Angela L. Cotten and Christa Davis Acampora, eds. Cultural Sites of Critical Insight: Philosophy, Aesthetics, and African American and Native American Women’s Writings. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007.
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book review
1. Cultural Sites of Critical Insight: Philosophy, Aesthetics, and
African American and Native American Women's Writings
Elizabeth Archuleta
The American Indian Quarterly, Volume 33, Number 1, Winter
2009, pp. 161-163 (Review)
Published by University of Nebraska Press
DOI: 10.1353/aiq.0.0040
For additional information about this article
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/aiq/summary/v033/33.1.archuleta.html
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2. Book Reviews
Angela L. Cotten and Christa Davis Acampora, eds. Cultural Sites
of Critical Insight: Philosophy, Aesthetics, and African American and
Native American Women’s Writings. Albany: State University of New
York Press, 2007. 216 pp. Paper, $23.95.
Elizabeth Archuleta, Arizona State University
Although one does not usually find research on Phillis Wheatley and Paula
Gunn Allen in the same book, the essays in Cultural Sites of Critical Insight:
Philosophy, Aesthetics, and African American and Native American Women’s
Writings contribute to an emerging scholarship that is changing the ways in
which we examine cross-cultural relationships between Native Americans and
African Americans. Angela L. Cotten’s and Christa Davis Acampora’s edited
collection adds to an already existing conversation by Daniel Littlefield, Tiya
Miles, Claudio Saunt, James Brooks, Jonathan Brennan, and Matthew Restall,
among others, on the historical and cultural exchanges between Native Ameri-
cans and African Americans and works that signify on both traditions. Cot-
ten and Acampora refer to a “crossblood literary aesthetics” that has grown
out of these shared histories of and contact between African Americans and
Native Americans, and they hope their collection encourages comparative
approaches that examine overlapping traditions and cultures as well as aes-
thetic and philosophical innovations. Their collection challenges disciplinary
boundaries that discourage comparative investigations of African American
and Native American literatures.
In addition to the editors’ introduction, the volume includes three addi-
tional sections entitled “Transformative Aesthetics,” “Critical Revisions,”
and “Re(in)fusing Feminism,” suggesting methods for connecting the essays
cross-culturally and comparatively. Part 2 uncovers the innovative structures
created by Paula Gunn Allen, Phillis Wheatley, and Sherley Anne Williams to
3. express healing, celebration, and their unique visions and experiences. Part 3
explores how Linda Hogan and Alice Walker revise literary and critical tradi-
tions, inscribing themselves into and speaking back to psychoanalytic, femi-
nist, and Marxist theories. Part 4 examines how the writing of Toni Morrison,
Luci Tapahonso, and Zitkala-Sa (Gertrude Bonnin) questions feminism’s nar-
row focus on gender and sexuality and how their early manifestations excluded
race, colonialism, violence, and poverty.
The editors note a dearth of scholarship on African American and Native
American women’s writing in the fields of aesthetics and philosophy, and
their goal is to fill this gap by creating models for future comparative analyses.
AnaLouise Keating takes a second look at Allen’s Grandmothers of the Light,
defining it as a different kind of self-help book. To distinguish it from other
self-help books, Keating refers to Allen’s book as a “womanist self-recovery”
book that contains stories of empowerment rather than approaching it as an
American Indian text. Elizabeth J. West uncovers in Wheatley’s poetry exam-
ples of traditional African cosmologies combined with colonial American reli-
gious views, which would become the narrative core of contemporary Afri-
can American women writers. Michael A. Anttonucci finds a blues aesthetic
expressed in Williams’s poetry, claiming that the blues had more of an aes-
thetic and cultural impact on American culture than is currently recognized.
The essays in part 3 reveal how distinct literary works signify on other texts.
