Tell This Silence: Asian American Women Writers and the Politics of Speech, by Patti Duncan (University of Iowa Press, 2004)

Patti Duncan, a mixed-race Korean American and assistant professor of Women's studies at Portland State University, explores the multiple meanings of silence in various texts by Asian American women writers, focusing on writers of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean descent. Drawing on her expertise in Asian American history and cultural knowledge, Duncan uses literary analysis to construct new frameworks for understanding the contributions of Asian American women to the notions of American national identity, U.S. feminism, race, gender, and sexuality. At the center of her argument is her claim that that Asian American women's voices have not been lost in or excluded from American narratives and history. Rather, Asian American authors such as Maxine Hong Kingston, Mitsuye Yamada, Theresa Hak Kyun Cha, and others have used silence as an intentional means of resistance and empowerment by preventing, in part, others from gaining their knowledge. Duncan asserts that these Asian American authors, by deliberately using forms of silence to resist conforming to Western ways of writing, force readers to understand Asian American culture and history in order to interpret their texts. Because gaps in the writing and the indirectness of the narratives require extensive knowledge of Asian American feminist culture and history, these authors risk having their stories being unintelligible and, once again, silenced. It is this very insight that Duncan offers as a powerful new framework to analyze the intersections of gender, race, nationality, and sexuality. These Asian American women not only contributed to the richness of American literature, but they also made profound social and political statements through their use of silence. Duncan, fortunately, provides the means for readers to hear that silence. $34.95 hardcover (University of Iowa Press, 100 Kuhl House, Iowa City, IA 52242; www.uiowa.edu/uiowapress/)
Reviewed by Daniel Hiroyuki Teraguchi

Without a Net: The Female Experience of Growing Up Working Class, edited by Michelle Tea (Seal Press, 2003)

Without a Net: The Female Experience of Growing Up Working Class, a collection of 30 short autobiographical accounts of being poor and female in America, intentionally shies away from tragic, romanticized notions of poverty. Instead, these authors speak of their lives growing up as filled with humor, resilience, pain, confusion, and determination to "make it"--often to the next meal more than all the way to the middle class. As adults, these women now find themselves determined to articulate the causes of systemic poverty, write against stereotype, work on behalf of their communities, and most importantly, retain and value the impact of their experiences on their identities and ways of seeing the world. The book counters the still prevalent "bootstraps" notion that with enough hard work, anyone can be middle-class. At the same time, the collection counters a more common trap of academic, often feminist writing that "speaks for" poor women. To that end, editor Michelle Tea situates Without a Net so that poor women are both subject and authors of experience as a corrective, of sorts, to work typified by Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed. As a whole, the collection gives serious attention to diversity by race, sexual orientation, geographic region, national origin, and within experiences of being poor, all of which work against stereotypes about working-class experiences. Violence is a common theme in the writers' lives, for example, yet rarely is the experience of familial or community violence held separate from larger analyses of the violence of hunger, untreated illness, substandard work conditions, environmental toxins, or day-to-day life. Each contribution to the collection offers engagingly complex narratives, but Without a Net's true power derives from the cumulative effect of the essays read in conversation with each other. $14.95 paper. (Seal Press, 1400 65th Street, Suite 250, Emeryville, CA 94608; www.sealpress.com)
Reviewed by Nancy O'Neill

Women Without Class: Girls, Race, and Identity, by Julie Bettie (University of California Press, 2003)

Julie Bettie's ethnography of high school girls in a rural, working-class California high school is both an eye-opening journey into the lives of teenage girls and a recommendation to reconsider how we think and talk about race, class, gender, and identity. In the year she spent at the high school, Bettie became closely acquainted with several groups of girls, learning about their daily lives, their hopes for the future, and their attitudes about high school and college. She situates this information in a broader social context, demonstrating how race, class, gender, and their interconnections are all powerful cultural influences in the lives of these girls. Bettie points out that because personal achievement and ability are highly valued, the affects of socioeconomic status and its inherent cultural factors on who goes to college and who does not are often obscured. By teasing out the interrelationships of these factors, Bettie demonstrates how access to college has been limited for these girls by their schools, families, and themselves because of incomplete and often erroneous understanding of the cultural influences of class. Through her analysis of the few girls in her study who are attempting to cross socioeconomic barriers, Bettie finds that those girls who can overcome socioeconomic cultural factors, regardless of their racial and ethnic backgrounds, are the ones who get on the path to college. She concludes by offering suggestions about school policy and curriculum that will provide all students with better opportunities for educational and economic success. $19.95 paper. (University of California Press, 2120 Berkeley Way, Berkeley, CA 94704; www.ucpress.edu)
Reviewed by Kathy Goodman