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Two legacies from the early 20th century continue to goad critical thought: W.E.B. Dubois' famously articulated “problem of the color line” and Sigmund Freud's equally pressing, if somewhat more baffled complaint, “What does a woman want?” Taking on the ambitious task of thinking these two issues together, Jean Wyatt's Risking Difference: Identification, Race and Community in Contemporary Fiction and Feminism is the latest in a series of books that considers the costs of disavowing envy, idealization, and oppression in communities of difference.
Recent studies that, like Risking Difference, use feminism, race theory and psychoanalysis to interpret the difficulties of community in contemporary society include Female Subjects in Black and White: Race, Psychoanalysis, and Feminism, edited by Elizabeth Abel, Barbara Christian, and Helene Moglen , Barbara Johnson's Literature, Psychoanalysis, Race and Gender: The Feminist Difference , Claudia Tate's Psychoanalysis and Black Novels: Desire and Protocols of Race , and several essays in The Psychoanalysis of Race, edited by Christopher Lane (1998). Wyatt's book stands out, however, in its focus on the Freudian theories - and their Lacanian revisions - of identification. Identification, Wyatt explains early on, “captures the global nature of the desire to become the other, to replace the other - a desire that … undergirds everyday structures of feeling like envy and idealization” (p 1). Wyatt emphasizes the tension inherent in desiring to become and/or replace the other: Despite the value we find in the other, a value that might unite us, the desire for identification also risks “reducing the other to an empty form,” thus denying her subjectivity (p 3). Wyatt's book consistently engages these dueling forces, ultimately calling for “some rupture of the shared assumptions - and the assumption of sharing - in a community”: a rupture that has the potential to break “the communal drive toward assimilation of difference” (p 185). T