Kimberly Wallace-Sanders, ed. Skin Deep, Spirit Strong: The Black Female Body in American Culture.

Kimberly Wallace-Sanders, ed. Skin Deep, Spirit Strong: The Black Female Body in American Culture. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2002. 350 pp. $24.95.

This well-conceived volume organizes 13 recent essays on the Black female body into a highly readable collection that not only provides an overview of scholarship in the field but also begins to chart new directions for further work. Three features distinguish the collection: first, the range of disciplinary approaches (contributions appear from scholars of history, literature, art history, history of science, performance studies, Women's Studies, American Studies, African American Studies, photography and film); second, the emphasis on visual images; and third, the productive conversation stimulated across the volume's multiple sections. Editor Kimberly Wallace-Sanders deserves credit not only for the strength of her selections but also for the productive arrangement of the volume itself. Unlike many essay collections that are too often mined only for their most valuable nuggets, Skin Deep, Spirit Strong presents a coherent, multidisciplinary research and teaching tool made all the more effective by the volume's overlapping concerns.

A brief introduction by Wallace-Sanders opens the collection, which is then divided into three main sections. The first section establishes broad historical, geographic, and iconographic frameworks for understanding and interpreting Black female subjectivity in American culture. Contributors to this unit include Beverly Guy-Sheftall on black female sexuality and the 19th-century Euro-American imagination, Jennifer L. Morgan on the gendering of racial ideology in early modern European travel writing, and Anne Fausto-Sterling on early-19th-century European constructions of "Hottentot" women. Together all three essays make vivid the disturbing welter of (to paraphrase Morgan) pseudo-scientific "ideas and information," both discursive and visual, about Black women--particularly their supposed savage animality and lascivious sexuality--that both predated and continues to shape western encounters with female Black bodies.

The second section of Skin Deep, Spirit Strong draws implicitly and explicitly on these multiple frameworks to examine the "symbolic power" (6) of the Black female body in 19th- and 20th-century American visual culture and literary texts. The wide-ranging essays include contributions by Lisa Collins on the Black female nude, by Lisa E. Farrington on Faith Ringgold's Slave Rape multimedia series, Rachel Adams on "wildness" in Toni Morrison's Beloved, Carla Williams on photography and the Black female body, Siobhan B. Somerville on gender-crossing and racial disguise in Pauline Hopkins's Winona, and Elizabeth Alexander on fragmentation and reintegration in Audre Lorde's Zami and The Cancer Journals. Rather than present a series of isolated readings, this section mixes general category discussions (Collins, Williams) with detailed examinations of specific visual and textual materials (Farrington, Adams, Somerville, and Alexander). As a result, each essay resonates more deeply through juxtaposition with its neighbors. Farrington's essay on Ringgold, for example, is enriched not only by Collins's broader account of the female Black nude in art history but also by Williams's discussion of the photographic representation of Black women's bodies. Moreover, by electing not to arrange the essays in this section in strict chronological order, Wallace-Sanders creates a reading experience in which the essays thread back and forth between periods, exploring ideas that overlap rather than simply bump up against one another.

The third section turns from analyses of the symbolic power of Black women's bodies to reflections on forms of control over those same bodies. Included in this section are essays by Doris Witt on cultural perceptions of Black female appetite, Terri Kapsalis on the antebellum practice and contemporary legacy of gynecological experimentation on slave women, and Evelynn Hammonds on the "geometry" of Black female sexuality. In form and scope, the first two essays recall the volume's opening historical section; like Guy-Sheftall, Morgan, and Fausto-Sterling, Witt and Kapsalis lay bare persistent and pernicious attitudes towards Black female bodies, albeit in more recent and more specifically US contexts. Hammonds takes a more theoretical approach than Witt and Kapsalis, and though her essay is less directly concerned with forms of control than theirs are, it is nonetheless similarly grounded in specific histories of silence, invisibility, and erasure. The volume then concludes with a separate essay by Bridgett Davis on the making of her independent and ultimately self-distributed film, Naked Acts, a multilayered exploration of the sexual identity of a contemporary Black woman.

Within the volume there is a certain amount of overlap and even repetition from essay to essay and from section to section. In another anthology such repetition might become distracting, but in Skin Deep, Spirit Strong it becomes an effective way of reinforcing the collection's multiple goals, as certain persons, objects, and histories become dynamic touchstones. The most important of these touchstones is Saartjie Baartman, the South African woman exhibited in Europe in the early nineteenth century as the "Hottentot Venus." Among the essays, Fausto-Sterling's examines Baartman's story in the greatest detail, but Baartman is discussed in all three sections, appearing in the contributions of Guy-Sheftall, Collins, Alexander, Witt, and Kapsalis. (Recognizing Baartman's centrality to the volume, Wallace-Stevens closes her introduction by hoping that the book might honor Baartman's life and celebrate the return and repatriation of her remains to South Africa in 2002, just as Skin Deep, Spirit Strong was going to press.) Other recurring touchstones in the volume include Joice Heth, Aunt Jemima, and Edouard Manet's 1863 painting, Olympia. Indeed, both the opening and penultimate essays in the collection quote almost exactly the same extended paragraph from Lorraine O'Grady's 1992 reexamination of Manet's painting, "Olympia's Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity," making O'Grady's essay a further critical frame for the volume's main goals: namely, the recovery of overlooked or underexamined facts about Black women's subjectivity; the disruption of conventional representations of the Black female body; and the figuring of new and diverse possibilities for understanding and depicting Black womanhood.

If there were something more to wish for from this volume, it might be even greater attention to Black lesbian bodies and to Black female sexuality more broadly. The collection is admirable for the attention paid to these topics, yet it does seem a touch odd for Wallace-Sanders to say in the introduction that she is "intrigued" by Hammonds's call for more scholarly attention to Black female sexuality and that she "look[s] forward to readers responding to this invitation," when that invitation was originally published in 1994 and thus already nearly a decade old when incorporated into Skin Deep, Spirit Strong in the first place. In certain ways this volume helps answer that invitation, but Hammonds's appeal has yet to be fulfilled. Perhaps the increased attention being paid to Black female subjectivity in this volume and others like it will make possible further and fuller responses to Hammonds's vital call.

Overall Skin Deep, Spirit Strong is a timely contribution to an expanding field. It well deserves a place alongside two other recent treatments of Black women's bodies, Michael Bennett's and Vanessa D. Dickerson's Recovering the Black Female Body: Self-Representations by African American Women (Rutgers UP, 2000), an excellent collection that is nonetheless not as visually oriented nor as methodologically varied as Skin Deep, Spirit Strong; and Carla Williams's and Debra Willis's The Black Female Body: A Photographic History (Temple UP, 2002), from which Williams's own contribution to Skin Deep, Spirit Strong is drawn. By not only collecting some of the best writing on the topic from the previous eight years but also shaping it into a cohesive whole, Skin Deep, Spirit Strong deftly achieves Wallace-Sanders's aim of creating a meaningful "collage" of "concepts, ideologies, theories, and approaches" (5) that might facilitate the study, understanding, and possibly even refiguration of Black female bodies in American culture.

William Gleason

Princeton University