SOURCE: A review of Racechanges: White Skin, Black Face in American Culture, in Modern Fiction Studies, No. 4, Winter, 1998, pp. 1073–75.

In the following review, Bergner appreciates the broad scope and ethical concern of Racechanges.

Comprehensive in scope, Susan Gubar's Racechanges: White Skin, Black Face in American Culture explores the psychological and ideological implications of cross-racial mimicry in twentieth-century culture. This wide-ranging study of film, literature, and visual arts examines an impressively large number of artifacts that are by now standard objects of cultural studies of race in America, including films such as The Birth of a Nation, The Jazz Singer, and Blonde Venus; literary works by Carl Van Vechten, Nancy Cunard, Zora Neale Hurston, and Ernest Hemingway; and photographs and paintings by Man Ray, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Pablo Picasso—to name a few. Racechanges also discusses in fruitful ways some lesser-studied works such as the paintings of Robert Colescott...