Introduction -- Alice Walker's The color purple: revisions and redefinitions -- (W)riting the work and working the rites -- Speaking in tongues: dialectics, dialogics, and the black woman writer's literary tradition -- Toni Morrison's Beloved: re-membering the body as historical text -- The stories of (O)Dessa: stories of complicity and resistance -- "Seen but not heard": a poetics of Afro-American women's writing -- Gayl Jones's White rat: speaking silence/silencing speech -- State of the art: black feminist theory -- What it means to teach the other when the other is the self -- Authors and authorities. Nella Larsen's Passing: passing, performance, and (post)modernism -- Josephine Baker and La revue nègre: from ethnography to performance -- Dancing diaspora: colonial, postcolonial, and diasporic readings of Josephine Baker as dancer and performance artist -- About face, or, what is this "back" in b(l)ack popular culture?: from Venus Hottentot to Video Hottie -- In retrospect. Sherley Anne Williams: "someone sweet angel chile" -- Bebe Moore Campbell: literature as equipment for living.