Nuancing N/native

Abstract

Sonita Sarker, inWomen Writing Race, Nation, and History (2022), simultaneously seeks expansiveness and particularity, and the structure of her book facilitates the success of both aims. Employing modernism generously as the literary and political context for her study of six N/native women – Cornelia Sorabji, Grazia Deledda, Zitkála-Šá, Virginia Woolf, Victoria Ocampo, and Gwendolyn Bennett – Sarker organizes each eponymous chapter into six interconnected categories – Time/History, New/ Now, Lineage, Land, Learning, Labour – that, taken together, contribute to a multi-faceted analysis of each author. The global reach of her project complements the singular presentation of each author, so that the concept of N/nativenss, the book’s orienting centre, remains dynamic, adapting to the political and cultural vectors accompanying each case study. This approach emphasizes Sarker’s commitment to portraying N/nativeness as ‘instantiated through discourses that are implicitly or explicitly racialized, classed, gendered, and sexualized’ (5). Thus, Sarker models an intersectional framework for global modernist scholars who are compelled to negotiate nationally, politically, and culturally contingent constructions of identity categories such as race, class, gender, and citizenship. Sarker’s foundational concept, N/native, anchors her analysis of each author and functions as a dynamic metric, shifting in response to the political and cultural contexts examined in each chapter. Sarker draws a distinction between Native with a capital N, which refers to ‘first in,’ and native with a lowercase n, which indicates ‘born in.’ And, as Sarker recursively addresses, both positionalities are racialized and gendered. As an example, Virginia Woolf, the subject of chapter four, is an English native. In the case of Woolf, race, particularly whiteness, safeguards her national belonging, while her gender is the means of her disenfranchisement. Woolf is unquestionably an English woman, but it is her womanhood that places her at the margins of national identity. So deeply does Woolf feel this marginalization that in Three Guineas in 1938—long after Sonita Sarker, Women Writing Race, Nation, and History: N/native, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2022, 218 pp., £60 (hardback) ISBN: 9780192849960.