Thinking about methods -- New directions for black feministcriticism -- Race of Saints: Four Girls at Cottage City -- "Changing Same": generational connections and black women novelists--Iola Leroy and The Color Purple -- Undercover: passing and other disguises -- On face: the marks of identity in Jessie Fauset's Plum Bun or getting read in the Harlem Renaissance -- "Nameless ... Shameful Impulse": sexuality in Nella Larsen"s Quicksand and Passing -- Reader in the text -- Boundaries: or distant relations and close kin--Sula -- Reading family matters -- Hesitating between tenses or allegories of history -- Witnessing slavery after freedom--Dessa Rose -- Transferences: black feminist thinking: the "practice" of "theory".