[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 other by usurping the other's place, wresting authority and symbolic power, and thereby devaluing blackness and establishing whiteness as the norm. Gubar emphasizes in her introduction and in subsequent chapters that no single effect can be said to emanate from racechange. It is a “trope that embodies the slipperiness of metamorphosis in its adoptions or adaptations as well as in its historical evolution” (p. 41). The project sets out to delineate the multiple dimensions—psychological, aesthetical, and ethical—of cross-racial mimicry and imagery in twentieth-century American culture.

Because the nineteenth-century minstrel stage functioned as a precursor to Hollywood screen images of blackface, the study contends in its early chapters that the birth of the American film industry was predicated “upon the death of [the] African American” (p. 65). Films such as The Birth of a Nation (1915) and The Jazz Singer (1927) allowed a white audience to assure themselves of black inferiority. In the context of this recurring “spirit-murder at the movies” and in other popular culture, African American artists of the early twentieth century found it especially difficult to locate effective strategies for countering the destructive effects of white supremacist logic. Should one vilify whiteness or glorify blackness in order to subvert racist stereotypes? Some literary and graphic texts of the Harlem Renaissance associate whiteness with nothingness; some associate blackness with fullness of being; still others neither delegitimize whites nor legitimize blacks but seek to challenge hegemonic stories of black racial origins that functioned to subordinate Africans in America. Racechanges also studies proponents of modernism who attempted a racial ventriloquism they associated with linguistic experimentation (chapter 4); portraits of black male genitalia created by white male and female artists (chapter 5); and the figure of the unexpectedly colored infant or mixed-race child that resurfaces in twentieth-century fiction (chapter 6). The closing chapter shifts from analyzing the motives of racechange to its effects. Though it has historically served racist ends, Gubar contends that cross-racial performance has a liberating potential that is only now being realized. Performance artist Sandra Bernhard, playwright George C. Wolfe, and portraitist Iké Udé are examples of racial impersonators who “neither abandon [their] origins nor pass into the other group's world” and in so doing create “a new (volatile and not necessarily unified) racial category” (p. 249). These “trans-racial transgressions” put the lie to racial classification and assumptions of a coherent racial self that undergird denials of black subjectivity and humanity.

Gubar's best work is in demonstrating the multiple and intricate ways in which notions of racial superiority and inferiority are reinscribed, interrogated, and challenged by cultural production. The study joins others by Robert Toll, Eric Lott, Michael Rogin, and Toni Morrison in analyzing white impersonations of blackness that until recently have been merely dismissed as unacceptable, indefensible, and “racist.” Yet such a label should not obligate the end of critical conversation. For as Gubar convincingly explains, it is in understanding the means and methods by which white supremacist ideology circulates in American culture that we may envision and enact “postracist ways of being and perceiving” (p. 241). The strength of Gubar's study is, however, an index to its chief weakness. Its interpretative frame—to elucidate the “traversing of racial boundaries, racial imitation or impersonation, cross-racial mimicry or mutability, white posing as black or black posing as white, pan-racial mutuality” (p. 5)—makes her extremely sensitive not only to racial but also to gender and sexual references, as well as to the dynamics of cultural production and consumption. The trope of racechange, however, proves too elastic and all-inclusive to convince; it tends to lose explanatory power because it encompasses too much. Overwhelmed by examples of racial impersonation, Racechanges remains undertheorized, and most specialist readers will be left wanting a more cogent model of what racechange includes and excludes. Gubar acknowledges this possible outcome in the preface, contending that she purposely avoids “the aridity of academic jargon” because she intends her study for “the common reader” (p. xviii). It is unlikely, however, that discussion of “mimetic mimicry,” “the gothic effects of scapegoating inflicted on the Other,” or the “misogyny enacted through the figure of the black penis-not-a-phallus” will prove easily accessible or compelling to the nonspecialist (pp. 79, 105). Nevertheless, Racechanges continues and usefully complicates the study of “whiteness” and “blackness” in American culture, and future scholarship can develop and deepen the analysis of racial impersonation that Gubar and others have begun.