Who Translates?: Translator Subjectivities beyond Reason (review)

352 strates what we should expect such an analysis to entail. Her archive includes, alongside the novels, contemporaneous newspaper editorials, architectural tracts, home magazine articles, real-estate advertisements, interior decorating literature, books of urban sociology, and other documents that surrounded the modern migration to the suburbs. Such texts serve to draw out the map of zones, boundaries, and divisions contained in novelistic representation, a map that, far from simply embellishing or providing a backdrop to the plot, reveals the novel’s participation in the production of social space. The inter-textual relation Jurca describes is one of difference as well as homology. She argues that while novels often work in tandem with nonliterary genres to define the suburban ideal, they more typically adopt a critical stance toward that ideal, an oppositional gesture that is itself no less inherent to suburban identity than the proverbial white picket fence. As the introduction points out, White Diaspora extends the study of middle-class culture and its cult of domesticity—a topic that has been widely pursued in the context of nineteenthcentury studies—into the twentieth century. This extension, however, is also a revision. The book joins the ongoing project of rethinking the concept of separate spheres. Most significantly, by focusing primarily on the suburban male, it dislodges the association between femininity and the material and emotional aspects of domesticity and brings into critical purview the intense, at times desperate, love-hate relationship between men and their homes. This emphasis on masculine affect is particularly welcome in today’s critical climate, where feelings of alienation and victimization are understood, and sometimes derided, as the markers of disenfranchised identities. Jurca allows us to see how the suburban novel articulated a white, masculine narrative of victimhood that masked and, in masking, bolstered its subjects’ actual privileges. White Diaspora is the first book-length study of the modern suburban novel. Its goal is to identify this genre’s overarching narrative patterns, and its scope is accordingly wide, stretching across the U. S. and covering almost the entire twentieth century. In as much as Jurca’s book creates a new area of investigation, one would hope to see subsequent studies more rigorously address questions of difference. How do accounts of the suburban experience vary from Levittown to Silicon Valley? From “East Egg” to the working-class towns girding Pittsburgh? And how is the discourse of suburbia transforming now that the boundaries that defined it—between center and margins, home and work, privilege and deprivation—are quickly eroding?