Ellen L. Arnold brings Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms and Margaret Atwood’s
Surfacing into dialogue, demonstrating their common goal of cultural recov-
ery and healing gained through ecofeminist insights that claim an alliance
between women and nature. In separate essays both Barbara S. Tracy and
Angela L. Cotten discuss the ways in which Alice Walker’s Meridian signi-
fies on or engages in an African American call-and-response ritual with John
Neihardt’s Black Elk Speaks. By claiming that Walker’s novel is a revision of
Black Elk Speaks, Tracy points to Meridian as a multivoiced text that refuses
to silence the complexities inherent in multiraced identities. Cotten analyzes
Meridian through the lens of Karl Marx’s historical materialism in order to see
how Walker shares some of Marx’s perspectives for social change. In compar-
ing their views on social struggle Cotten demonstrates the value of compara-
tive analysis for enriching Marxian and black radical traditions.
Part 4’s essays focus on women-centered themes and insights in Morri-
son’s Paradise, Tapahonso’s “Leda and the Cowboy,” and Zitkala-Sa’s autobio-
graphical essays published in the Atlantic Monthly. Noelle Morrissette, Mag-
gie Romigh, and Margot R. Reynolds, respectively, rely on feminist criticism
to reveal its manifestation in the works of women who do not claim feminist
leanings.
The essays offer some fresh perspectives on well-known works and will
162 american indian quarterly/winter 2009/vol. 33, no. 1
4. prove useful to students and scholars in philosophy, women’s studies, and the
humanities. Nevertheless, I found myself disappointed because the collection’s
essays engaged in less of an analysis of the aesthetic similarities and intersec-
tions among and between African American and Native American cultures
and more in a predictable and traditional approach to literary texts. How have
both cultures intermingled to create a syncretic African Native American cul-
ture, aesthetics, or philosophy? How has this cultural intermixing confounded
attempts to theorize a strictly black or indigenous cultural tradition? Although
the editors spoke at length on these subjects, many of the essays left what were,
to me, the most interesting issues presented in the introduction unexamined.
What is an African Native American aesthetics or philosophy? How does either
challenge the academy’s traditional view of each discipline? While these ques-
tions remain unanswered, the collection does a good job in presenting new
ways of thinking about texts that challenge traditional disciplinary divisions.
Carolyn O’Bagy Davis. Hopi Summer: Letters from Ethel to Maud.
Tucson, AZ: Rio Nuevo Publishers, 2007. 160 pp. Paper, $15.95.
Matthew Sakiestewa Gilbert, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
In January 1927 Carey E. Melville, a mathematics professor at Clark Univer-
sity in Worchester, Massachusetts, his wife, Maud, and their three children
left the comforts of their suburban home for a nine-month adventure across
the United States. Traveling in a newly purchased Model T Ford, the Melvilles
drove south to Florida and then made the journey out west. In the summer of
1927 the Melvilles arrived at the Hopi villages of Sichomovi, Walpi, and Polacca
in northeastern Arizona. At Polacca Maud Melville met several Hopi artists,
including a Hopi-Tewa pottery maker named Ethel Salyah Muchvo, her hus-
band, Wilfred, and their children Minerva and Clifford. Unlike other tourists
who had visited the Hopi villages in the past, Maud remained in contact with
Ethel and her family after the Melvilles returned to their home in New Eng-
land. In Hopi Summer historian and biographer Carolyn O’Bagy Davis uses
Maud’s journal entries, Ethel’s letters to Maud, letters written by Christian
missionaries, and Hopi oral interviews to tell the story of Ethel’s friendship
with Maud. However, Hopi Summer is more than a story about a friendship
between two very different people. It is a story about survival, death, life, and a
Hopi women’s determination to care for her family and ill husband.
In the late 1920s and 1930s diseases killed many Hopis on the reservation.
Ethel’s husband, Wilfred, suffered from tuberculosis, and his illness had a dev-
astating effect on their children. Having experienced the pain and sorrow of
losing eleven children to the disease, Ethel reached out to her pahaana (white
Book Reviews 163