The Woman That I Am: The Literature and Culture of Contemporary Women of Color

There is no question that the vein of writings by contemporary women of color is very rich. It is in fact too rich to be confined to a single anthology, no matter how ambitious. For teachers, this volume offers a wide and flexible range of works and writers (Louise Erdrich, bell hooks, Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, Nikki Giovanni, Paule Marshall, Leslie Marmon Silko, Audre Lorde, Bharati Mukherjee and Alice Walker, to name a very few). The entries are accompanied by extensive notes and three tables of contents which divide the book by genre (poetry, short story, drama and ``Cultural Narratives and Critical Perspectives''), by theme (growing up, sex and love, women's traditions and conflict) and by ethnicity (Native American, African American, Latina American and Asian American). As Soyini, who teaches speech communication at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, points out, ``for better or worse the selections included here work against establishing a unified subject or viewpoint.'' For the general reader with clear interests, though, a scattershot collection which includes Etel Adnan's angry poem, ``The Beirut-Hell Express,'' an excerpt from Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club and Patricia Hill Collins's coolly academic ``Defining Black Feminist Thought'' is like eating quail--there's a lot of poking around for what you want, and at the end you're still hungry. (Jan.)