SOURCE: A review of Racechanges: White Skin, Black Face in American Culture, in Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, Vol. 18, No. 1, Spring, 1999, pp. 124–25.

In the following review, Stavney lauds Racechanges as a useful study examining the ideas of “whiteness” and “blackness” in American culture.

In Racechanges: White Skin, Black Face in American Culture, Susan Gubar examines instances of cross-racial mimicry and mutability in twentieth-century film, literature, journalism, painting, photography, and plastic art. Asserting the centrality of what she terms “racechange” to modern and postmodern American culture, Gubar maintains that performances of racial imitation or impersonation provide a means of measuring “altering societal attitudes of race and representation” (p. 10). Such impersonation can be a strategy of the disempowered—as demonstrated by narratives of white-to-black racechange that educate a “white” character and by extension a white audience about American racism. Racial imitation can also function as a method to disempower the...