JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. Indiana State University and St. Louis University are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to African American Review. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 185.2.32.28 on Wed, 18 Jun 2014 18:53:55 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditionsmation-and, in particular, to show the importance of the depiction of a distinctive past shared by members of a particular minority group. In DeHay's reading, texts by Cisneros, Tan, Walker, and Erdrich enact a critique of traditional realist narratives by destabilizing discursive hierarchies and opening the possibility of other, multifarious versions of reality that celebrate, revise, and re-member minority women's identities. The other comparative study included in the volume, by Wolfgang Karrer, looks at the array of verbal rituals that are variously designed to represent and enact recall-rituals ranging from Albert Murray's reference to blues structures in Train Whistle Guitar to the uses of legend, myth, and ceremony in works by Sabine Ulibarri, Paula Gunn Allen, and Alice Walker. Given the obvious strengths of the volume, I found the essays focusing on African-American authors to be somewhat disappointing. Sandra Molyneaux's "Expanding the Collective Memory: Charles W. Chesnutt's The Conjure Woman Tales" is a well-researched and eloquent essay that shows how Chesnutt's manuscript revisions underscore the importance of recorded memories, both written and oral, for the larger project of validating the moral system that undergirded Chesnutt's call for fundamental structural changes in society. And Sharon Jessee's discussion of time in Toni Morrison's Beloved has its interesting moments, especially when she examines the parallels between the clamoring for recognition on the part of the dead in Morrison's work and some West African perspectives on time and death. But much of Jessee's essay-as well as Barbara Offutt Mathieson's discussion of maternal love as a metaphor for memory in Beloved-is on such familiar and critically well-trammeled ground that the reader will not find much that has not been said already.
But, in spite of minor deficiencies, Memory, Narrative, and Identity marks a new departure in the study of ethnic American literatures. The volume brings together what is most universal and most unique about the composite, ever changing image of American identity-what Ellison aptly described as a "delicately poised unity of divergencies." The editors are to be commended for such a balanced, well-written collection, as well as for their introduction, which offers a usefulhistory of the rise of ethnic studies within the academy. Judging by this volume, the companion volume announced by the pub...
