Rezensionen 170 Michele Bottalico and Salah el Moncef bin Khalifa, Borderline Identities in Chicano Culture. Venezia: Mazzanti Editori, 2006. Stipe Grgas Even a cursory review of recent titles in literary and cultural studies clearly reveals that space, both as theme and metaphor, has become a paramount issue on their agenda. Some argue that the waning persuasiveness of the historical has been marked by a shift from a temporal to a geographical imagination, from the dialectics of time to the dialectics of space. Within this spatial turn the practice of mapping has become one of the central theoretical terms, providing a way of charting both physical and mental space. However, one ought to be wary of its frequent appearance in much recent critical work because of the proclivity to ignore the differences between the metaphorical and the material. This is one of the contexts in which the book under review ought to be read. Within the disciplinary field of American studies, the volume edited by Michele Bottalico and Salah el Moncef bin Khalifa partakes in that move which has worked to subvert the essentialist conceptualization of the United States as a culture, a polity, and a historical project. At the present moment, one way this is being done is to position the United States within a framework wherein the distinct territoriality of the polity has been enmeshed in broader, global flows and processes. It can be said that the geographical broadening of scope within American Studies is signified by the very image on the cover of this book, which shows the mass of the two continents of North and South America without state borders incorporated into a mesh of latitudes and longitudes. The other approach which has worked to subvert the essentialist readings of American identity displaces its focus on the center and approaches its subject from the margins, whether these be regional, racial, or ethnic. It is on the background of this juncture of the theoretical reappraisal of the spatial and the latest interrogations of the subject matter and methodological procedures of American Studies that one can assess the collection of papers in Borderline Identities in Chicano Culture. Between the introduction by Michele Bottalico and the afterword by Salah el Moncef bin Khalifa, the book is composed of eight chapters dealing with different aspects of Chicano literature and culture. In addition to providing brief summaries of what awaits the reader in the individual chapters, the title of Botallico’s introduction, “Towards a Poetics of Liminality”, indicates that the main focus of this book is “the diversity and the manifold cultural identity of Chicanos/ as” which the collected contributions are to examine by dealing with issues such as post-coloniality, gender, genre, nationhood, citizenship, transnationalism, mobility in space and individual and collective identity (14). The introductory note summarizes the content, argumentation, and interpretative procedures of the later chapters. Michel Feith’s reading of Gloria Anzaldúa’s pioneering text Borderlands questions its transgressiveness by showing its balancing procedures which, on the one hand, reject the masculine orientations of Chicano identity and the Western subject, and yet, on the other, require the positing of a firm Chicano identity, empowered by the Aztlán homeland, to voice an antipodal option. To cite the author: “Borderlands reestablishes an asymmetrical relationship, a reversal of dominance rather than an abolition of it,” (39) evincing the paradox of a “transnational nationalism, a vision of AAA Band 33 (2008), Heft 1 Rezensionen 171 hybridity that promises multiple, subversive boundary-crossings, yet reifies one border as the site of a privileged mixture of traits defining a rather stable identity” (40). Marc Priewe charts the current transformations of Aztlán by focusing on its reinscription in John Rechy’s novel The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gómez and in El Vez’s Transfrontera performance. Taking as its target the “reterritorializing discourse of Aztlán nationalism” (47), the analysis shows how these authors “intervene in the national imaginary by construing previously marginalized positions marked by gender, sexual preference, and ethnic allegiance” (50). The point of the article is to show how the “diasporic switching points” of urban Southern California articulate a postnational experience that reveals “the exclusionary constructedness of both Chicana/ o and Anglo-American national discourses and identity formations” (61). Astrid M. Fellner’s paper consists of a theoretical exposition of notions such as citizenship, nation, community, border, and “other spaces,” followed by a reading of two novels, Ortiz Taylor’s Faultline and Ana Castillo’s The Mixquiahuala Letters. According to the author, writings by Chicanas provide interesting examples of “shifting identities and political agency” (68). Although at the end of her readings of the two novel she writes that the political reality of border identity may only be a future possibility, she opines that “the reconceptualizations of identity, citizenship, and nationhood