SOURCE: A review of Racechanges: White Skin, Black Face in American Culture, in Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Vol. 25, No. 3, Spring, 2000, p. 912.

In the following review, Nelson suggests that Racechanges is weakened because its conceptualization of race is “ahistorical and transcultural.”

Susan Gubar prefaces her book Racechanges: White Skin, Black Face in American Culture with an unsettling catalog of examples drawn from middle-class, mostly academic whites’ “confessions” to habitual modes of blackface minstrelsy. They range from secret imitations of Stepin Fetchit to jive-talking by dog-owners, practices that whites save for moments of domestic intimacy. This is the Africanism of the white bourgeoisie, the (beloved) heart of (imagined) darkness that Toni Morrison defined in Playing in the Dark.¹ Gubar asserts that such moments, as well as the more public ones she also analyzes in the book, while having “little to do with actual changes in melanin and...