The Myth of Aunt Jemima is a bold and incisive examination at the way three centuries of white women writers have represented "race" in both England and America. In this dynamic and eloquent study, Diane Roberts challenges the widely held belief that white women writers have simply appropriated the dominant cultural inscriptions of race.
Negotiating Beloved, Gone with the Wind, Oroonoko, as well as authors such as Frances Trollope, Frances Wright, Harriet Martineau and Frances Kemble, Roberts displays a masterly command over recent critical theory, deploying the work of Bakhtin in order to lay the foundation for a reading of the multiple inscriptions of race, gender, and sexuality. Moving deftly between popular cultural texts, such as the representation of "Aunt Jemima" and the historical representation of black women in white women's writing, Roberts brilliantly and trenchantly reads the co-articulation of racialist and anti-sexist discourses, at once always aware of and attentive to the subtle contradictions that mark the double inscription of race and gender. The Myth of Aunt Jemima is a brave and intelligent account of the history of white women's encounter with slavery and its aftermath. This text is bound to raise the temperature of debate within and outside of feminist theory.