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Risking Difference revisions the dynamics of multicultural feminist community by exploring the ways that identification creates misrecognitions and misunderstandings between individuals and within communities. Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalysis, Jean Wyatt argues not only that individual psychic processes of identification influence social dynamics, but also that social discourses of race, class, and culture shape individual identifications. In addition to examining fictional narratives by Margaret Atwood, Angela Carter, Sandra Cisneros, Toni Morrison, and others, Wyatt also looks at nonfictional accounts of cross-race relations by white feminists and feminists of color.

Wyatt reflects on the essay by James Phelan titled \"Authors, Resources, Audiences: Toward a Rhetorical Poetics of Narrative.\" To him, the most extraordinary (and provocative) sentence in the essay is the statement that \"the audience does not just react to the teller's communication; instead, the audience and its unfolding responses significantly influence how the teller constructs the tale\". Since this idea contradicts normal temporal sequence--the writing of a text must precede a reader's reading of that text--he wondered if he misread or missed something. But no: Phelan reiterates continually the concept that \"tellers frequently rely on the unfolding of readerly dynamics in their construction of textual dynamics\".

Risking Difference revisions the dynamics of multicultural feminist community by exploring the ways that identification creates misrecognitions and misunderstandings between individuals and within communities. Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalysis, Jean Wyatt argues not only that individual psychic processes of identification influence social dynamics, but also that social discourses of race, class, and culture shape individual identifications. In addition to examining fictional narratives by Margaret Atwood, Angela Carter, Sandra Cisneros, Toni Morrison, and others, Wyatt also looks at nonfictional accounts of cross-race relations by white feminists and feminists of color.

In A Mercy , Morrison frames the psychic damage inflicted by slavery as a series of failed messages between slave mother and slave daughter. Florens's misreading of her mother's message, as she arranged for Florens's sale, becomes the distorting lens through which she perceives the world; and as a consequence of her separation from her mother, her capacity to read the meanings of others' messages is disabled. Jean Laplanche's theory of the enigmatic signifier, which also examines the effects of a parental message that cannot be understood, enables me to clarify some baffling aspects of Florens's actions and of her style as narrator. The narrative structure formally reproduces the thematics of mother-daughter separation.

Tar Baby (1981) offers a critique of capitalism largely through satire. The parodic, exaggerated, and sometimes grotesque behaviors of the characters effectively make the point that participation in the regime of the commodity distorts and deforms human thinking and feeling. Reference to the categories of economic analysis in Karl Marx's Capital (1867-94) enables me to show how, throughout the novel, Toni Morrison challenges late capitalism's obsession with the commodity by insisting on the labor and social processes that go into commodity production. There are two specific sites of resistance to capitalism in the novel: the character Son and the creatures of nature. A Marxian frame elucidates the nuances of Son's Christmas Day diatribe against the capitalist Valerian; and the creatures of nature, to whom the narrative gives a voice, force an alternative perspective on the action, which brings out the follies of some of the capitalist characters. Tar Baby's wide-ranging critique targets not only the ways that engagement in capitalist practices at the level of the individual deforms self-image, sexual desire, and love but also, at a more global level, the ways that capitalism has disadvantaged black people and harmed natural ecosystems through time. Subtle allusions to the historical antecedents of Son and Valerian bring the history of global capitalism, particularly the connection between the sugar trade and the slave trade, to bear on the contemporary characters' relationships. And these historical allusions introduce a subtheme of the general critique of capitalism: the specific problems that capitalism has created for black people throughout history and into the fictional present.

The cure is built directly into the narrative structure; the mechanism of change is dramatized, not described. Because the plot of The Painted Drum is undertold, because the process of Faye's transformation is not narrated, the reader has to do work ordinarily accomplished by plot; to understand the change that takes place in Faye, a reader has to imagine the effect of Bernard's storytelling on Faye through making his or her own associative links between Bernard's stories and Faye's situation.