Skin Trade

In these cogent and clever essays, duCille (The Coupling Convention) handily balances popular culture and academia with an accessible and wry tone. DuCille has an eye for ideas that others have glossed over or missed completely. She adds a new twist to the recent flood of Barbie scholarship with her consideration of the doll's ethnic makeup. DuCille not only examines the many ""would-be multicultural versions of the doll"" (including Malaysian, Nigerian and Native American Barbie) but also considers the boundaries that Mattel, Barbie's manufacturer, refuses to cross (e.g., the ""ethnically correct"" Shani doll has wider hips but still sports long hair). In examining the myriad media perspectives on the O.J. Simpson trial, duCille casts a wide net without getting tangled in it. Sandwiched between these two essays on icons are three on literature and academia. One examines the ire that writers like Toni Morrison and Alice Walker provoke in black male critics, who often accuse them of misrepresenting black men and identifying with their gender to the detriment of their race. A second ponders the current popularity of literature by African American women by examining the rise of Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God from out-of-print text to ""quasi-canonical."" A third considers the rise of Afrocentricity in a postcolonial world and its use for everyting from ""`African Pride' hair straighteners sold in the `Ethnic Needs' aisle at Super Stop & Shop, to the fake kente placemats available through J.C. Penney's `Afrocentric' catalogue."" ""Race"", duCille says in her prologue, ""and its kissing cousin ethnicity have become precious commodities for both capitalism and the academy."" (Oct.)