| Selfish Gifts: |
||
Selfish Gifts: Senegalese Women's Autobiographical Discourses. By Lisa McNee. Albany: State University of New York, 2000. Pp. xi + 197. Notes, sound recordings, works cited, index. $18.95 paper. Lisa McNee's Selfish Gifts: Senegalese Women's Autobiographical Discourses provides a valuable contribution to African oral arts scholarship. In addition to exploring the Wolof panegyric genre of taasu, McNee considers the role of Senegalese women's written autobiography, comparatively analyzing both vehicles of verbal self-representation. McNee's research, based on more than a year spent as the "adopted" daughter of a Senegalese family, primarily focuses on how the self is represented through autobiographical discourse. An intersubjective model of identity enables her to appreciate the role of cultural practices such as gift exchange--essential to Wolof society--in the verbal construction of self. Through analysis of transcribed and translated narratives, McNee explores other issues such as genre conventions, gendered subjectivity, and narrative truth-value. McNee's conception of autobiography as "an insertion of self into society" illustrates both the dynamics of interpersonal relationships and the broad range of discursive articulations of individuality (p. 97). Through autobiographical discourse, which provides an ideal context for identity negotiation, the performer offers the gift of her self, while simultaneously expecting reciprocity from her audience. The taasu genre of praise poetry, performed primarily at family events such as naming ceremonies, functions both as a reflexive discourse about the performer and as a narrative of exchange that reinforces social ties. "Public opinion of an individual is vital, for it is the key to the mutual assistance upon which Wolof depend" (p. 38). Therefore, exchange of such symbolic goods as praise is essential to both the maintenance of society and to individual survival. Dynamic negotiations which rely upon discursive exchange, "taasu do not simply mirror experience--they shape it, too" (p. 88). In addition to functioning as a performance of gendered identities interpreted according to social codes, taasu provide a means of exercising agency and tapping into the power available to women through such esteemed positions as motherhood. Used in political rallies, taasu communicate statements of resistance to male domination. As a mode of social competition and political debate, they enable consciousness of individual agency. Professional performers have recently developed the taasu genre in urban settings, where they take on different meanings. According to McNee, rather than creating a deformation of the genre, the altered performance context represents "changes in a living tradition" (p. 46). McNee's attention to autobiographical texts written in French effectively illustrates her theory of discursive self-representation. She presents different verbal genres, oral poetry and written prose, as forming a narrative continuum in which the discourses influence one another. Privileging neither orality nor literacy, McNee compares the women's discourses thematically and contextually rather than according to their generic characteristics. As a Western woman studying a Third World nation, McNee remains keenly aware of her own subject position. She recognizes and successfully avoids the pitfall of re-inscribing colonial power structures by utilizing her position to validate and defend Senegalese women's discourse. "Studies of the interactions between many different forms of autobiographical practice provide the best source of convincing data to counter theories that would endow any particular tradition of autobiography with generic purity and primacy" (p. 11). Her detailed analysis of the nuanced verbal art created by unique combinations of performer, text, and context, serves to debunk the monolithic stereotype of the collectivist Third World versus the individualist West. Arguing that the individual-centric ideology of the West fails to accommodate the varied relationships between self and society found in autobiography, McNee bears witness to the fact that alternatives to European forms of autobiography do, indeed, exist. The creative and performative context of such a historically conflicted region as Senegal inspires complex strategies for the construction of identity; McNee carefully attends to these strategies through a thoughtful examination of verbal expression. Shannon Geary |
