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McDowell's vibrant scholarship combines close textual analysis with attention to broad social, political, and cultural contexts. In this volume, she also critiques her own earlier positions, reconfiguring and contributing to the evolution of a new black feminist criticism.
List of contents
Preface-Speaking To You about the "Changing the Same"
Part I Thinking About Methods
Chapter One - New Directions for Black Feminist Criticism
Part II Ideas of Tradition
Chapter Two - Race of Saints: Four Girls at Cottage City
Chapter Three - "The Changing Same": Generational Connections and Black Women Novelists-Iola Leroy and The Color Purple
Part III Undercover: Passing and Other Disguises
Chapter Four-On FAce: Textual Identities in Jessie Fauset's Plum Bun or Marking and Marketing in the Harlem Renaissance
Chapter Five: "The nameless . . . Shameful Impulse": Sexuality in Nella Larsen's Quicksand and Passing
Part IV The Reader in the Text
Chapter Six-Boundaries: Or Distant Relations and Close Kine - Sula
Chapter Seven: Reading Family Matters
Part V Hesitating Between Tenses or Allegories of History
Chapter Eight-Witnessing Slavery AFter Freedom-Dessa Rose
Chapter Nine-Transferences: Black Feminist Discourse: The "Practice" of "Theory"
About the author
Deborah E. McDowell
Summary
Examines defining moments in African American women's fiction and its reception: the "Women's Era" of the 1890s, the Harlem Renaissance, and the "New Black Renaissance" of the 1970s and 1980s.
