Heather Russell. Legba's Crossing: Narratology in the African Atlantic.

Brown, J. Dillon

Heather Russell. Legba's Crossing: Narratology in the African Atlantic. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2009. 224 pp. $44.95.

Heather Russell's study begins with a salutary reminder that authors' formal choices always carry ideological significance, asserting that her aim, in turn, is to counter what she identifies as the tendency of African diasporic literary criticism to emphasize "theme, content, and meaning over formal analysis" (1). Although Russell never explicitly engages in narratology, the type of technical literary analysis named in her book's subtitle, she seeks to affirm the significance of literary form in a select sample of texts by writers from the United States and the Anglophone Caribbean. This regional grouping, which Russell terms African Atlantic, pointedly alters the usual scholarly transatlantic trade routes between North America and Great Britain. The book's title--Legba's Crossing--is similarly revisionist, a self-conscious rhetorical decision to evoke a nebulous but insistent "tug of West Africa" (7) informing the aesthetics of New World artists. Ultimately the book seeks to exemplify a formalist reading strategy attuned to specifically African Atlantic textual practices that "produce liberating spaces, creating multivocal quiltings for new national, global, and diasporic possibilities" (4).

Flanked by an introduction and a short concluding chapter, the main body of the book is divided into three sections: "Interruptions," which examines James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man and Audre Lorde's Zami, A New Spelling of My Name; "Disruptions," which treats the Trinidadian writer Earl Lovelace's Salt and the Jamaican American writer Michelle Cliff's No Telephone to Heaven; and "Eruptions," which concentrates on John Edgar Wideman's The Cattle Killing. Although these three concepts officially structure the book, only the faintest distinction is made between them, and the form the section headings take--a dictionary definition of the relevant term followed by a long list of synonyms--signals the book's preference for interpretive fluidity over any stable taxonomy of form. Indeed, the book's introduction enacts what it characterizes as Legba's operating logic of polymorphous interpretive praxis, invoking a wide-ranging, seemingly discontinuous assemblage of critical concepts (including Paget Henry's "Great Time," Veve Clark's "diaspora literacy," the "quilting structure" of Carole Boyce Davies and Elaine Savory Fido, Houston A. Baker, Jr.'s "crossroads" trope, the Yoruban concept of ashe, Wilson Harris's "limbo imagination," and the "single History" of Edouard Glissant, among others) that undergird the book's interpretive practice. Despite the book's many gestures toward the material world, the Legba Principle it seeks to establish ultimately remains ineffable and protean, more rhetorical than concrete. If the principle proves resistant to any stable description as discursive practice, however, it has the advantage of opening up the book's hermeneutic strategies to surprising, potentially productive influences.

True to Russell's chosen form of analysis, the book's individual chapters roam freely and with some caprice through historical exegesis, textual criticism, and literary critical debates occasioned by the books under discussion. The use of previous literary criticism is strategic and eclectic, rather than comprehensive, and the book's own readings typically stay at a general level of form throughout. The first chapter, on Johnson's fictional autobiography, is perhaps the least persuasive. Although insightfully placing Johnson's book into a nuanced historical and literary context of post-Civil War political disappointment, the chapter seems short on the textual evidence needed to be convincing in its claim that Johnson's rather conventional form of narrative satire is explicitly "interruptive." The second chapter is on much firmer footing, as Zami, Audre Lorde's self-described "biomythography," explicitly undertakes "the self-conscious act of destabilizing ... conventional dictates" (60) that Russell champions. The chapter's historicizing efforts--noting Zami's publication just before the U. S. invaded Grenada and carefully reading Lorde's later writings about the island--help address charges that Lorde's book exoticizes the Caribbean from a privileged space, and the presentation of Lorde's self-avowed poetics of resistance effectively illustrates the general contours of the Legba Principle.

The following chapter aligns well with the one preceding it, emphasizing how No Telephone to Heaven activates formal strategies against expectations of neatly linear storytelling. The emphasis is likewise appropriate for Cliff's novel, and the chapter's focus on the inassimilable, messy, often violent realities of post-independence Jamaica is well chosen for the task. Russell wavers between championing anti-developmental chronologies and recuperating the novel's bleak denouement for an (imagined) progressive Jamaican future, but again usefully portrays her book's governing concept. The fourth chapter's examination of Salt astutely identifies Lovelace's investment in re-imagining forms of community responsibility, providing instructive context and readings of his sprawling, kaleidoscopic narrative. The chapter's claims for Lovelace's formal disruptiveness seem a bit overstated--Salt's "multiple subjectivities" are not particularly jarring or discordant, nor is its narrative especially anti-chronological--but the critical focus on the novel's understanding of land, history, and reparation is sensitive and illuminating. The discussion of The Cattle Killing returns to the now familiar concepts of polyvocality, chronological fluidity, and generic transmutation in describing Wideman's literary practice. There are interpretive insights here--especially the identification of Native Son as intertext but the distinctively "eruptive" nature of Wideman's textual rule-breaking remains elusive. Russell's own language reaches its exuberant height including the rather fantastic assertion that one narrator's italicized interventions "literally explode the lies upon which the official History is underpinned" (150)--but a clear formal difference between Wideman's novel and the others does not readily emerge.

What does emerge is a set of texts that, to varying degrees, exemplifies what Russell identifies as a distinctive African Atlantic tradition "energized by ruptures, fissures, and formal departures that fundamentally challenge Western logocentricity" (166). Discordantly, for a study that invokes Fredric Jameson in its very first sentence, textual production is not historicized (one primary text appeared in 1912, the rest cluster in the 1980s and 1990s), leaving important questions about the tradition's chronological sweep and historical pertinence largely unexamined. For its part, the lack of sustained engagement with studies of diasporic writers' entanglements with literary modernism and postmodernism (which, after all, have been deconstructing the same Euro-American tradition for some time) may exaggerate Russell's claims for a distinctive African Atlantic oppositionality. It might also be argued that the African Atlantic concept sometimes elides different experiences of race and oppression in the Caribbean and the United States. This elision emerges especially in the discussion of Cliff, which overlooks both the fraught class/color/identity politics associated with Cliff herself, as well as the stark vilification of the U. S. that definitively structures her novel's action. Nevertheless, this monograph's intellectual investment in analyzing literary form, realigning transatlantic solidarities, and enacting its own flexible, recuperative diasporic critical practice is valuable and provocative in the best scholarly sense. Russell's book hesitates symptomatically but productively between an emphasis on structural forces and individual agency, contingency and progressive narratives of uplift. If, finally, it does not manage to answer the almost impossible question it poses--how its own interpretive paradigm can "be operationalized to effect material transformation in the lives and livelihoods of African Atlantic subjects" (164; original emphasis)--it does manage to raise this crucial question within a novel and interesting framework.

Reviewed by J. Dillon Brown, Washington University in St. Louis