"The Changing Same": Black Women's Literature, Criticism, and Theory by Deborah E. McDowell (review)

Book Reviews197 those of the plays are commendable. Whether discussing concerns central to Stuart interests—as in Hamlet, Macbeth, and Measure for Measure, or the divine right of kings in Lear or fading aristocratic military ideals in Coriolanus—Kernan creates a subtle argument that ultimately portrays Shakespeare as a playwright who could both gratify and question a king. JEANIE GRANT MOORE San Diego State University DEBORAH E. MCDOWELL. "The Changing Same": Black Women's Literature, Criticism, and Theory. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. 222 p. Although Deborah McDowell states that she started this book "when [she] commenced [her] dissertation," this is not a polished version of a graduate dissertation written in 1979. In fact, McDowell clearly states, "While I have held on to the subject, nothing of the dissertation remains . . ." (xi). Her subject is African American women writers, a topic chosen in 1978 when "not a few" were skeptical that this fiction was intellectual enough for such a scholarly analysis. Yet, as anyone who knows her work realizes, not only did McDowell ignore her critics but she went on to become one of the most daring , outspoken pioneers of the black feminist movement, with her landmark essay "New Directions for Black Feminist Criticism" published in 1980. This essay represents a significant early contribution to the field of black feminist theory in its bold attempt to chart objectives and goals that both answered and clarified those outlined in a preceding ground-breaking gesture made by Barbara Smith. Thus, it becomes an appropriate opening for this book which both begins and ends with essays that chart developments in black feminist movement and theory. McDowell explains that the commencement of her dissertation occurred during a time of "wrenching upheaval" in the academy surrounding the move away from criticism toward theory in literary studies. This controversy was responsible for stopping some dissertations dead in their tracks, and rendering others obsolete before they had a chance to cool from the defense . Many students responded by choosing to ignore the current "trend" while others began an investigation of it and the ways it might become incorporated into their own methods (xi, xii). McDowell's decision was framed by the latter. She points out that she, like so many other critics, "set about crawling from underneath the rubble to see what they could salvage while trying to rebuild" (xii). In other words, she moved into theory with the tools of the New Critic in hand to see what could be used in conjunction. "The Changing Same" maps the movement of that investigation as it reveals her immersion into poststructuralist theory in particular. Without valorizing theory or assigning the label of anything other than black feminist critic to herself, she masterfully uses this theoretical position's tools of language and method when appropriate to her construction of alternative readings of black women's texts. 198Rocky Mountain Review The book is divided into five parts and consists of nine essays written over the decade of the 1980s focusing on the work of Emma Dunham Kelley, Frances E. W. Harper, Jessie Fauset, Nella Larsen, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and Sherley Anne Williams. The essays are neither revised nor arranged in chronological order to resist the tendency to plot a linear progressive journey toward a finality of wholeness in her critical development. Moreover, rather than disregard any of her earlier thinking, she comments on "second thoughts" that allow her to "adjust some of [her] own positions" or to respond to the questions and opposition of others (xiv). This results in "interpolated commentary," printed in italics following all but four of the essays , that not only charts her scholastic growth but her sophisticated use of the language of theory as well. In fact, it is often difficult to disavow McDowell as a poststructuralist critic. Her critique of the concepts of race, gender, and class often seems to "erase" race, a criticism she addresses in commentary to the essay "Boundaries: Or Distant Relations and Close Kin—SuIa." Responding specifically to Michael Awkward's opposition to the essay, an opposition that echoed the division among African American critics over such erasure as well as the usefulness of employing poststructuralist theory in the reading of...