Black feminist author Ann duCille's new collection of essays ranges from the Barbie doll to the O.J. Simpson case, with several other interesting topics in between. Skin Trade (Harvard paperback $16.95) should provide fascinating fodder for those who ponder today's status of the racial divide.
Despite the gains made by African Americans, duCille firmly believes that the struggle is far from over, and in fact may never cease. The author is professor of American and African American Literature at the University of California, San Diego. She writes with generous amounts of humor and a breeziness that sometimes seems at odds with the serious topics she tackles.
She contends that race in the U.S. today has become "as in the days of slavery -- both a commercial dividend and a commercial divide," adding that "in the face of rising costs and diminished opportunities, racial and ethnic differences threaten again to split the nation in two."
As the 1990s draw to a close, duCille sees the uncivil war as "first and foremost a battle over entitlement: who gets to claim America, who gets to be American?"
In a funny but overlong essay on the icon of little girls everywhere, duCille points out that the Barbie doll was modeled on a German sexpot called Bild Lili, which was taken from a comic-strip character, a "kind of sex toy, which reportedly was sold primarily to men in tobacco shops and other male haunts." She writes that most of Barbie's American wardrobe has more to do with the bedroom and the ballroom than with the boardroom. "(T)hese lingerie sets may teach little girls more about taking their clothes off than about putting them on."
She attacks the Barbie for possessing a plastic body "inscribed within it the very contradictory whore/madonna messages with which patriarchy taunts and traumatizes young women." A few years ago, Barbie manufacturer Mattel issued a line of dolls aimed at the African American market, of which duCille observes that "in identifying buttocks as the signifier of black female difference, Mattel may be taking us back to the eugenics and scientific racism of earlier centuries."
In an essay about black female writers, duCille takes to task male black authors who accuse Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Gayl Jones, Ntozake Shange, and Gloria Naylor of not only historical inaccuracy but racial infidelity, and of "inventing historical fictions that serve a feminist rather than an Afrocentric or black nationalist agenda." In duCille's opinion, black nationalism denies sexism in much the same way that white nationalism denies racism. When modern black women challenge male perspectives with their own, "they offer up different and often difficult someboy-done-somebody-wrong songs that not only indict black men as well as white but that also identify the love of men as the root of women's oppression."
DuCille believes that the novel and other literary forms offer black women the opportunity to explore the oppression, insanities, sorrows, joys, and triumphs of women's lives. And, she says, those experiences can be transformed into art.
In her essay about the O.J. Simpson murder case, duCille charges that media coverage carried a racially-coded message that was contemptuous of black people. Her thoughts and theories about this case aren't surprising. The relevant criteria for the Simpson case, she believes, were wealth and celebrity along with skin color, the latter including a historical presumption of guilt.
In producing a book that demonstrates her prowess as a thinker and writer, duCille ends Skin Trade on a somber note. "The problem of the twentieth century has indeed been the color line, and there is every reason to believe that it will be the problem of the twenty-first century as well."
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