The Aesthetic Cold War: Decolonization and Global Literature by Peter Kalliney (review)

Abstract

lesbian Western’s gender play inevitably crashes into the history of white supremacy. Even at best, the well-intentioned white character still benefits from colonialist racism and genocide” (77). Indeed, in Chapter Four, “Tomboys and Indians,” Garber spends a lot of time on the problematic history of Westerns writ large, and lesbian historical fiction specifically, begging the question of the utility of the genre itself if it cannot succeed without replicating the racism, sexism, and colonialism of heterosexual writers. Nonetheless, Garber does an excellent job of revealing the ways in which this sub-genre vilifies and, at the same time, appropriates Native American culture, enacting a form of literary criticism that is necessarily critical of the genre as it yet extols its efforts. One of the book’s more significant weaknesses is noted by the author: the near non-existence of lesbian historical fiction written by Black, Indigenous, and other lesbians of color. Related to that is the inclusion of one film that examines Black lesbian historical fiction, which seems out of place in a text focused on genre novels. Chapter Two, “Haunting the Archives,” focuses primarily on the ways in which writers utilize the archive to inspire and support their work, as well as how they fashion narratives based on what is absent from the historical record. Garber briefly mentions Jewelle Gomez’s The Gilda Stories (1991), an historical rendering of a Black lesbian born during the Civil War era, but spends considerably more time on The Watermelon Woman (1996), a film by Cheryl Dunye focused on recovering a usable Black lesbian filmic past. Thematically, inclusion of Dunye’s film works here because it is doing the work lesbian historical fiction is tasked with doing: situating lesbians in a specific historical period (in this case, the era of early cinema) in order to create a usable past in which present-day lesbians can imagine themselves. However, the mockumentary seems out of place, as every other text mentioned in Garber’s study is a novel. To be sure, this is a reminder of the paucity of Black lesbian historical fiction and shines a glaring light on the overwhelming whiteness of lesbian literature and literary culture. Overall, Novel Approaches to Lesbian History does what it sets out to do: remind readers that, regardless of the limits of positivist historiography and irrevocable gaps in the archive, lesbians have always been with us. Lesbian writers are committed to recovering their own histories, even if that means creating them. Scholars and students of lesbian and queer literatures will find a plethora of material to work with, as Garber also includes a bibliography of lesbian historical fiction to encourage further research.