Risking Difference: Identification, Race, and Community in Contemporary Fiction and Feminism (review)
historicization. While the historicizing project finds and records cultural memory, racial memory is the guilty secret held in the body or in the body of the text. "To register—or more accurately, to fail to register—a violence done to the race as a collective act of patricide is a way of keeping it, so to speak, in the family" and of turning it inward against that family (81). For Durrant, this is the meaning of Beloved's return. She is the "infinite repetition of the original scene of molestation," the "presence of an unhistoricizable event" (83, 98). Following Hortense Spillers, who has read Beloved in a Lacanian theoretical frame, Durrant persuades us that "endeavoring to restore the dreams of Morrison's characters to their proper time and place, we will necessarily come against the elusive temporality of trauma and thus the limits of historicism" (89). I am fully persuaded that the process of collective mourning is necessarily endless while there are limits to historicism. But I retain my doubts about the extratextual formation of a community of difference, much as I admire the important work of utopian thought. Social forces are far less pliable than textual ones. This said, Durrant's insights about the process of mourning in postcolonial narratives are all the more important.