whose benefit performances of Macbeth during the Civil War along with her earlier brilliant career helped modify 19 th century ideals of womanhood and improve the status of one group of working women: actresses. But although she seemed to be the epitome of the respectable woman of her time, Cushman transgressed gender borders not just by proving the women’s value in the war effort and by actively struggling to modify the way her profession was perceived at that time, but also because she performed both female and male roles on stage and was praised for the androgynous talent to play both genders with equal perfection. Likewise, part two, “Masculinities”, opens with a text celebrating the values and profits of androgyny in approaching fiction as well as everyday situations. Its authors, Maria Goicoechea de Jorge and Asuncion Lopéz- Varela, remind the reader that androgynous subjects seem more adaptive, claiming Rezensionen 157 that the individuals who adhere closely to the paradigms of either gender cope less well with the challenges of literary texts and of life than do more androgynous-minded people. Christelle Maury’s text (part two) examines the artistic and technical means used to endow masculine characters of the 1940s and 1950s films noirs with feminine and animal characteristics, which creates a complex representation of gender. In short, the classification of many essays is consciously arbitrary, which reflects the problematic nature of terms such as masculinity and femininity, and ultimately strives to show the way out of the realm of binary oppositions, which is the aim of deconstructive feminism. As “performance […] effectively articulates the debates in feminism between performative identity strategies and the material presentation of performic flux” (Gamble 1999: 294), it is not surprising that a large number of essays examines narratives linked to theater or cinema. Acting is a profession dramatizing the ease with which boundaries can be crossed, and linked to the notion of performance. Both theater and film are media which typically require a high degree of social consensus, given that many persons and institutions are involved in their production, that they are the product of negotiations between filmmakers, censors and the audience’s taste, and that their reception is a matter of communal viewing. Finally, “the theatre is a repository of cultural memory, a memory that can be continually adjusted and modified” (Huff, 38), which could also be said about the cinema. Therefore, these media help shape communal and national consciousness and at the same time provide gender paradigms which are easy to emulate, thus participating in the reflection on identity. The group of contributions in this thematic domain includes the abovementioned essay on Charlotte Cushman by Helen Huff, as well as Amelia Howe Kritzer’s analysis of early American women playwrights’ texts (part one), Barbara Lewis’s article on William Wells Brown’s The Escape, or a Leap for Freedom (the first extant African American play; part one), Hilaria Loyo’s interesting text examining two film versions of An American Tragedy and the models of masculinity which they propose (part two), Cristelle Maury’s study of postwar American film noir (part two), Milette Shamir’s brilliant analysis of the trope of interracial fraternity (part two) and, last but not least, Ignacio Guijarro Gonzalez’s study of multicultural history and the construction of a viable community feeling by means of education in John Sayles’ Lone Star (part three). With the exception of the last text, all these essays approach various models of gendered identity and look at the ways in which film makers, playwrights, and actors seek to subvert existing paradigms of womanhood and masculinity. The last of the essays mentioned above focuses less on gendered models than on the coexistence of different ethnic groups within a single community in the context of the “culture wars”, on the nature of knowledge, and on the problems of monolithic education. An issue appearing in several essays is the problem of allegiance to a given group. ‘”To what nationality should a writer pledge literary allegiance? ”’ is a question asked by Régine Robin in the afterword to The Wanderer, the English translation of La Québecoite (55). Her novel presents three possible lives of the narrator, whose potential loyalties differ considerably: to her new host country, to her European past, and to political radicalism, arguably the suitable political option for a member of an oppressed minority. Heinz Ickstadt shows how in this novel, the narrator’s three lives are differentiated by the choice of partner and the place to live. To deal with the issue Rezensionen 158 of allegiance, the narratives offer models of citizenship or focus on an ethnic or religious group, further qualified by gender and sexual orientation. Some contributors have chosen to work on narratives which aim at proposing new models of the national community and analyze the roles to be played by men and women. For instance, Kritzer discusses “national identity as a compact based on values and choice” (75). Groups based on sexual preference seem to be given a less hopeful treatment. Thus, Stephan Brandt analyzes the representation of the homosexual community in James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, and his text is somewhat grimmer than the plays analyzed by Kritzer, given that this community ultimately fails to sustain its members. In fact, Baldwin’s text shows the impossibility