Review: Looking for Home in the New World

Reviewed Work(s): Second Arrivals: Landscape and Belonging in Contemporary Writing of

the Americas by Sarah Phillips Casteel; Trailing Clouds: Immigrant Fiction in
Contemporary America by David Cowart
Review by: Susan Strehle
Source: Contemporary Literature, Vol. 49, No. 1 (Spring, 2008), pp. 145-150
Published by: University of Wisconsin Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/27563784
Accessed: 07-06-2019 22:34 UTC

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 SUSAN STREH L E

Looking for Home in the New World

Sarah Phillips Casteel, Second Arrivals: Landscape and Belonging in Contempora

Writing of the Americas. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007. 2
pp. $59.00; $22.50 paper.

David Cowart, Trailing Clouds: Immigrant Fiction in Contemporary America

Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 2006. xii + 249 pp. $57.95;
$19.95 paper.

In different ways, both books under review trace similar yearn

ings among the world's uprooted for a renewed ability to
belong?to reestablish home and to claim citizenship in a sec
_ond homeland. Edward W. Said believes that these uprooted
constitute both a mandate and a dynamo for thought today.
"[SJurely it is one of the unhappiest characteristics of the age to have
produced more refugees, migrants, displaced persons, and exiles
than ever before in history. . . . Yet it is no exaggeration to say that
liberation as an intellectual mission, born in the resistance and
opposition to the confinements and ravages of imperialism, has
now shifted from the settled, established, and domesticated dynam
ics of culture to its unhoused, decentered, and exilic energies, ener
gies whose incarnation today is the migrant."1 Responding to the
traumatic dislocations of personal and public history, the authors
and protagonists of the writing analyzed in these two recent books
seek variations on the space to which Toni Morrison refers in
Paradise: "the unambivalent bliss of going home to be at home."2

1. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1994) 332.
2. Toni Morrison, Paradise (New York: Knopf, 1998) 318.

Contemporary Literature XLIX, 1 0010-7484; E-ISSN 1548-9949/08/0001-0145

? 2008 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System

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 146 CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE

From their kindred starting points in the migrant's quest,

books diverge in more ways than they resemble each
David Cowart's Trailing Clouds: Immigrant Fiction in Cont
America, the migrant author and protagonist have arriv
United States; recognizing that the original homeland wa
able," "the immigrant must deal with prejudice and hom
but eventually becomes empowered by a new American i
(7). For Co wart, immigrants bring from their original h
"an acute awareness ... of social, political, and historical h
a much larger scale" than any problems they encounter in
their chosen land (207). The "American myth or meta
remains valid" for the grateful immigrant, whose assimil
"embrace of the dream" can demonstrate "how to value w
cial about the great cultural experiment that is America.
valuing of America's promise and ideals, imperiled by the
of identity politics, can be recuperated through the writings
who have most recently" immigrated (12).
In Sarah Phillips Casteel's Second Arrivals: Landscape and Be
in Contemporary Writing of the Americas, diasporic peoples
cross transnational spaces without any definitive landing
World homeland. Instead, they consider landscape, looking
"rural and wilderness spaces" which "are frequently ima
national narratives as the essence or heart of the nation,"
therefore "remain off-limits to minority presences" (5).
Casteel considers focus their critique on such spaces: "Re
observe the carefully policed boundaries . . . and the exc
definitions of national belonging that they naturalize, the
and artists intrude upon such landscapes and transform t
more inclusive and heterogeneous spaces" (6). After the fir
in the city, the migrant achieves a second arrival in the coun
and more generally in a new way of seeing that overc
"binary opposition of home and away, native and tourist.
than migration, then, Casteel explores diaspora, which sh
"an ongoing process of becoming."
While Cowart focuses on fiction, Casteel includes po
prose, garden writing, photography, and installation art.
study is clearly organized and bounded; he chooses a grou
ers who have themselves immigrated to the United States

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 S T R E H L E 147

contains ten chapters, each analyzing one or two contemporary fic

tions; these include Saul Bellow's Mr. Sammler's Planet, Chang-rae
Lee's Native Speaker, Edwidge Danticat's Breath, Eyes, Memory, Junot
Diaz's Drown, and many more. Though Cowart could have selected
different or additional writers, his subject of inquiry is well-defined.
Casteel, on the other hand, seems to choose the individual subjects
for her chapters almost at random. She takes on the potentially
boundless subject of writers and artists, working in various genres,
who represent landscapes in the New World, including Canada, the
United States, and the Caribbean, but not Mexico. The writers and
artists she selects inhabit different kinds and degrees of minority
status within their cultures, as do the fiction writers Cowart studies.
Comparative throughout, her essays link and contrast, whereas
Cowart's chapters focus on single texts. While her book claims a
place in New World studies, Casteel begins with the Old World as it
is reflected in V. S. Naipaul's The Enigma of Arrival (about life in rural
England) and Derek Walcott's Tiepolo's Hound (about painter
Camille Pissarro's complex relation to France). The first half of
Casteel's book explores benign and beautiful landscapes, revised by
writers in a mode she calls "critical pastoralism"; the second half
turns to more sublime and antirealistic landscapes, reflected in
"marvelous gardens and gothic wilderness." While the breadth of
Casteel's focus underscores the extensiveness of complicated repre
sentations of New World landscapes, its unfortunate corollary ren
ders her selections apparently arbitrary and her connections
accidental.
Philosophically and politically, the two critics are sharply at odds.
Casteel is a postcolonial critic addressing transnational cultural
exchanges dense with history; for her, the traumatic oppressions
that dislocate peoples belong to large-scale, long-term systems of
conquest and colonization. Writers of the Americas share, she
believes, "a common colonial inheritance" of New World identities
defined by nature (9). While the history and politics shaping her
diasporic subjects take a secondary position behind the sometimes
distantly connected analysis of botanical imagery in representations
of nature, Casteel approaches her New World writers from a
broadly historical perspective. Cowart instead finds that immigrant
writers "identify themselves as artists first, immigrants second,"

