"The Changing Same": Black Women's Literature, Criticism, and Theory. - Review - book reviews

African American Review, Fall, 1999 by Thomas Fahy

Deborah E. McDowell. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1995. 222 pp. $39.95 cloth/$12.95 paper.

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Deborah McDowell's "The Changing Same": Black Women's Literature, Criticism, and Theory examines some of the forces that have stifled and devalued black feminist theory and literature in the academy. Though she agrees with bell hooks's call for black feminist criticism to "transcend the boundaries of the university," she primarily examines the ways it has been constructed and viewed within this setting. According to McDowell, theory's reduction "to a very particular practice" has contributed to the academy's reluctance to validate the culturally specific approach and discourse of black women's writings. She effectively argues that narrow, Eurocentric definitions of "theory" position black feminist criticism in opposition to theory. As a result, she calls for a discourse - written by black women - that resists the institutionalized language of poststructuralist theory and finds its strength in examining the history of (and the reasons behind) the emergence of black feminism. Presenting her own work as a model for the multifaceted perspectives and discourses of black feminist criticism and theory, she offers an insightful dialogic approach that enables her to expand on and draw out the theoretical implications of her previously published writing.

McDowell's collection of essays provides a rich portrait of the ways black feminist criticism has changed in the last fifteen years, and she presents her earlier works in order "to suggest something of a roundtable, moving from place to place, the mode of dialogue and discussion that surrounded the study of black women writers in the 1980s." The variety of critical perspectives that these essays offer (poststructuralism, new historicism, feminism, and cultural studies) enables McDowell to resist situating herself within a particular theoretical perspective. Instead, she presents "a variety of discourses" as an approach which she believes is essential for black feminist criticism. Her work also examines and exposes literary history as a culturally constructed product that has devalued black women's writing and excluded it from the canon.

The only new pieces in her collection, the "Preface" and "Transferences," establish the various goals of her project. Structurally, she frames the book with chapters that engage in the problem of critical methodology - "New Directions for Black Feminist Criticism" and "Transferences: Black Feminist Thinking: The 'Practice' of 'Theory'" - and this organization reflects her own struggle to find an effective methodology for black feminist criticism. She wants to avoid the dichotomy between "theory," which gets associated with poststructuralism, and the type of "humanistic" scholarship on African-American literature that privileges the perspectives of black women and men. In order to resist this bifurcation, McDowell "selects aspects from a variety of discourses in order to formulate [her study's] questions and reading strategies." In parts two through five, she offers interpretations for what she believes to be defining texts in the history of African-American women writers and examines the ways that previous scholarship about these texts reveals "as much (if not more) about the shifting aesthetic, critical, and cultural conventions and values as about the merits or properties intrinsic to the writers' work."

In her provocative reading of Nella Larsen's Passing, first published in 1986, McDowell explores the lesbian subtext of Irene's relationship with Clare and, more broadly, highlights lesbianism as a common trope in the writings of African-American women, who often use more conventional methods, themes, and plots to mask "unsafe" issues such as lesbian sexuality. In the original publication of "New Directions for Black Feminist Criticism," McDowell believed that Barbara Smith had "simultaneously oversimplified and obscured the issue of lesbianism and stripped it of any explanatory power." Yet in the "Preface," she acknowledges that her readings of authors such as Frances E. W. Harper, Jessie Fauset, Nella Larsen, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and Sherley Anne Williams draw on both the critical framework of Smith's "Toward a Black Feminist Criticism," which emphasizes the interlocking impact of race, gender (including sexuality), and class, and on feminist reading strategies "to expose ideologies of male dominance, question traditionally masculinist standards of evaluating literature, and critique sex/gender arrangements that exclude women from symbolic activity." Her reading of Larsen, therefore, clearly brings together these strategies and is in dialogue with Smith's lesbian reading of Toni Morrison's Sula in that it explores the lesbian sub text of Larsen's works.

McDowell's addenda to her previously published work provide some of the most interesting material in the text. This approach allows her to engage in a dialogue with both her earlier writings and subsequent critical responses by theorists such as Hazel Carby, Patricia Hill Collins, and Valerie Smith. By reflecting on these earlier essays, she offers black feminism a dialogic model for criticism. As she explicitly states in her preface, "these essays are not only in dialogue with each other, but they also record parts of a continuing dialogue among a variety of critics and critical perspectives." This conversation allows her to reshape her own work as a black feminist and provide a road map of the ways her criticism has changed in the last decade. Through these addenda, McDowell not only speaks to other critics, but she evaluates and expands upon her earlier critical perspectives. In this reshaping process, she enacts a dialogue that continues to raise questions and make spaces for further discussion. As a result, this dialogue with herself clears a new space for other critics to respond to the evolution of her writings and, by extension, the changes in black feminist criticism.