Scripted Geographies: Travel Writings by Nineteenth-Century Spanish Authors (review)

as a fi gure of accommodation and DuBois as standing for more militant resistance in questions of racial inequality. Picking up on the subtitle of DuBois’s publication, there is some discussion of the notion of “an autobiography of a race concept,” and this might have proved an interesting phrase with which to return to the texts explored earlier, each one of which navigates not just a personal life but African American identity in its own distinct way. Race and Form provides a helpful starting point in thinking through a narratological approach to autobiography, and to African American publications too often read merely in terms of their social commentary. It also offers a series of observant practical analyses and stimulating comparisons. Despite the range of its selection of primary texts, the study is somewhat narrowed and impoverished, however, by a lack of engagement with how the autobiographies in question might be a part of or respond to an African American (or American) literary tradition. For example, it surely would have been productive to have examined how some of the twentieth century publications draw upon the tropes, devices, and modes of the earlier slave narrative genre. Indeed, the volume declines to “probe into the historical development of narrative strategies,” although this is the very activity that would have strengthened the claim to a contextualized narratology. Unfortunately, the volume also suffers from a succession of errors of the kind that one might expect to have been picked up at the editorial stages: there are countless infelicities of expression, an article by Elizabeth Schultz published in 1975 is wrongly attributed a publication date of 1915 and then celebrated as “one of the earliest . . . critical essays on modern African American autobiography,” material is repeated, the theorist Michel Foucault is referred to as Michael Foucault, and so on. This kind of inaccuracy does detract, but if set aside, Race and Form offers us promising ways of reconfi guring and combining critical frameworks, and elucidates neglected aspects of important African American prose texts.