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 148 CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE

and thus he focuses on their aesthetic choices rather than

representations of history (207). In contrast to Casteel, Cowar
cizes postcolonial theory for its tendency to foreground
separateness, diversity, political disenfranchisement, and
alienation" (3). He counters postcolonial readings of several
discusses, including Jamaica Kincaid's Lucy: since postcol
ics "often fail adequately to historicize and contextualize,
proposes instead to

differentiate colonialisms?or to ask what peoples have not at som

been colonized. . . . Might Lucy?or Kincaid?not recognize th
rapacity of the English was, more than that of other colonizers, te
by civilized restraint? By the same token, might she not see that A
derived as much benefit from its English conqueror as the Saxons
from their Norman conqueror or the British Celts from the occu
Romans?
(140)

Cowart appears to believe that the oppressions practiced by mostly

postcolonial, mostly third world nations derive from local, unre
lated sources. Migrants seeking freedom come to America, whose
neo-imperial stance does not trouble Cowart; the U.S.A. is "not a
place of perfect fulfillment, perhaps, but a place of second or third
or fourth beginnings, where essential decency can still prevail over
a dreadful and bloody past. The immigrant's America: almost
home" (107).
Casteel's "second arrivals" resemble Cowart's rebeginnings,
though they retain greater irony, internal conflict, and detachment
from any possible arrival at the unambivalent home. Casteel's
book is strongest in theorizing the complex?and, she persuades,
significant?role of place and landscape in diasporic writing and
visual art; she makes the original and forceful argument that dias
poric subjects "articulate alternative forms of emplacement" by
attending to landscapes from which they are displaced in ways
symptomatic of their exclusion from the nation (1). Through critical
pastoral writing, they "assert the need for place while simultane
ously registering the historical realities of displacement" (13). Place
measures both their yearning to belong and their recognition that,
having lost or left one homeland, they now inhabit another whose

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 S T R E H L E 149

very construction of nature locates them perennially outside the

borders. From this understanding, she constructs rich interpreta
tions of the wide range of writers and artists considered in Second
Arrivals, among them, Naipaul, Walcott, Joy Kogawa, Shani
Mootoo, Gis?le Pineau, and Maryse Conde.
Cowart's analysis is strongest where he is most invested: he reads
the artistry of immigrant writers with fresh and often brilliant
insight, attending to the rich range of choices that shapes their fic
tion and generates its power. Readers familiar with any of Cowart's
five previous books will expect well-written, thoughtful interpreta
tions of fiction, grounded in engaged scholarship. In Trailing Clouds,
Cowart interprets Kincaid's Lucy as a fundamentally unreliable
narrator, and the resulting analysis changes the text entirely. He
traces insect references in Myl?ne Dressler's The Deadwood Beetle,
compares these to Kafka's, and argues that Dressier uses insect
imagery to suggest "the isolation of an immigrant, albeit one much
troubled by guilt" (165). He analyzes dreams and poetry in Cristina
Garc?a's Dreaming in Cuban. Cowart's book is valuable for the keen
insight into language, character, image pattern, and allusion that
characterizes all of his work. Readers may regret his unsupported
allegations about the comparative rapacity of empires and the rela
tive innocence of American aggression, as well as his unnecessary
objections to postcolonial thought. But readers, teachers, and stu
dents will appreciate Trailing Clouds for its new insights into well
known writers (Bellow, Kincaid, Lee, Bharati Mukherjee) and for its
inclusion of new and lesser-known writers (Dressier, Ursula Hegi,
Lan Cao, Wendy Law-Yone). With its abiding interest in recent
migrant writers who represent life in this country, it will be valued
by scholars and teachers of American literature who want to know
the emerging canon of contemporary American fiction. It is
unashamedly pro-American, but it also recalls that Americans have
always included immigrants fired by "the passionate insistence that
America live up to its ideals" (210).
Casteel's Second Arrivals will interest comparative Americanists
and particularly students of New World discourse and theory. This
book intervenes most powerfully through its theoretical argument
that rural landscapes matter as much as urban spaces to diasporic
subjects as they negotiate new relationships and new identities.

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 150 CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE

Rather than celebrating alienation and dislocation, Casteel

the dense interp?n?tration of the longing for home and the
awareness of exclusion. As her diasporic migrants reimag
World landscapes, they witness both their own prohibition
potential to open up spaces through forms of representa
contest and ironize. Grounded in an impressive knowledge
retical and literary texts, Casteel's analysis innovates, bo
consistently comparative form and in its articulate read
nature, history, indigeneity, and belonging.
Both books map an important new territory, though th
some of its parts uncharted. If Said is right in claiming
times have produced an unprecedented number of m
refugees, and exiles, and that they carry the duty and power
atory thought, the writers and artists studied in these tw
books enliven the present and create the future. Efforts
stand their crucial burdens and their unfolding stori
engage all students of contemporary literature.
Binghamton University

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