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 Rezensionen 173 Bible-thumping (the impetus for, but not the subject of this volume) has, at least, had the unintended positive consequence of attracting new scholarly interest in American religion - an interest comparable to that lavished on the concepts of “race, class, gender, and nation” (viii). This frankly “revisionist” (x) approach to the study of Black religion takes its modest place among great standard works such as Carter G. Woodson’s The History of the Negro Church (1921), Albert J. Raboteau’s Slave Religion (1978) and Milton Sernett’s African-American Religious History (1985, expanded 1999), all cited in Herget and Hornung’s preface. Those classics were the first to deal with the “syncretistic” [sic] (ix) nature of American Black spirituality. These new essays - the proceedings of a Fest conference for Karl Wilhelm Dietz - add the newer Atlantic or diasporan perspective. But the real difference is a red (or perhaps liberal blue) shift away from historical approaches towards the literary end of the spectrum. Eight of the eleven essays center on literary texts, and the other three allude to them. The result is a ‘blessed mess,’ the kind of interdisciplinary daube that today’s Americanists relish. There’s some history, of course, plus big chunks of literary criticism. There’s a seasoning of philosophy, art history, musicology, and theology. The title “Religion in African-American Culture” may, however, be misleading to the casual diner. This is NOT the book for someone trying to learn about Black churches in America. The alphabet soup of acronyms such as COGIC (Church of God in Christ), AME (African Methodist Episcopal), CME (Colored Methodist Episcopal), etc. will likely remain just as obscure to someone who has read this book as to someone who has not. When all is said and done, maybe the chief reason to prize this volume is that it represents perhaps the last published work of master French critic Michel Fabre, who passed away this summer of 2007. While not necessarily the pièce de résistance of Fabre’s long career (which includes the book The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright - 1973/ 1993 - and his 1991 volume From Harlem to Paris: Black American Writers in France, 1840-1980), this is a characteristically skillful essay about Creoles in New Orleans entitled “Between Catholicism and Voodoo.” Fabre is interested in the “complex network of distinctions” (3) that Creoles maintained among themselves based on their parents’ dates of freedom, their preferred language, etc. But he concludes that their Catholicism surpassed all other factors in shaping their way of life. Fabre’s ‘New Historicist’ inspired samplings from period newspapers unearth heart-felt, minor religious poems and surprising details on church integration and segregation. Fabre waits 14 pages to bring in the Voodoo promised in his title. But then we get a double helping of Marie Philomene Laveau and her daughter - the two most renowned (and most confused with one another) priestesses of the era. For readers interested in learning more about Fabre’s career, there is fortunately a Festschrift that was produced by GRAAT: Groupe de Recherches Anglo-Américaines de Tours in 2003. Fabre is also survived by his wife, the prominent and gifted Americanist Geneviève Fabre. Having noticed a spate of Black Obeah characters in recent 21 st century British horror and science fiction, Kristen Raupach explores their precursors in 18 th century fiction. Her notion is that the first wave of scary practitioners of the ‘black arts’ reflected whites’ “national insecurity and loss of imperial control during the revolutionary period of the 1790’s; ” while their current incarnations similarly reflect today’s anxieties Rezensionen 174 about destabilized “class, race and gender hierarchies” (21). As in Fabre’s essay, it takes too long (in Raupach’s case, 5 pages) for the author to define Obeah and describe its practices, but her thesis is compelling. Volume co-editor Winfried Herget follows suit with a feminist perspective on American women preachers, who likewise tended to stir up political trouble wherever they did roam. Herget’s study of Jarena Lee, whose autobiography predates Frederick Douglass’ by 9 years, points out that the writing and promoting of religious conversion tracts was one of the few outlets women - and certainly women of color - had in early America. Herget’s classical close reading of passages from Jarena’s narrative (pp. 67ff.) is particularly impressive. Though perhaps most famous for his ‘sermons in verse’ (along with the Black national anthem ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’) James Weldon Johnson was, surprisingly, an agnostic. This is Manfred Siebald’s starting point for his helpful study of God’s Trombones, Johnson’s “fusion of Biblical images and contemporary metaphors” (81). Kerstin Schmidt follows with an essay on commonly lesser known but still interesting texts, two didactic religious folk dramas from the Harlem Renaissance that are also steeped in Africanisms. The first play is Plumes, a