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Ikenna Dieke, ed. Critical Essays on Alice Walker. Westport: Greenwood, 1999.226 pp. $65.00.
The work of Alice Walker has arguably generated more contested readings than that of any other living African American writer except Toni Morrison, and this volume adds some useful essays to extant criticism. Harold Bloom's Chelsea House Alice Walker (1989), not so notoriously skewed as some other Chelsea House collections on African American writers, preceded Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Anthony Appiah's Alice Walker: Critical Perspectives Past and Present (1993), which provides a better sense of the historical contexts framing Walker's critical reception. Both prior collections accumulate views by already well-known critics and provide foundational essays, despite selections that sometimes have the feel of a closed literary shop. The latter volume's selections mirror the editorial choices of Gates's 1990 anthology Reading Feminist, Reading Black, which does not
include some of the writing that represents either important theoretical backdrop to evaluations of Walker or strong readings of particular texts. Work by Sandra Adell, Jacqueline Bobo, Carole Boyce Davies, Ann duCille, Karla Holloway, Wahneema Lubiano, and Susan Willis, for example, helps provide contexts for the work of a writer constructed as controversial. (Jacqueline Bobo's "Sifting through the Controversy: Reading The Color Purple" might well have introduced any collection because it so well explains why it matters that "controversial" describes the contexts of a work's reception rather than meanings that inhere somehow in a text.)
Unlike the earlier edited volumes on Walker, Dieke's collection results from a call for essays, one that by design has no theoretically informed principle of inclusion despite a felt affirmation of Walker's value and the editor's own focus on immanence, myth, and archetype (appropriate to the "monistic idealism" he foregrounds). Except for Dieke himself and David Cowart (not primarily an African Americanist), the selections here come from relatively new or less-- known critics, yet frequently they...