Autobiographical Inscriptions: Form, Personhood, and the American Woman Writer of Color. By Barbara Rodriguez. New York: Oxford UP, 1999. xii, 228pp.

Reviewed by Lisa M. Ortiz

Barbara Rodriguez asserts that the works studied in Autobiographi-
cal Inscriptions: Form, Personhood, and the American Woman Writer of Color can serve as a case study of storytellers whose strategies of self-inscription lead us toward a new paradigm for reading autobiographical genres. She offers a careful review of autobiographical theory and criticism that promotes revisionist readings of writing by American women of color that "notably frame and contain specific conversations about race, gender, and speech" (97). Borrowing from the theories of scholars such as Paul De Man, Françoise Lionnet, and Leigh Gilmore, she presents us with a lens that magnifies the autobiographical gestures in works by Zora Neale Hurston, Harriet Jacobs, Mary Rowlandson, Hisaye Yamamoto, Maxine Hong Kingston, Leslie Marmon Silko, Adrienne Kennedy, and Cecile Pineda. Rodriguez moves beyond modern notions of identification and self-representation to a study of "practices of inscription and reinscription" that extends and supplements contemporary theories of self-representation (3).

Rodriguez's study, which offers an ambitious "repositioning of autobiography studies," participates in the discourse of life writing by responding to reductive readings of canonical works such as Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; controversial works such as Hurston's solicited autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road; and lesser-read works such as Cecile Pineda's Face (3). She fleshes out the ways in which "innovations of form and structure contain and indeed bolster the arguments for personhood" employed by American women of color who write their personhood from a position doubly removed from the autonomous act of self-representation (4). Perhaps the most notable of Rodriguez's contributions is the way in which she examines the implications for autobiographical studies that can be derived from reading her selections outside of prescriptive contexts. She champions authors such as Hurston for "collapsing any narrative distance" between their voices and those that inhabit their narratives yet still maintaining the role of storyteller (34). Endorsing authors' refusal to meet the "structural expectations" of autobiography proper, Rodriguez makes a case for reading in new genres like autofictography and autoethnography and others yet to be named (37).

a/b: Auto/Biography Studies

While her study of autobiographical "prosopopoeia" doesn't offer a new theory for the study of autobiography, Rodriguez's study of structure and genre reveals many "layers of autobiography" at work in self-representation by women of color (16). A form of "personification that represents an imaginary, absent, or deceased person speaking or acting" in which, as De Mann asserts, one's name "is made as intelligible as a face," prosopopoeia serves as a trope for reading the self-representation of American women of color (4). A search for "face" is one in which Rodriguez reminds us that the American woman writer of color is engaged in "rhetorical and structural strategies of inversion" that readers are only recently coming to understand as necessary and unique "appropriations of personhood" in the face of objectification (51). Much the way Ilan Stavans sees Rodriguez's works as a dramatic "game of reflections" in which she "looks at women looking at themselves in the mirror while the public observes," Rodriguez herself is keenly aware of readers' participation in this process of self-affirmation inherent in producing new subjectivities and new autobiographical forms (1). If, as she suggests, "making a self involves making a face" then we must read their prosopopoeic reflections as would witnesses to a moment of establishing historical, political, and aesthetic subjectivity that is as unstable as looking into a mirror (19).

Her study of women's self-representation is modeled closely after Leigh Gilmore's feminist work in autobiographics. As Gilmore seeks to remove women writers from the interpretive contexts in which their works are canonized, so Rodriguez seeks to read selected works by American women of color outside of prescriptive contexts determined by conventional notions of form and personhood. As a method of revaluing the multiple cultural and historical influences upon the written ethnic identity, she offers her historically and culturally specific readings with consideration of how language and its acquisition shape the autobiographical act for hyphenated American women. Rodriguez's rationale for the application of autobiographic readings to narratives, not all of which are traditionally read autobiographically, is that it is precisely in the margins, joints, and layers of the writing that autobiographical meaning is made. As Gilmore contends, "it is there that the terms of a different reading and re-textualization of the subject of autobiography must be located" (42).

If there is any chapter in Autobiographical Inscriptions that conveys its worth and encapsulates its argument it is chapter four, "People Made of Words: Identity and Identification in Leslie Marmon Silko's Storyteller and Adrienne Kennedy's People Who Led to My Plays." Here, Rodriguez gets to the core of what it means to write one's identity as an American woman of color when that personhood has been miti-

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gated by a history of the very laws of American citizenship. Rodriguez examines the challenges that American women writers of color face when inscribing their own subjectivities that have been legislated, negotiated, purchased, sold, denied, and otherwise misappropriated. She uses legal arguments such as the Dred Scott decision, the Allotment Act, the Fourteenth Amendment, and the Declaration of Independence to highlight the fact that while identity is never fixed and is always subject to regeneration and redefinition, Ethnic-American identity is further complicated by a constant condition of inter-reference between the Ethnic and the American in lived and discursive forms (Fischer 201). It is in this chapter that Rodriguez concretizes her claim that autobiographical practices, positions, and narrative forms that emerge in the narratives of Ethnic-American women, in fact, bend genre. She reads across cultural and generic traditions to explore the tensions between "fiction and history, the fantastic and the real, the collective and the individual" as they exist in African-American, Asian-American, Native-American, and Latina literature (15).