emerging from the Chicana community are important points of departure for a discussion of issues of transterritoriality” (75). The chapter by Pascale Smorag, “Spanish Place Names Beyond the US-Mexican Border: From Colonial to Mainstream,” is the first of the remaining five chapters which are more focused on a specific phenomena or a particular author. Pascale Smorag, on the basis of a set of toponyms, reconstructs a history of naming places as a practice of land appropriation but shows how the political border in the American Southwest does not coincide with the linguistic frontier. As she writes: “If the American-Mexican border is an arbitrary line, the toponymy keeps breaking and blurring these barriers” (97). In her reading of Ana Castillo’s novel Sapogonia, Angelika Köhler demonstrates how the main protagonist’s “hybrid concept of the self, encompassing European, U.S.-American, and Native American dimensions,” never reaches completion or finality because in rejecting the notion of a monolithic community he is able “to maintain his claims to subjectivity in a cultural borderland in which the concepts of unity and difference interfere with each other” (113). In Carmen Flys- Junquera’s reading of Lucha Corpi’s detective fiction we are familiarized with the role of codes and conventions in formulaic fictions and we are shown how these are subverted, altered, transgressed upon by the Chicano writer. The author examines how Lucha Corpi appropriates the American hard-boiled detective tradition while at the same time undermining some of its set conventions with the purpose of promulgating a “deliberate aesthetic strategy to portray alternative worldviews to the dominant Anglo-American one” (117). The first part of Sophia Emmanouilidou’s contribution deals with Miguel Méndez’s autobiographical novel From Labor to Letters as a social act for “communal identification,” exploring the questions how and why Méndez himself becomes the object of his study. The second part reads the novel through Foucault’s concept of heterotopias. Although Leslie Marmon Silko is a Native American writer, David Harding justifies her inclusion in this volume because her novel Almanac of the Dead foregrounds the twin themes of place and identity and “ques- Rezensionen 172 tions the very legitimacy of the whole European system of government in the Americas” (159). In so doing she keeps faith “with the legacy of suppressed native history” (160) but, in addition, in this novel she undermines “the separate construction of Indian and mestizo identities,” reminding the reader that “constructions are just that, constructions, and not the absolutes they are seen as by many” (167). The afterword can be read as a summing up of the basic tenets of the book. Salah el Moncef bin Khalifa reiterates the centrality of Gloria Anzaldúas teachings, particularly her two seminal concepts of hybridity and in-betweenness. She underscores that the political, socio-cultural, and esthetic forces which the previous chapters had explored espouse a self-critical sense of identity. As such, the contextualization of various Chicano stories of both the self and the community within the experience of hybridity and interstitiality “reflects an emphatic reappropriation of narrative toward shifting redefinitions of history and the subject of history from a dominant, monolithic, Euro-American “master-narrative” to a plurality of narratives” (173-4). Although readers might welcome the way that the contributors to this volume steer clear of the often obfuscating impact of theory-laden discourse, I find that many of the problems dealt with here demand a more theoretically informed approach. Since the authors, amongst other things, deal with a spatial entity, I think that the notion of Aztlán as a site and its positioning within the borders of the United States demand a more discriminating geographical explanation. I am of the opinion that such an account would have something to add to the too easy subversion of the national identity in Chicano narratives when these are compared to other American identities. In addition, such a spatial grounding would reflect the retentive power of national boundaries both as a geopolitical reality and as the framework of various disciplinary procedures. However, whatever perspective one opts for in supplementing the findings of this volume or in challenging their implicit value system, it will be necessary to implement the “close attention to textual analysis,” which characterizes the papers gathered in this book. Stipe Grgas University of Zagreb Department f English Winfried Herget and Alfred Hornung, eds., Religion in African- American Culture. (American Studies - A Monograph Series, 83). Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter. Page Laws In these particular times that try men’s souls - when, in the words of editors Winfried Herget and Alfred Hornung “fundamentalist religion and politics [are] commensurate with the convictions of the Bush administration” (vii) - it is a blessing to have this new anthology of essays on the role of religion and spirituality in Black culture. Neocon AAA Band 33 (2008), Heft 1