poignant, even bathetic story about a Black mother’s determination to bury her child with what seem to her the proper rites. The other play analyzed is called Sahdji: An African Ballet. Schmidt calls it “a fusion of dance, pantomime, musical and spoken drama” (103), and it, too, blends African with American spirituality. Alfred Hornung’s essay “Religion and Afro-Modernism: Claude McKay’s Transatlantic Syncretism” - the fulcrum essay of this collection - is one of the all-too-rare attempts to place Black writers into a larger context: here, the period of Modernism. Hornung’s expertise is clear from footnotes (e.g. p.112) that could easily serve as syllabus for a graduate course in World Modernism. Hornung goes on to analyze religious themes and the idea of “religious hybridity” (122) in a number of McKay’s poetic and prose writings. Thadious M. Davis’ essay “Mapping and Mirroring: Nella Larsen’s and Ralph Ellison’s Critiques of African American Religion” is a useful reminder that Black churches - like white ones - house hypocrites, often right in the Amen Corner. Larsen pioneers the theme of hypocrisy in the Black Middle Class. Ellison, without acknowledging her, mirrors Larsen’s suspicions of the Black Church and - its contender for power in the Black public sphere - the Black College. Both Larsen and Ellison are devastatingly on target in their attacks on pseudo-religion and corrupt, anti-intellectual preachers in Black America. Davis is equally on target with this essay. Robert G. O’Meally provides a second, good essay about Ellison for this collection - this one devoted to a reading of Juneteenth, with music and spirituality foremost in mind. Christopher Mulvey contributes a slightly preachy but very informative essay comparing Dubois’ Souls of Black Folk, Eric Williams’ Capitalism and Slavery, and Cornel West’s Race Matters. Mulvey obligingly states the “main curve” of his argument in seven numbered points, something students are bound to appreciate. Mulvey’s tone is tellingly British when it comes to his description of America’s separation of powers as “a tough, brutal, resilient system which enables the whole enterprise to operate while whole sections of it are failing” (191). Mulvey’s titillating essay Rezensionen 175 title, by the way, is “The Limits of Religion and History: The African American Intellectual in the Twentieth Century.” Nassim W. Balestrini has studied the poetry of Robert Hayden in the light of the latter’s Bahá’í religious beliefs. Only nine of Hayden’s 100 poems allude to this religion, but one-third deal with the African American experience in general and all, according to Balestrini, reflect Hayden’s belief that art is “intrinsically religious” (195). There is again a useful comparison made with T.S. Eliot’s brand of religious Modernism. The final essay in the collection, Frank Kelleter’s “The Nation of Islam as an American Religion” may smack a bit of tokenism - the editors’ desire to be inclusive of at least one (besides Bahá’í) non-Christian group. Kelleter’s Hegelian approach, however, leads us right back to the centrality of Christianity for Black America. He explains, “‘American Islam’ is first and foremost a dialectical antithesis of African American Christianity, an antithesis which, in its tenets and rituals, still echoes the conventions of the religious community it has set out to confront” (220). As one proof of his own thesis, Kelleter points out that Louis Farrakhan in his Million Man March speech of 1995 quoted the Bible 30 times and the Koran only five times (221). Or could it be that Farrakhan just knew his audience? Kelleter is not, of course, alone in his insistence that the Nation of Islam lives in symbiosis with the Black church. He quotes Henry Louis Gates’ statement that the NOI is “a kind of Reformation movement within the black church - a church that had grown all too accommodating to American racism” (221). That last negative remark about the modern Black church in America simply echoes a suspicion that is virtually coeval with the founding of slave-holding America by Bible-patting (if not thumping) Anglican Virginians. This collection of essays provides a very useful critique of Black religion. Though it calls for supplementary reading if one really wants to learn about Black denominational practices, it also should inspire supplementary research across the various cultural studies disciplines. Page Laws Norfolk State University Department of English and Foreign Language Patrick Duffley, The English Gerund-Participle. A Comparison with the Infinitive. Frankfurt, Bern, New York: Lang, 2006. Tünde Nagy Patrick Duffley’s book is a study of the English gerund-participle. As the book compares the use and function of the gerund-participle to that of the to-infinitive, it can also be considered an analysis of infinitival constructions. The book consists of six chapters. The first is an overview of the different uses of -ing constructions and the meanings and functions that can be attributed to them. These meanings and functions are then compared to those of the to-infinitive, which are analysed in chapter AAA Band 33 (2008), Heft 1