Review by Choice Review
As important as Domestic Allegories of Political Desire (CH, Sep'93), Tate's second work examines desire and meaning in literature. Although not the first feminist critic to use psychoanalytic theory and literary studies to address weaknesses in each--e.g., see Meredith Anne Skura's The Literary Use of the Psychoanalytic Process (CH, Jul'81); Literature and Psychoanalysis, ed. by Shoshana Felman (1982); and Marianne Hirsch's The Mother/Daughter Plot (CH, Apr'90)--Tate (Princeton) is the first to focus exclusively on African American texts. She builds on parameters of black textuality and psychoanalytic theories to frame ways of reading content "surplus" to racial oppression. Drawn on theories of Freud, Lacan, and Helen Deusch, Tate's rubric presents a "racially contextualized model of psychoanalysis" in order to examine "textual enigma"--meaning external to racial/social arguments. Focusing on desire as encoded in rhetorical elements, Tate reconstructs three levels of discourse in noncanonical works by five canonical authors. The canonical/noncanonical matrix is of particular interest in chapters on Richard Wright and W.E.B. DuBois, whose Freudian overtones traditional approaches have, at best, ignored. Of value to feminist criticism is Tate's Lacanian reading of Nella Larsen's Quicksand (the canonical exception), which demonstrates a means of reading texts that consider but do not privilege race without dismissing race as a factor. This book expands Kevin Gaines's arguments in his historical study Uplifting the Race (CH, Jun'96). Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. A. J. Gosselin Cleveland State University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
