Rational, heartfelt, this book will bridge understandings across a wide range of constituencies struggling seriously with questions of race and gender. -- Patricia J. Williams, author of The Rooster's Egg
Ann duCille is Professor of American and African American Literature, University of California, San Diego. She is the author of The Coupling Convention.
[DuCille’s essays may] succeed in challenging the pervasive notion
that on matters of race, we must ‘declare victory and get out.’
*Boston Book Review*
In these essays Ann duCille, writing from within the academy,
offers an array of thoughts on race. Several of the essays are
about the reading, teaching and campus politics of black studies at
a time when black faculty, already ghettoized in African-American
studies departments, are being further squeezed to make room for
other writers and theorists ‘of color’ and the new discipline of
‘postcoloniality.’ Skin Trade is, however, written with a lighter
touch than many academic studies and ranges well beyond the campus.
DuCille makes a sharp analysis of the O. J. Simpson murder trial
and its fallout… And in her satirically titled ‘Toy Theory: Black
Barbie and the Deep Play of Difference,’ duCille points out, with
warmth and wit, a running theme of this volume: how we learn to
judge ourselves and others by that least reliable of indicators,
appearance.
*Boston Globe*
DuCille’s Skin Trade is a thoughtful compilation of five
provocative essays… DuCille’s subtle wit punctuates each essay,
including the afterword, ‘The More Bitter the Whine,’ which
anticipates claims of black feminist essentialist grousing.
DuCille’s wry inversion of the title of Wallace Thurman’s Harlem
Renaissance novel The Blacker the Berry implicitly acknowledges her
own project as another critical rejoiner to the changing same.
DuCille’s project is a serious, even urgent one. She calls her
generation to account for complacently perpetuating a legacy of
‘ethnic rivalry, race hatred, bigotry, anti-Semitism, sexism,
heterosexism, and even neo-Nazism’. DuCille’s antidote to the ‘skin
trade’ is to decode rather than deny the country’s entrenched
schemes of color, class and gender.
*Signs*
A brilliant analysis of race and gender in contemporary continental
United States. It explores the meaning and merchandizing of race
and gender by the corporate world, the academy and the justice
system. This book is enlightening and thought provoking… duCille
has presented us with a brilliant synthesis of racial issues in
America. Where integration would seem to have occurred, processes
of differentiation and segregation, be they intellectual or
physical, continue to plague American society. This is compounded
by the gender issue where females are particularly vulnerable to
control, commodification and exclusion. There is much to be gained
by this thoughtful analysis… A penetrating piece of literary
writing.
*Ethnic and Racial Studies [UK]*
This collection of lucid, engaging, thoughtful essays on the
current uses and abuses of race as a cultural commodity in America
should prove highly attractive both to specialist and to general
readers… Beautifully written, each of the essays displays a finely
balanced and judiciously deployed mixture of personal reaction,
analytic power, and political commitment. Simultaneously displaying
the accessibility of the best journalism and the rigorous standards
of expert scholarship, this is a book which one can only hope will
reach the very large number of readers which constitutes its proper
audience.
*Journal of American Studies [UK]*
DuCille’s new book provides a poignant answer to two pivotal
questions: Does race matter? And, in what fashion is ‘racial’
significance manifested? …Skin Trade is a moving depiction of the
commercialization of race relations in American society.
*Choice*
In these cogent and clever essays, duCille handily balances popular
culture and academia with an accessible and wry tone. DuCille has
an eye for ideas that others have glossed over or missed
completely. She adds a new twist to the recent flood of Barbie
scholarship with her consideration of the doll’s ethnic makeup… In
examining the myriad media perspectives on the O.J. Simpson trial,
duCille casts a wide net without getting tangled in it. Sandwiched
between these two essays on icons are three on literature and
academia.
*Publishers Weekly*
DuCille’s book offers a sophisticated analysis of the academy—the
trends in scholarship that take ‘black women’ from the margins to
the center of attention, with the attendant dangers for black women
scholars of passing from invisibility to commodity without always
being heard as leaders and critics in—and of—the process.
*Barbara Johnson, Harvard University*
Rational, heartfelt, this book will bridge understandings across a
wide range of constituencies struggling seriously with questions of
race and gender.
*Patricia J. Williams, author of The Rooster’s Egg*
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