Bennett, Michael and Vanessa D. Dickerson, eds. Recovering the Black Female Body: Self-Representations by African American Women. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP,2001. Paper $22.00. 331 pp.

by Amanda Davis

The body has, no doubt, become one of the most active sites for addressing and rethinking some of the most central issues facing Cultural and Gender Studies today. The myriad ways bodies are represented and read both socially and culturally speak to the body's importance in contemporary discussions of subjectivity and identity. It is into these conversations that Recovering the Black Female Body: Self-Representations by African American Women inserts itself. Focused specifically on how African-American women have attempted to recover their bodies through self-representation in the face of an often hostile public rendering of the black female body, it makes a needed intervention into both studies of the female body and feminist theory more generaIly.