Anuradha Dingwaney Needham

Resisting Alterities: Wilson Harris and Other Avatars of Otherness (review)

the intimate encounter of the archive. Now, however, Christopher De Santis’s superb Hughes-focused documentary contribution to the long-running Dictionary of Literary Biography series makes great strides towards bringing the archival experience to the modern reader. Its hundreds of closely printed, large-format pages provide an embarrassment of riches: reprints of dozens of well-known or obscure-but-deserving poems; excerpts from scores of Hughes’s major texts; facsimile reproductions of his prose and poetry in draft, replete with holographic cross-outs and emendations; facsimile reprints of letters between Hughes and Blanche Knopf, Carl Van Vechten, Claude McKay, James Weldon Johnson, Jean Toomer, Richard Wright, Duke Ellington, and James Baldwin; photographs of Hughes with young Chinua Achebe, Hughes and Arthur Koestler picking cotton in Soviet Turkmenistan in 1933, Hughes and Ernest Hemingway and Nicolás Guillén in Madrid in 1937, and Hughes in West African garb at his college classmate Nnamdi Azikiwe’s inauguration as governor general of newly independent Nigeria; a transcript of Hughes’s interrogation before Joseph McCarthy’s U.S. Senate committee; a far happier interview between Hughes and the South African Richard Rive; and much more. Linking this cornucopia together is a comprehensive and well-crafted interspersed narrative by De Santis, a lengthy bibliography, and detailed chronology. The overall effect is powerful and rich. Hughes specialists will revel in all manner of this volume’s sections, while the broader Research in African Literatures reader will focus not only on the many African and Caribbean connections in the book, but also on the astounding range of the man who was, to the best of my professional knowledge, the fi rst African or Afro-diasporic person to make his living exclusively from his writing. Certainly every college and university library should own this text. Indeed one’s only lament is that at

BOOK REVIEW: Ed. Marco Fazzini. RESISTING ALTERITIES: WILSON HARRIS AND OTHER AVATARS OF OTHERNESS. Cross/Cultures 71. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004.

215 (or closer to

BOOK REVIEW:C. L. Innes. A HISTORY OF BLACK AND ASIAN WRITING IN BRITAIN, 1700-2000. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002. andHelena Woodard. AFRICAN-BRITISH WRITINGS IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: THE POLITICS OF RACE AND REASON. Westport: Greenwood, 1999.

170 discounted online), the volume is beyond the reach of many ordinary buyers. Given a more exciting cover and a better price, this visually dizzying book might even fare well in the coffee-table book market. Until that day, as Gaurav Desai said of a different recent volume, I am closely guarding my review copy of this brilliant text.