of building a viable community due to the social climate informing the homosexuals’ perception of themselves. American culture can also be seen as a community of thought, and some scholars seek to demonstrate its unity: certain essays tend to background the wide time gaps separating the publications of the narratives examined, studying works from different periods and genres so as to demonstrate the vitality of certain tropes in American culture. A number of essays study narratives which problematize fragmentation and disruption of community and/ or national bonds. However, fragmentation is not necessarily a bad thing, as it may be a source of a renewed identity. Heinz Ickstadt hints at the value of dissolution in his essay entitled “Finding Voice in Fragmentation”, which analyzes novels by four immigrant women writers: Bharati Mukherjee, Régine Robin, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, and Gail Scott. The idea of “constructed family” transcending class lines and race divides appears in Kritzer’s interesting analysis of early nineteenth century plays by women. In these plays, family, marriage and citizenship result from active and rational choice: dissolving passive family, personal, and national bonds is shown to lead to building up new ties which are better because they are consciously constructed. A similar idea can be found in the insightful essay by Francisco Collado-Rodriguez, which investigates Chuk Palahniuk’s writing to discover, behind the veil of fiction, an ethical call to reconstruct community bonds. Palahniuk is shown here to invite the creation of new sustaining communities, made possible through the characters’ earlier isolation. M. Aichih Wehbe Herrera works on fragmentation in Ana Castillo’s fiction, inviting Chicana women to construct a multiple identity by accepting the coexistence of various and sometimes diverging elements, which hints at the provisional nature of their identity. Nieves Pascual’s article is somewhat less optimistic. This interesting essay deals with autobiographic narratives by anorexic women. Pascual argues that while writing may provide these women with a temporary respite from their condition and help them connect with others, it offers no permanent cure for it. A minor weakness - or what may seem like one - is the lack of cohesion of certain essays. Thus, “Androids, Gynoids and Cyborgs: Applying Bem’s Theory of Psychological Androgyny to CyberFeminist Reader-Response Criticism” (part two) begins with a discussion of reader-response theory and psychology, moves to a presentation of the concept of androgyny through the ages, and finally discusses several works of science fiction. However, to the reader it seems as if this choice of subject matter reflects the postulate voiced in the final paragraph of the essay, i.e. that in the new state of our civilisation it has become necessary to accept “a higher degree of ambiguity, inconsistency, and chaos, than has ever been the case” (126). Rezensionen 159 To sum up, the real strength of this volume lies in the wide variety of topics, works, and genres discussed in overall interesting and well-documented essays. The editors have successfully struggled to allow ample room for various representations of gender, and their choice reflects and enriches the current discussions in the field. References Gamble, Sarah (ed.) (1999). The Icon Critical Dictionary of Feminism and Postfeminism. Cambridge: Icon Books. Patrycja Kurjatto-Renard Independent scholar France Marc Priewe, Writing Transit: Refiguring National Imaginaries in Chicana/ o Narratives. (American Studies: Vol. 140). Heidelberg: Winter, 2007. Ewa Antoszek Writing Transit is an insightful study of the development and the status quo of Chicana/ o works devoted to “cultural representations of urban spaces and the changing roles of national narratives,” as Marc Priewe states himself. In the introduction the author explains the shifts in the interpretation of those two concepts that are crucial for the study: the nation (or the nation-state, as he sometimes refers to it) and the border. His study thus focuses on those changes and refigurations depicted in Chicana/ o texts, films, music, and selected cultural productions from the Southwest. Priewe admits that despite some recent interest in urban Chicana/ o works, the research on the refigurations of national imaginaries and the concept of border in Chicana/ o cultural productions is relatively scarce. Therefore, he attempts to provide new interpretations of national representations in selected Chicana/ o works and to incorporate them in the current debate on the re-mapping of cultural positions “beyond the nation.” Priewe’s study contributes greatly to a discussion of those issues and, what is more, it tries to avoid polarizations or implementing binary oppositions not infrequently deployed in various analyses, such as the juxtapositions between us vs. them or between the U.S. vs. Mexico. Thus his analysis provides the reader with new perspectives on these issues. As Priewe does not want to limit the scope of his analysis, the spectrum of voices he deploys in his study ranges from earlier literary productions, including Oscar Acosta’s The Revolt of the Cockroach People (1973) or Ron Arias’s The Road to Tamazunchale (1975) to more contemporary works, like The Rag Doll Plagues by Alejandro Morales (published in 1992). He also examines works that reflect “gendered perspective of mobility” - John Rechy’s The Miraculous Day of Amanda AAA Band 33 (2008), Heft 1