Available From UC Press

This landmark collaboration between African American and white feminists goes to the heart of problems that have troubled feminist thinking for decades. Putting the racial dynamics of feminist interpretation center stage, these essays question such issues as the primacy of sexual difference, the universal nature of psychoanalytic categories, and the role of race in the formation of identity. They offer new ways of approaching African American texts and reframe our thinking about the contexts, discourses, and traditions of the American cultural landscape. Calling for the racialization of whiteness and claiming that psychoanalytic theory should make room for competing discourses of spirituality and diasporic consciousness, these essays give shape to the many stubborn incompatibilities—as well as the transformative possibilities—between white feminist and African American cultural formations.

Bringing into conversation a range of psychoanalytic, feminist, and African-derived spiritual perspectives, these essays enact an inclusive politics of reading. Often explosive and always provocative, Female Subjects in Black and White models a new cross-racial feminism.

Elizabeth Abel is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley; her books include Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis. Barbara Christian is Professor of African American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley; her books include Black Feminist Criticism: Perspectives on Black Women Writers. Helene Moglen is Professor of Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and author of Charlotte Brontë: The Self Conceived, and The Anxieties of Indeterminacy: Subjectivity, Sexuality, and the Emergence of the English Novel.

"This brilliant and timely collection takes us far in documenting the complex intrapsychic worlds and intersubjective relations of race, gender, and culture. Questions concerning how race and ethnicity create and refract unconscious fantasy and self-construction must be at the forefront of contemporary psychoanalytic thinking."—Nancy J. Chodorow, author of The Reproduction of Mothering

"Bold. Daring. Provocative. This collection of essays emphatically demonstrates that rhetorical meaning, constituted in the text and the world, evolves from mediations of the psychical and the material, the personal and the social. The critical models displayed so forcefully here will not only influence psychoanalytic and feminist discourses but literary and cultural studies as well."—Claudia Tate, George Washington University