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The Changing Same: Black Women's Literature, Criticism, and
Theory Deborah E. McDovvell
Indiana University Press: Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1995
ISBN 0 253 33629 5, £11.99 Pbk ISBN 0 253 20926 9, £27.50
Hbk
What a pleasure! Deborah McDowell is good indeed. This is more
than just a miscellany of occasional critical writings - here she
looks at defin-ing moments in African-American women's fiction and
its reception including the 'Woman's Era of the 1890s', the 1920s
and 1930s Harlem Renaissance and the new Black Renaissance of the
1970s and 1980s. All these essays were composed during the 1980s
when African-American women's writing was subject to intense debate
both within the academy and further afield. In representing these
excursions into that debate, McDowell has also critiqued her
earlier positions, commenting on feed-back from other critics, and
sometimes modifying and updating her own opinions in the light of
new work. The original essays themselves contain much that is
insightful and theoretically engaging, but it is the italicized
inserts that hold the real guts and force.
For instance, 'New directions for black feminist criticism', the
1980 essay which responded to Barbara Smith's brave 'Toward a black
feminist criti-cism' (1977), is now tempered with the view that
'there is no criticism without ideology', a sign that McDowell has
pulled back from her 'fairly harsh judgement of ideology' made
fifteen years ago. It is hearten-ing to find that her respect for
ideological perspectives is also seeing her through the 'Age of
Theory'. 'Transferences' (1989), the last essay in this book,
debates the theory/practice division showing how both 'Feminist
Theory' and 'African-American Theory' have reproduced strate-gies
of dominance both of which misrecognize black feminist theory; its
relevance has implications not only for Literary Studies but for
other aca-demic disciplines. McDowell is not, however, shying away
from post-structuralist theory, nor preferring oversimplifications
of 'for' and 'against', but, as she makes clear in her
introduction:
I accept this moment's critical axiom that self 'identity'
always gives way to 'difference', thus making difficult any easy
and clear cut identifications and alliances ... this study does not
fit neatly within either conceptual or disciplin-ary boundaries,
but rather selects aspects from a variety of discourses in order to
formulate its questions and reading strategies.
Methodologically, McDowell is more and more inclined to espouse
post-structuralism within her interpretative framework. 121
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The Woman's Era is re-evaluated in the light of lola Leroy by
Frances Harper and Alice Walker's The Color Purple, both of which
explore race, gender, and sexuality; and, although the
outer-directed Harper novel is critiqued against Walker's
inner-directed focus, McDowell regards attempts to recuperate the
mulatta figure as a component of a larger interventionist strategy
by nineteenth-century authors.
The focal points of Part ill, 'Undercover: Passing and Other
Disguises', are the Harlem Renaissance writers Jessie Fauset and
Nella Larsen whose middle-class preoccupations are granted a
generous reconsider-ation against the background of the artistic
politics of the 1920s and 1930s. These essays are valuable
introductions to representing questions of 'race', gender, and
sexuality in the period. (More recent detailed work such as
Thadious M. Davis' full-length biography of Nella Larsen Novelist
of the Harlem Renaissance (Louisiana State University Press, 1994)
attest to sustained growth in the field of black feminist
criticism.) McDowell has now revised her view that 'gender and
sexuality are sub-ordinated to race' in Larsen's novellas and,
informed by more recent history of sexuality, recognizes Larsen's
own dilemma in exploring black female sexual desire, 'especially
lesbian desire without becoming an icon of racist projection'.
The defence of black women writers in the contemporary scene
begins in Part IV, 'The Reader and the Text', in which Toni
Morrison's Sula provides the context for discussing fluid
identities, multiple selves, and dialogic models of reading and
thus dismisses the critics who (mis-guidedly) accuse black women
writers of negatively targeting black men. McDowell is retrieving
black 'feminist' perspectives from the onslaught of masculinist
anxieties, appeals to 'race', 'wholeness', and 'community' which at
points during the 1980s aimed to censor the African-American woman
writer from questioning that supposedly self-evident unity.
'The Changing Same' pulls the reader in two directions. First,
we are back in the 1980s when attempts to establish a black
feminist literary tradition and appropriate critical perspectives
to works such as Walker's The Color Purple and Morrison's Sula
dominated. Second, we are drawn inevitably towards the present
through the counterpoint of more recent discourse. This dual action
is fine, but I was always aware that times had changed even more
than this book can suggest: after all these same authors, Morrison
with Beloved and jazz, Walker with Temple of My Familiar, are
leading canon transformation for the 1990s.
This is not, then, a book that will instruct feminist scholars
already work-ing in the field; they can enjoy the exchange and the
evolution of this
121 particular critic. McDowell's real audience are those
critics and students
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who need to be alerted to 1980s questions on critical
methodology for black women's literature and unquestioned
assumptions about 'tradition'. However, for both readerships, this
can be categorized alongside other single-authored classics of
1980s African-American feminist criticism such as Hazel Carby's
Reconstructing Womanhood (Oxford University Press, 1987) and
Barbara Christian's Black Feminist Criticism (Pergamon Press,
1985).
Delia Jarrett-Macauley
Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History: The Roles and
Representations of Women Paula E. Hy~nan
University of Washington Press: Seattle and London, 1995
ISBN 0 295 97426 5, $14.95 Pbk ISBN 0 295 97425 7, $30.00
Hbk
Adive Voices: Women in Jewish Culture Maurie Sacks (ed.)
University of Illinois Press: Urbana and Chicago, 1995
ISBN 0 252 06453 4,$12.95 Pbk ISBN 0 252 021541,$34.95 Hbk
'Women are, in a certain sense, like the Jewish people,' wrote
Chaim Malitz, an immigrant journalist to New York in 1918. These
books, in a certain sense, invert this statement to transform the
way we think about Jewish societies - Maurie Sacks's by placing
centre-stage women as agents and Paula Hyman's by examining the
conceptualization of gender in Jewish communal writing.
Both Sacks and Hyman use their introductions as
part-confessional vehicle to situate their own development as
politically and culturally conscious Jewish women. Given her focus
on Judaism (in contrast to Hyman's on Jewishness), Sacks has a
clear idea of her readers, who come from a relatively conservative
Jewish tradition and are suspicious of attempts to dismantle their
hierarchized vision of Judaism. Indeed, Sacks's explanation of
feminism takes little account of recent studies of the politics of
gender, or of more radical work on Jewish women and
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sexuality, published largely in the United States since the
1980s. 121