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 Rezensionen 160 Gómez (1991), and Mariá Escandón’s Esperanza’s Box of Saints (1999), together with its film adaptation Santitos (2000). In addition to the last title, Priewe allows more room for other representations of popular culture and includes in his study the analysis of performances by El Vez and Guillermo Gómez-Peña. Such a selection of works acquaints the reader with various kinds of Chicana/ o cultural productions and complements the current debate on new tendencies and trends in Chicana/ o studies. Priewe’s study is systematic and well structured. The author not only analyzes, examines, and provides examples for “border and resistance paradigms,” but he also contextualizes the changes and transformations. With Priewe’s study the reader will be able to find answers to questions “that revolve around the relation between nation and narration in a time and space in which the nation is increasingly losing its influence on cultural representations.” In order to facilitate/ systematize these processes, the author divides his study into two parts which complement each other. Part I - “Socio-Cultural Fields & Discursive Formations” - consists of two chapters which provide some background information indispensable for the understanding of the postulates he expounds in the subsequent chapters while analyzing particular Chicana/ o cultural productions from/ of/ about the Southwest. Chapter 1 is an overview of “the region’s contemporary history from a Chicana/ o perspective.” In this historical survey the author discusses the specificity of the Chicana/ o experience in the Southwest as juxtaposed with other regions of the U.S. He focuses on several aspects of this experience, linking them to the contemporary status quo of Chicanas/ os and their cultural productions dealing with the concepts of the nation and the border. Referring back to the 1960s and 1970s and the Chicano Movement with its nationalist character and “proliferation of the concept of Aztlán,” Priewe discusses in detail the contradictory nature of the movement. He points to the movement’s significance for the creation of the foundations of Chicana/ o identity and cultural heritage but, at the same time, he acknowledges its restrictive power, which propagated chicanismo and thus discriminated against Chicanas. He argues that cultural nationalism and the concept of Aztlán contributed to the development of the new idea of the nation which postulated opposition to the assimilation to the Anglo- American culture and society, but at the same time “was marked by unresolved tensions between its social and cultural polarities.” The limiting polarities were subsequently challenged by Chicanas, whose intervention, according to Priewe, “can be regarded as a postnationalist interrogation of the formation of group cohesion and identity based on nationalist premises.” Here Priewe emphasizes the fact that this new approach to the concept of the nation laid foundations for its development as well as its treatment in contemporary Chicana/ o productions (together with “neo/ ultranationalisms and fundamentalisms” which are still present “also among Chican/ os”). In the second part of Chapter 1 Priewe refers to other aspects that influence contemporary conditions of the Chicana/ o nation, which, as Priewe maintains, may well be described as people who live “in transit.” In this part he analyzes various “migratory movements” focusing on new patterns of migration allowing for new types of nationality that “undermine the dichotomy between assimilation and alienation” and sanction a transcending of spaces both in the physical and metaphorical sense. Since these processes are part of globalization, the author acknowledges its significance by distinguishing two types of globalization, namely “globalization from below” and “globalization from above.” He claims that these two processes complement Rezensionen 161 each other and affect the nation, leading to what Habermas calls “postnational constellations.” In the last part of Chapter 1 Priewe presents Los Angeles, which is the setting in most of the productions described by him in subsequent chapters. The author depicts the city as an “urban transfrontera” - the global metropolis whose heterogeneity makes it “less controllable by the nation-state.” Such characteristics of L.A., together with its closeness to the physical border between the U.S. and Mexico, allow it to function as a city of transit. Focusing on the Los Angeles-Tijuana zone, Priewe discusses the development of the concept of the border as well as various kinds of borders and their numerous roles. Calling upon the critics analyzing the concept of the border - both