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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

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