Jean Rivard - University of British Columbia

1920s as a transition period in America
marked by vast demographic changes that
were responsible for the decade's preoccupation
with ethnicity and spawned fictional
and non-fictional responses of both an ideological
and generic diversity never before
seen anywhere. For example, the 1920s witnessed
a boom in prairie fiction mostly
written by Scandinavian immigrants who,
Meindl claims, "transcend realism" owing
to both their "uprootedness" and the literary
influences of Ibsen and D.H. Lawrence.
The decade also gave rise to so-called
mulatto fiction and to a literature expressing
the "fascination of white authors for the
figure of the African-American" (Binder).
The six articles not dealing with literary
discourse discuss Jewish entertainer Al
Jolson's success on Broadway, the Menorah
Journal crisis, the Jewish Labour
Movement, the ethnic ramifications of the
Sacco-Vanzetti case, the loss of group
coherence among Germans on account of
Germanophobia after World War I, prohibition
as still another "avatar of American
nativism," and the rising interest of
American anthropologists in local "cultures"
("ethnic'Vimmigrant groups) and
their flirtation with hereditarianism.
The strength of this collection lies primarily
in the compilation of information.
The contributors are obviously more interested
in the history of "ethnic cultures"
than in questioning the methodology and
terminology they employ to talk about
them. What one misses in this book on
"ethnic cultures" in the 1920s are articles
about the contribution of the Irish and
Italian communities, which were both culturally
and politically influential at the time.
Symbiosis: An Intercultural Anthology of
Poetry includes poems written in French
and English by more than thirty poets from
the Ottawa region. Editor/contributor
Luciano Diaz maintains in the foreword
that "writers from the minorities are put,
and subsequently kept, in a sort of ethnic
literary ghetto." To counteract this tendency
in Canadian literary criticism, Diaz
includes works by Canadian-born writers
"whose writing is worthy of recognition by
a wider public," with those of immigrant
and First Nations writers.
The title of the anthology is probably not
the most effective. Symbiosis signifies the
living together of two dissimilar organisms,
whereas the editor's intention is to deemphasize
difference. He critically observes
that "ethnic" writers (whom he identifies
with non-Anglo-Celtic or French immigrant
writers) are "of interest to the mainstream
public primarily for their 'ethnicity'
rather than their intrinsic value as writers"
and claims that all writers need "to converge
in the common ground they all share:
the artistic expression of the written word."
Furthermore, "transcultural" may have
been a more appropriate term for Diaz'
project than "intercultural" since, in Diana
Brydon's words, "transcultural" signifies a
process whereby "differences are brought
together and make contact." While "intercultural"
implies a binary opposition
between a writer's heritage culture and
mainstream culture, "transcultural"
emphasizes the writer's interaction with
existing cultural frameworks within and
between which he or she is writing.
Although the majority of the contributors
were not born in Canada, only a few of
the poems deal with immigrant or exile
experience. The anthology demonstrates
once more that although feelings of displacement
may at times be driving forces
behind an immigrant poet's creativity, the
immigrant predicament is not the only
subject for these writers.
Transfigurations of the Maghreb:
Feminism, Decolonization, and Literatures is
an informative, passionate, and provocative
book. "Writing ... in the wake of the
Rushdie affair and the Gulf War," Woodhull
sees her book "as part of a collective effort
to resist an impulse ... to demonize and do
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