Legacy

Legacy 19.2 (2002) 260-261

West of the Border: The Multicultural Literature of the Western American Frontiers. By Noreen Grover Lape. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2000. 224 pp. $59.95/$24.95 paper.

"West of the border," argues Noreen Grover Lape in her exciting new book of the same name, is "not so much a geographical place as zones of culture contact and conflict in which writers negotiated their positions between cultures" (3). While Lape builds on work by Mary Louise Pratt and Annette Kolodny, in particular, she offers an original, well conceived, and clearly articulated redefinition of a new kind of frontier, a "liminal space" where writers produce "works that mediate between disparate cultures" and "negotiate social, cultural, and identity frontiers through cross-cultural dialogue" (6). Using both borderland criticism and the anthropologist Victor Turner's theories about rites of passage, she shows that writers from a variety of ethnic groups who inhabited multicultural frontiers represent the "American borderlands" as "thresholds to a new state of being" (8).

Key to Turner's rite of passage and Lape's argument is the concept of liminality, in which, according to Turner, individuals are "'neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial'" (quoted in Lape 5). In this position, they become cultural critics, "energetic, subversive, creative" (quoted in Lape 6). In the frontier contact zone, Lape's writers—James Beckworth, Sarah Winnemucca, John Rollin Ridge, Mourning Dove, Sui Sin Far, Onoto Watanna, and Mary Austin—possess what she calls a "double consciousness or awareness of being between two cultures" that shapes their self-perceptions and their social critiques (178).

Lape recognizes that frontiers are characterized by exploitation, by power inequities, and by what Patricia Limerick calls a legacy of conquest, but she presents the writers she discusses as active agents in social change: "[F]rontiers were not simply sites of victimhood or negation; rather, they were places where cultural others mediated between groups and defined and analyzed social and cultural problems" (9). She explores how her writers attempt to keep borders open between diverse groups. One of her most innovative and useful observations is: "If closed frontiers bolster the power and supremacy of the dominant culture, then open frontiers are [End Page 260] ambiguous, contradictory, subversive, pluralistic, and resistant. Closed frontiers denote the termination of cultural relations and the institution of Anglo dominance; open frontiers indicate the continuation of intercultural relations and resistance to Anglo dominance" (13). The writers illustrate what she calls the "historical dialectic between open- and closed-frontier politics," a tension she sees as "inherent in U.S. pluralism to this day" (18). While Mourning Dove, for instance, uses trickster figures to create "a position of intercultural synthesis and of cultural critique from which to write," challenging Anglo dominance, Ridge closes the frontier "by believing that [his] trickster-bandit is impotent to reorder" it (15). "A bold activist," Sui Sin Far challenges stereotypes about the Chinese, opening up a counterfrontier, while her sister Onoto Watanna "seems to be trying to evade the Chinese American contact zone, choosing to pass as Japanese." Wantanna's exotic romances, then, do not challenge "dehumanized and distorted images of Japanese characters" (118-19). While Mary Austin too freely appropriated American Indian materials, she offered alternatives to the racism of the progressive twentieth century by attempting "to reopen the frontier by sustaining cultural contact" (174).

Watanna and Austin exemplify the varied writers Lape has chosen to explore in detail: by choice or necessity, they "reconceive the concept of self-making" by internalizing the contact zone, exhibiting "fluid selves that are able to change by adapting to diversity" (177). Both have been much critiqued for what Lape calls their "transethnicity," but she presents a balanced analysis, arguing that such writers "externalize the contact zone when they act as literary mediators" (178). Her critical perspective thus mirrors her argument: instead of closing down dialogue, she opens it up. While not overlooking the writers' material difficulties and their personal conflicts, Lape sees the...