In her concluding chapter, "Making Faces, Making Race: Prosopopoeia, Autobiography, and Identity Construction," Rodriguez's answer to Lionnet's "female textuality" is her reading of Cecile Pineda's Face as an allegory for women's self-representation. This fictional account depicts a male protagonist, Helio Cara, whose face is disfigured by a nearly fatal accident. Denied reconstructive surgery by the public health care system in Brazil, he goes to desperate lengths to reconstruct his own face. The sight of his horribly distorted reflection is an unbearable reminder that he is as unintelligible to himself as he is to his neighbors who don't recognize him as he walks through their community. Rodriguez persuasively argues that Cara's loss of face and community mirrors the predicament facing women writers of color whose work endures neglect or misrecognition through reductive readings that withhold treatment of the "face"--a "substitution of the face for the life-story" (188). Her readings "make faces" by making the multiple, dialogic, and contingent faces of her authors intelligible. In the sense of Gloria Anzaldua's Spanish translation, haciendo caras is a necessary subversive strategy for simply "being." Her analogous "reading" of Orlan's French composite art that showcases compound faces made from multiple individual features also recalls Lionnet's métissage as both a concept and practice for understanding how women writers of color "make faces" for themselves at the "site of undecidability and indeterminacy," in which contemporary Ethnic American women's identity can be theorized (Lionnet 6).

What propelled me through my reading of Autobiographical Inscriptions was not so much its diverse range of approaches to women's self-

a/b: Auto/Biography Studies

representation, but my hope for a more expansive selection of primary texts. Although her sampling covers a comfortable scope of cultural contexts and historical periods, her peripheral readings of others, like Gloria Anzaldua and Patricia Williams. Anzaldua's writing, while only referenced peripherally, are fertile areas that deserve further analysis in Rodriguez's arguments about the undervalued autobiographical moves of women of color: hybridity. Although her readings of Woman Warrior and "The Legend of Miss Sasagawara" treat the experience of second-generation Asian Americans, Rodriguez does not fully theorize the complex ways in which immigrant, exile, and other hybrid or border "selves" occupy spaces of hyphenated American identity in their writing or in their lived experience. Her study deserves attention to contemporary Latina authors such as Ana Castillo, Julia Alvarez, and Sandra Cisneros, whose thinly veiled autobiographical fiction can offer up numerous examples of the autobiographical turns Rodriguez theorizes on her way toward the concept of prosopopoeia. Her reference, Breaking Boundaries: Latina Writings and Critical Readings, could offer guidance to this body of work peculiarly left out of much autobiographical discourse and still without a permanent home in either American or Latin American literary canons (Delgado et al. 45).

Although she provides readers with smart, careful, and innovative readings, her primary texts are somewhat dated with the most recent, Cecile Pineda's Face, published in 1985. More contemporary works, such as Michelle Cliff's Abeng or No Telephone to Heaven, Julia Alvarez's How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, and Edwidge Danticat's Breath Eyes Memory all lend themselves to precisely the kind of autobiographical reading about which Rodriguez is so enthusiastic. Cliff's works have been studied in Lionnet's Autobiographical Voices, so here, the missed opportunity is introducing autobiographical readings of authors like Alvarez and Danticat to a community of scholars who study life writing in its various modes.

While not a study of autobiographical discourse, per se, (only about one quarter of her selected bibliography consists of theory and criticism of life-writing), Rodriguez's inquiry into "prosopopoeic" narrative furthers current discussions of autobiography and literature by American women writers of color. Volume viii in the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute series edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Autobiographical Inscriptions stems from research initiated at the nation's oldest research center dedicated to the study of the literature, history, politics, religion, and art of the African Diaspora. Although Rodriguez, assistant professor of African-American Literature at Tufts University, gives more critical attention to literary criticism of Ethnic-American women's narratives, her reconceptualization of autobiographical form and

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personhood carefully "complicates and clarifies current theories of the genre" (6).

A very accessible text, Autobiographical Inscriptions is neither highly stylized, nor dependant upon literary or theoretical jargon to deliver its arguments. Her intended audience appears to be other African-American literature specialists, but is valuable to both the established life-writing scholar and the novice for whom a more utilitarian discussion of autobiographical theory proves useful. I would recommend it to scholars and students of women's autobiography searching for ways to answer questions about the relationship of autobiography proper to other autobiographical forms, the difference between the lived experience of the author and the relational experience of authors to the lives of their characters, and the shaping force of Ethnic-American identity on a woman's representation of her own life and the lives of her characters. Any reader interested in seeing Rodriguez further her study of genre, not necessarily in autobiographical studies, should look for her second book, a study of the slave narrative in American literature, art, and music: The American Slave Narrative: Slavery and the Persistence of Form forthcoming from University of Wisconsin Press.

The College of New Jersey

Works Cited

• Delgado, Asuncion Horno, et al., eds. Breaking Boundaries: Latina Writings and Critical Readings. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1989.
• Gilmore, Leigh. Autobiographics: A Feminist Theory of Women's Self-Representation. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1994.
• Fischer, Michael. "Ethnicity and the Post-Modern Arts of Memory." Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Ed. James Clifford and George Marcus. Berkeley: U of California P, 1986. 194-233.
• Lionnet, Françoise. Autobiographical Voices: Race, Gender, Self-Portraiture. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1989.
• Stavans, Ilan. Rev. of Autobiographical Inscriptions: Form, Personhood, and the American Woman Writer of Color, by Barbara Rodriguez. Oxford General Catalog 31 August 2001. 10 September 2001 <http://www.oup-usa.org/isbn/0195123417. html>