Second Arrivals: Landscape and Belonging in Contemporary Writing of the Americas

Sarah Phillips Casteel. Second Arrivals: Landscape and Belonging in Contemporary Writing of the Americas. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007. Pp. ix, 272. $59.50; $22.50 pb. What happens to the desire for home and a situated sense of belonging in a globalized, diasporic world? Following the siren call of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, are we really all content to be rootless nomads? Or does the desire for a space, landscape, environment to call one's own persist? These are the issues Sarah Phillips Casteel explores with enviable clarity and perception in Second Arrivals: Landscape and Belonging in Contemporary Writing of the Americas. Casteel focuses on diasporic writers and visual artists from across the Americas who lay claim to a sense of but understand place an ongoing, laborious, and always provisional process (193). The book's introduction acknowledges current theory's predilection for mobile, deterritorialized and liminal urban spaces. Diaspora theorists such as Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, and Arjun Appadurai, along with Deleuze and Guattari, Casteel explains, rightly critique the ways in which colonial, nationalist and patriarchal discourses historically linked identity and geography: to belong once meant identification with a particular, typically rural place, race and history. Yet Casteel insists, and many people's experiences bear out, that the alternative of simply abandoning all notions of emplacement denies both the desire for belonging and many imaginative possibilities. Instead, she reads writers V.S. Naipaul, Derek Walcott, Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, Joy Kogawa, Jamaica Kincaid, Michael Pollan, Shani Mootoo, Gisele Pineau and Maryse Conde, as well as visual artists Isaac Julien and Jin-me Yoon, for the ways in which they negotiate more complex and sometimes contradictory understandings of emplacement. Rather than rejecting rural and wilderness spaces outright, these writers and artists deconstruct binaries of home-exile, roots-routes and nature-culture in favour of a new, dynamic vision of landscape. Casteel addresses authors from across the Americas, arguing that colonial exploration, natural science, and ethnographic narratives initiated anxious and competing claims to belonging and emplacement throughout the New World. Canonical Caribbean writers such as Naipaul and Walcott, for instance, rearticulate pastoral motifs from a postcolonial perspective, insisting on tensions between the pastoral's idealized vision and its real historical implications. Casteel's close readings locate both authors as revealing the dispossession tied to pastoral discourse through plantation history while also, with differing degrees of success, deploying the pastoral as a means to repossession and a new sense of place (46). Similarly, Malamud and Roth appropriate the pastoral myth in a Jewish diasporic context. Pointing to the tenuousness of belonging traditionally associated with urban Jewish culture, both authors assert the more profound if problematic belonging of a rural American Jewish presence. In a particularly insightful chapter on Joy Kogawa's novel, Obasan, she places that work within pastoral and nature-writing traditions and argues that Kogawa seeks to assert Japanese Canadian indigeneity through emulating the perspective of First Nations people. …

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