Remnants of Nation: on Poverty Narratives by Women.

Hammill, Faye

Remnants of Nation: On Poverty Narratives By Women. By ROXANNE RIMSTEAD. Toronto, Buffalo, NY, and London: University of Toronto Press. 2001. x + 348 pp. $65; 42 [pounds sterling] (pbk $24.95; 15 [pounds sterling]).

Class is no longer a dominant category of analysis in literary and cultural studies. It has been displaced by the rise of postcolonial and feminist reading strategies which, despite their concern with social justice, emphasize gender, race, ethnicity, and sexuality at the expense of social class and poverty. Roxanne Rimstead argues that 'a recent trend in North American cultural studies has been to devalue class itself as a category of identity and resistance' (p. 23), and since her challenge to that trend is so persuasive and intellectually rigorous, her book should be of interest to a wide range of researchers. Her project is genuinely interdisciplinary, drawing on theoretical material from the fields of literature, cultural studies, sociology, Canadian studies, and women's studies.

Remnants of Nation is concerned with developing a method of oppositional reading that could be applied to poverty narratives from any group in a prosperous western nation. The particular focus, however, is on poor Canadian women. Canada is identified as an example of a state whose national imaginary is predicated on ideals of progress and wealth creation, and which relegates the poor to the status of internal exiles, 'remnants of nation'. Rimstead also argues that 'the extreme outsider position of poor women is reproduced simultaneously by both patriarchal and class hegemony' (p. 36), and asks how gender, poverty, ethnicity, and nationality work together to form poor women's life stories and subjectivities. She also engages in detail with the recently identified phenomenon of the feminization of poverty. Increasing numbers of women are experiencing poverty and deprivation, and Rimstead points out that many of these are middle-class women. She emphasizes that poverty is a state which an individual can move in and out of, and highlights the direct political consequences of a nation's narration of its poor as 'inherently different, isolated and dehistoricized' (p. 235).

The term 'poverty narratives', Rimstead proposes, should be understood to include both fictional representations of poverty and the 'ordinary' voices of the poor and once-poor themselves, as available through their autobiographies and personal accounts. Her primary texts, therefore, include novels and short stories by well-known Canadian writers (Margaret Laurence, Susanna Moodie, Alice Munro, Nellie McClung, Gabrielle Roy), non-fictional writing by poor women (including Maria Campbell and Cy-Thea Sand), and items from magazines and news reports. Using this material, she analyses the ideology of images of poverty in contemporary literary narratives, academic discourse, and popular culture; and considers how our knowledge about poverty is constructed through these media. Close reading of the selected texts occupies a fairly small proportion of the book, but they provide extremely valuable illustrations of the larger arguments of Remnants of Nation.

Rimstead recognizes the exclusionary aspect of academic discourse and its limited potential to effect social change, but nevertheless she is committed to an engaged and radical critical method which she defines and demonstrates convincingly throughout the book. She insists: 'We need to authorize ourselves to speak emotionally about poverty and to claim a sense of solidarity with the poor' (p. 62), and her remarks on the crucial role of intellectuals in facilitating cultural agency among oppressed people issue a direct challenge to her readers.

This is not an easy book to read. It is very well written, but its theoretical density requires sustained concentration and alertness. Also, its arguments are often disturbing and unsettling, which I imagine is precisely what the author intended.

FAYE HAMMILL

CARDIFF UNIVERSITY