Black Women, Writing, and Identity is a salient examination of black women's writing and the politics of subjectivity and identity. Emerging out a critical need to situate black women's writing in a cross-cultural perspective, Carole Boyce Davies investigates critically the complexities, the contradictions, and the constraints which both determine and displace the black women writer's identity. Treating such issues as locationality and naming, Carol Boyce Davies produces a remarkably imaginative and acutely exciting discussion of the what she uniquely terms the "migratory subject."

Davies follows the migratory subject through the works of such authors as Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Zora Neale Hurston and Maya Angelou. She looks at issues such as temporality and memory, and representation and identity, constantly negotiating the tensions that frame the differences between the fields of "black women's writing" and "African-American women's writing." Davies carefully and cleverly and autiobiographically examines these shifts in canonicity, subjectivity, and identity, and, in the end, produces a significant contribution to debate about race, writing and identity in the academy and out of it.