Western and Chicana/ o ones - he depicts the development of the research, accompanying it with the analysis of both advantages and drawbacks of different approaches. In this way the reader not only gets acquainted with the research but is able to develop his/ her own perspective on this issue. Combining theorizations of Mary Louise Pratt, José David Saldívar, and Michel Foucault, Priewe proposes a “‘new urban model,’ marked by transnational interconnections and heterotopic spaces” and “accompanied by a shift from national to postnational alignments.” In order to analyze the functioning of this model in cultural productions by Chicana/ o authors, Priewe provides a theoretical framework for his analysis in Chapter 2. This theoretical structure is based on two key concepts “salient in recent American Studies projects,” the postnational and the transnational. Priewe examines both approaches, explaining his understanding of the terms and the way he deploys them in the subsequent parts of the study. Providing some general definitions of those paradigms coined by various theoreticians, he also clearly states his opinions and presents his approaches. He considers postcolonial theories inadequate to describe “the on-going neocolonial practices of the United States” and complements them with “research paradigms from the New American Studies,” emphasizing the fact that such a step “does not constitute a colonial gesture that subsumes Chicana/ o literature and culture into a possible new hegemonic U.S. narrative of the postcolonial.” Instead, he argues, it “acknowledges and accentuates the mutual influences and interactions between Anglo-American and Chicana/ o cultures,” which in turn, allows to “further theorize intercultural transit and disciplinary border crossings.” In a similar way he combines the concepts of the diaspora and borderland in order to create “a useful conceptual grid for analyzing and understanding representations of contemporary displacements and movements of people, capital, [etc.] in the urban transfrontera.” In this chapter Priewe also addresses the problem of defining ethnicity and ethnic writings as well as the issue of reading and interpreting such writings. He also offers advice to the reader so that s/ he can avoid essentialist reading of the Chicana/ o productions he examines. The last part of Chapter 2 may help the reader to interpret Chicana/ o works, since it is devoted to the notion of “transculturation” - the concept Priewe deploys in his study, preferring it to mestizaje or hybridity as more accurate and precise. Having set the theoretical parameters of his research, Priewe implements them in Part II - “Textual Practices.” This part consists of three chapters (excluding the conclusion) whose aim is to “identify and compare representations of transit between Rezensionen 162 national, postnational and transnational discourses in literary and cultural texts from Southern California.” The texts he examines deal with various denotations of “transit” - both physical and metaphorical. In addition to examining those different interpretations of transit, Priewe also identifies the techniques used by the authors to represent transit. He starts his survey chronologically, starting with texts that were published earlier in the 20 th century. Chapter 3 begins with the analysis of Oscar Acosta’s The Revolt of the Cockroach People (1973). Priewe locates the texts in the tradition of corrido, re-interpreting it also as a “postnational narrative.” In the analysis of this novel he concentrates on the examples that make The Revolt a “postnational narrative.” He examines how nationalism was deployed in the earliest stages of the Chicano Movement. On the basis of this novel, Priewe also analyzes various ways of what he calls “performing ethnicity.” He refers to this process while talking about Ron Arias’s The Road to Tamazunchale (1975). This work, according to him, “allegorizes the demise of cultural nationalism in Los Angeles and beyond.” Finally, the last work analyzed in Chapter 3 - The Rag Doll Plagues by Alejandro Morales (published in 1992) - exemplifies “the transit from national to postnational imaginaries”, which not infrequently involves the emergence of what he calls “contamiNation.” Chapter 4 refers to “gendered perspectives of mobility,” as mentioned at the beginning of this review. Here Priewe refers to transit urban spaces frequented by Chicanas. The first novel he examines is John Rechy’s The Miraculous Day of Amanda Gómez (1991), which talks about “carving out and maintaining a transcultural subject position” without either assimilating to or totally rejecting the space in which identity is being formulated. This text enables him to talk about