Cotera’s book is an original and quite compelling analysis of the politics and the poetics of groundbreaking feminist ethnographic writings of the early-twentieth century. Inspired by Jovita González’s Shades of the Tenth Muse, a book in which González creatively constructs an imagined conversation between two seventeenth-century writers, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and Anne Bradstreet, Cotera offers a fascinating comparative intellectual history of three American feminist native scholars: Zora Neale Hurston, Ella Cara Deloria, and Jovita González. Although these writers lived and worked during the same historical period and shared similar scholarly interests, they never met or communicated with each other. In fact, Cotera found no evidence to confirm that they read each other’s work, a point that is especially noteworthy given that Hurston and Deloria worked with the same mentor, anthropologist Franz Boas.
Skillfully mining their letters, essays, and manuscripts, Cotera seeks to discover the challenges and tensions that these pioneer native feminist scholars experienced in navigating their professional and personal lives. For Cotera, this project is important for several reasons. First and foremost is the fact that despite the difference in their disciplinary training (folklore studies, anthropology, and ethnolinguistics) each writer engaged in ethnographic writing on, and became recognized experts in, their own ethnic communities during the 1920s and 1930s. These writers sought to transform negative perceptions of their communities through their scholarship. However, their complex subject positions limited their ability to do so effectively. Cotera astutely notes that because “insider” or “native” scholars were not fully accepted in the academy at this point in time and because their work did not fit neatly within the established, conventional, academic discursive domains, these scholars and their writings remained marginal to the mainstream during their lifetime. In fact, the greater part of the scholarship produced by these women, particularly that of González and Deloria, was published posthumously. It was not until the 1970s that women and/or Third World scholars recuperated and validated their path-breaking feminist scholarly contributions.
Framed by an introduction and an epilogue, this book is divided into two parts. In the introductory chapter, Cotera neatly articulates the concept for her book. She underscores that her goal is to go beyond comparing the similarities among the three scholars by taking account of the social location of each author. That is, by making visible the particularities of their individual historical experiences as racial, ethnic, female scholars, Cotera seeks to highlight the complicated intersection of race, class, and gender in the United States during the 1920s and 30s.
Part One consists of four chapters. In the first chapter Cotera lays the groundwork for examining the ethnographic writings of the three scholars by providing a succinct overview of the significant disciplinary practices and conventions prevalent in ethnographic writing of the early-twentieth century in the United States. In the three subsequent chapters Cotera adeptly explores the methodological and theoretical approaches that each author employed in her respective writings.
In Part Two, Cotera demonstrates the resilience and creativity of these three writers. She persuasively argues that Hurston, Deloria, and González produced experimental women-centered fictional novels as a critical strategy that enabled them to transcend their respective disciplinary conventions and cultural norms. By engaging in experimental storytelling that was based on ethnographic data, these authors created a new discursive domain in which they could safely address taboo topics such as sexuality, romance, and intimacy. In this way, these women rendered a far more complex understanding of their respective communities.
On the whole, this is a valuable and noteworthy contribution that will no doubt prove significant for scholars in the fields of anthropology, folklore, literature, feminist studies, and American studies.
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[Review length: 604 words • Review posted on February 16, 2010]