With a relatively limited corpus of just three novels, this study explores the literary representation of female spirituality in the African diaspora. Marouan's selection of Edwidge Danticat's Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994), Toni Morrison's Paradise (1998), and Maryse Condé's I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem (1992) generates an insightful analysis of the complexity of African diasporic religious practices as they intersect with gender and historiography while offering new perspectives on each of the novels in her corpus. While these three writers are often mentioned in the same breath, this kind of extensive study of their work in a comparative framework is harder to find. Marouan's work is thus an original contribution to African diaspora studies that bridges the disciplines of religion and literary criticism in thoughtful ways to tease out the common threads in her corpus.

The book's introduction lays out the principal theoretical and thematic concerns of the project: the outlines of an African diaspora consciousness traced through the three novels, the empowering potential of transnational, creolized readings of witchcraft and religious practice, and the lens of historical revisionism through which the corpus will be examined in putting forth these new models of black female spirituality. Duly attentive to the span of historical, geographical, linguistic, and cultural references represented by the works and biographies of these three formidable writers, Marouan also takes care to tightly anchor her corpus to the themes she identifies as their unique contribution to the literary representation of African diasporic spirituality. Of particular note is her argument that the novels in her corpus propose a more nuanced – and often more critical – view of Africanism than their peers. Pointing to the affirmation of Africanist cultural traditions in representative texts by such authors as Paule Marshall and Gloria Naylor, she claims that the novels in her study “are unusual in the sense that they subject these traditions to a critical lens, expressing a sophisticated concern with the socially constructed nature of historical consciousness and of religious traditions themselves” (28). This antiessentialist impetus seems in many ways fundamental to Marouan's assessment of the unique vision shared by Danticat, Morrison, and Condé, and her insights on this subject are complemented by a concerted attention to the fluctuations between wholeness and fragmentation, suppression and liberation, celebration and skepticism, that characterize these novels.

Turning to each novel individually in her three remaining chapters, Marouan begins with Danticat's portrayal of Haitian and Haitian American women, focussing on the ways in which the imagery and symbolism of Breath, Eyes, Memory generate a dense tapestry of references to Christianity and Haitian Vodou. The Vodou loa Erzulie, for example, appears here in her multiple manifestations, transformed and revised yet again by Danticat, in a narrative that celebrates a culturally symbiotic religious tradition “both female and Africanist” (53, emphasis added). As Marouan is careful to demonstrate, that celebration stops short of glorifying the 1920s Haitian Indigenist movement or presenting idealized spaces of liberation for immigrant communities. Danticat's novel, she asserts, “is transnational in its refusal to oversimplify the experience of Haitian Americans” (66). In the analysis of Morrison's Paradise, transnationalism takes a more implicit role as the focus turns instead to the author's probing look at the meanings and manifestations of utopia in American history. Here Marouan insightfully unpacks the intersecting narratives of Afro-Brazilian Candomblé, Egyptian Gnosticism, and Christianity as they inhere in the dynamics of race and gender in the novel. Finally, the study of Condé's I, Tituba links the transformative conception of “witchcraft” to the novel's parodic dimension, which both recuperates and exaggerates the heroism of an overlooked figure in the Salem witch trials of 1692. Following Rey Chow, Marouan lends particular insight to the ways in which Condé's use of parody contributes to the novel's refusal to produce an ethnic self.

Marouan's bibliography is wide-ranging but somewhat uneven. The most significant omission in this respect is the extensive body of critical work on the texts and authors studied. References here are selective, summary, or at times dismissive, when a more thorough engagement with other critics could have brought the study into a more grounded interdisciplinary dialogue, making the most of the innovative methodological paths opened up by its approach. But on the whole Marouan's work represents an important intervention in diaspora studies, forging an otherwise underexplored and highly valuable framework through which to situate these three groundbreaking writers.