the specificity of Los Angeles and to analyze the accounts about this city that have been published so far. The author also endeavors to track down “transcultural practices” and evidence of transit in the text by Mariá Escandón’s Esperanza’s Box of Saints (1999), together with its film adaptation Santitos (2000). These works are also regarded as texts that “articulate ‘post-chicanisma’ subject positions” - the new stances which, unlike previously published works, do not base their agenda on the criticism of machismo. Finally, Chapter 5 discusses “the work of two Chicano performers,” El Vez and Guillermo Gómez-Peña. Introducing popular culture to the discussion about the shifts in the perception of the nation and the border not only broadens the scope of analysis but also points to the fact that such voices (of popular culture) are becoming more and more significant in scholarly debates. What is more, productions of popular culture contribute greatly to those discussions. Therefore, while talking about El Vez, Priewe concentrates on the artist’s contribution to “transfrontera cultural formations that move beyond the constraints of the nation.” Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s art, in turn, supports Priewe’s conclusions about the broadening of the meaning of the concept of the border as well as the shift in the notions of nationality. Priewe’s conclusions can be found in Chapter 6, which works as an overview of the postulates he proposes in the previous chapters. This chapter is also an attempt to answer the questions about the current status quo of Chicana/ o works dealing with urban transfontera. As Priewe maintains, such cultural productions “open up and negotiate new sites of resistance” and “they also tend to redefine, and even provisionally reintroduce, national imaginaries for counter-hegemonic purposes in a Rezensionen 163 globalized contact zone.” They also prove how provisional and changeable some suppositions about these works are. Writing Transit by Marc Priewe is a comprehensive study of nation and border paradigms in Chicana/ o works which follows the recent changes and introduces new approaches to these issues. Readers who are interested in Chicana/ o studies will appreciate the research and the analyses offered by Priewe. For those who are just beginning to deal with Chicana/ o productions, the study - with its thorough theoretical background and numerous references that encourage the reader to conduct further research - will be a great opportunity to explore the current trends and tendencies in Chicana/ o literature and culture put into context of earlier Chicana/ o productions. Ewa Antoszek Department of American Literature and Culture Maria Curie-Sk odowska University Lublin Till Kinzel, Die Tragödie und Komödie des amerikanischen Lebens: Eine Studie zu Zuckermans Amerika in Philip Roths Amerika-Trilogie. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2006. Manfred Kopp Till Kinzel, der mit Platonische Kulturkritik in Amerika: Studien zu Allan Blooms ‘The Closing of the American Mind’ (2002) und Nicolás Gómez Dávila: Parteigänger verlorener Sachen (2003) zuvor bereits zwei recht kenntnis- und materialreiche Bücher veröffentlicht hat, unternimmt mit dem vorliegenden Werk den - wenn auch mit gewissen Einschränkungen - insgesamt als gelungen zu betrachtenden Versuch, eine literaturbasierte Kulturdiagnose der amerikanischen Nachkriegsgesellschaft vorzulegen. Zu diesem Zweck wendet er sich den drei durch die Erzählerfigur Nathan Zuckerman verbundenen neueren Romanen Philip Roths American Pastoral (1997), I Married a Communist (1998) und The Human Stain (2000) zu. Dass Kinzels Analyse und Interpretation dieser Texte als einigermaßen erfolgreich bezeichnet werden kann, bezieht sich indes ausschließlich auf den Inhalt seiner als Habilitationsschrift an der Technischen Universität Berlin angenommenen Studie, keinesfalls jedoch auf deren sprachliche bzw. formale Gestaltung. Dabei mögen gelegentliche Satzkaskaden, unbegründete Kursivsetzungen, fehlende Seitenangaben bei Zitaten, die häufige Verwendung von Lieblingswörtern (z.B. ‘schlechterdings’ oder auch ‘Kristallisationspunkt’) und Tautologien (so schreibt Kinzel beispielsweise über die “Einfachheit der einfachen Menschen” (84) oder spricht ganz ernsthaft von “der kritischen Kritik” (164), der sich Coleman Silk ausgesetzt fühlen mag) noch verzeihlich erscheinen, die mehrere Dutzend (! ) Rechtschreibfehler, grammatikalischen Ungenauigkeiten und sonstigen sprachlichen bzw. typographischen Nachlässigkeiten sind es nicht mehr. Der traurige Höhepunkt dieser das Leseinteresse doch erheblich beeinträchtigenden Problematik befindet sich etwa in der Mitte des Buches, AAA Band 33 (2008), Heft 1