"This is a well-researched and original book that will appeal to students and scholars of Black women's writing, feminist theory, post-colonial studies, and cultural studies. With this book, Kevin Quashie makes a substantial contribution to the study of Black women's writing."-Angelyn Mitchell, author of The Freedom to Remember: Narrative, Slavery, and Gender in Contemporary Black Women's Fiction

Kevin Everod Quashie explores the metaphor of the "girlfriend" as a new way of understanding three central concepts of cultural studies: self, memory, and language. He considers how the works of writers such as Toni Morrison, Ama Ata Aidoo, Dionne Brand, photographer Lorna Simpson, and many others, inform debates over the concept of identity. Quashie argues that these artists replace the notion of a stable, singular identity with the concept of the self developing in a process both communal and perpetually fluid, a relationship that functions in much the same way that an adult woman negotiates with her girlfriend(s). He suggests that memory itself is corporeal, a literal body that is crucial to the process of becoming. Quashie also explores the problem that language poses for the black woman artist and her commitment to a mastery that neither colonizes nor excludes.

The analysis throughout this book interacts with schools of thought such as psychoanalysis, postmodernism, and postcolonialism, but ultimately moves beyond these to propose a new cultural aesthetic that aims to center black women and their philosophies.

Kevin Everod Quashie is an assistant professor of Afro-American studies at Smith College. He is the co-editor of New Bones: An Anthology of Contemporary Black Writers in America.