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.

Preface¿Speaking To You about the "Changing the Same"Part I Thinking About MethodsChapter One ¿ New Directions for Black Feminist CriticismPart II Ideas of TraditionChapter Two ¿ Race of Saints: Four Girls at Cottage CityChapter Three ¿ "The Changing Same": Generational Connections and Black Women Novelists¿Iola Leroy and The Color PurplePart III Undercover: Passing and Other DisguisesChapter Four¿On FAce: Textual Identities in Jessie Fauset's Plum Bun or Marking and Marketing in the Harlem RenaissanceChapter Five: "The nameless . . . Shameful Impulse": Sexuality in Nella Larsen's Quicksand and PassingPart IV The Reader in the TextChapter Six¿Boundaries: Or Distant Relations and Close Kine ¿ SulaChapter Seven: Reading Family MattersPart V Hesitating Between Tenses or Allegories of HistoryChapter Eight¿Witnessing Slavery AFter Freedom¿Dessa RoseChapter Nine¿Transferences: Black Feminist Discourse: The "Practice" of "Theory"