Settling Down and Settling Up: The Second Generation in Black Canadian and Black British Women's Writing by Andrea Medovarski

Reviewed by: Settling Down and Settling Up: The Second Generation in Black Canadian and Black British Women's Writing by Andrea Medovarski Paul Barrett (bio) Andrea Medovarski. Settling Down and Settling Up: The Second Generation in Black Canadian and Black British Women's Writing. U of Toronto P, 2019. Pp. 208. CAD $37.50. Andrea Medovarski's Settling Down and Settling Up: The Second Generation in Black Canadian and Black British Women's Writing offers a compelling analysis of the depiction of second-generation citizens in Black Canadian and Black British women's fiction. Through a series of nuanced readings of the work of Dionne Brand, Tessa McWatt, Zadie Smith, Esi Edugyan, and Andrea Levy, Medovarski traces the manner in which second-generation citizens "'settle up' with the nation, to remake citizenship on other, more ethical or more [End Page 188] inclusive terms" (15; emphasis in original). Her readings complicate conceptions of the relationship between race, citizenship, nation, and diaspora by focusing not on the generation that arrives but on the second generation that "envision[s] alternative spaces from which citizens can make ethical demands of nations in the interest of looking towards different futures, new heterogeneities, and other possibilities" (168). Medovarski's reading offers a compelling reappraisal of ideas of diaspora and nation by comparing these two distinct literary traditions. Settling Down begins with a description of the state of critical discourse "[i] n the early 1990s" (3) and the book is decidedly a product of those debates and that time both in its methods and citational practices. The strength of such an approach is that it enables Medovarski to foreground the disruptive potential of diaspora; this is particularly important given the recent slide in the term's critical currency within Canadian studies. Yet the weakness of such an approach is that the book is oddly non-conversant with more recent scholarship. With the exception of a handful of citations, the bulk of the text's references predate 2006. A great deal has happened in Canadian studies, Black studies, and diaspora studies in the subsequent fourteen years. Indeed, given the transformation in discourses of migrancy, diaspora, and citizenship in the past decade, Medovarski's book misses an important opportunity to intervene in more contemporary discussions. Furthermore, Medovarski does not precisely articulate her position in relation to her critical precursors. It is never entirely clear how Medovarski places Avtar Brah's diaspora space in dialogue with Édouard Glissant's poetics of relation or Paul Gilroy's Black Atlantic. Her argument that "'diaspora space' … is 'inhabited' not only by diasporic subjects but equally by those who are constructed and represented as 'indigenous'" (5) is provocative yet underdeveloped. Indeed, given George Elliott Clarke's argument that Canada is marginalized within Gilroy's Black Atlantic, as well as Clarke's own controversial claims concerning Africadian Indigeneity, it is surprising that Medovarsksi never cites or draws on his work. Similarly, her conclusion raises Sylvia Wynter's concept of the "counter-novel" (168) without fully articulating how each of the novels she studies engages in counter-hegemonic practices. Indeed, the book gestures toward but does not entirely engage with a number of important critical debates. This is particularly evident in the comparative frame of Medovarski's analysis: more work needs to be done to specify the distinction between British and Canadian conceptions of citizenship and the two countries' strategies of managing difference. She refers to the "Canadian Multiculturalism Act" and the "British Race Relations Act" as [End Page 189] two policies that "largely … discipline and contain 'others'" (25). This is certainly true, but there are substantial differences between the two documents, their legislative enactment, and the means by which local communities have resisted that management. Blackness and migrancy have been depicted, in literary and public discourse alike, very differently in Canada and Britain; a more nuanced analysis of the two political environments in which the writers under discussion operate is needed. These limitations aside, however, one of Settling Down's strengths is its sustained and impressive attention to literary works. In contrast with some contemporary literary scholarship, which skims poetry and prose as mere evidence for sweeping theoretical arguments, Medovarski attends to literary complexity. Her...

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