andPost-Structuralist Theory (Oxford and New York:Blackwell, I987), this is a book that engages with the theoretical impact of post-structuralistand postmodern thinking, and emphatically with the politics of women's movements; it is an informedaccount of a complex history.Weedon faces an uncomfortablepraxisthat was once an apparentlystraightforwardfeminist politics, but has been challenged in thepoliticsof theoryby queertheory,psychoanalysis,and thepostsofmodernism, structuralismand colonialism.As Weedon puts it in the introduction:'The concern with difference has been driven by the ever-growing complexity of feminism as a political movement, and the strugglefor inclusion by groups of women who were marginalized.' That emphasis on marginalized voices is what marks the politics of the book, which is organized around those challenges to a universalizing 'feminist' theory, and to a white, middle-class and heterosexual woman's movement. Weedon's argument begins from 'The Question of Difference', outlining fluently (if a bit breathlessly)the post-war construction of a feminist politics. There is a refreshing celebration of women as a political force, with welcome photographs of key moments in thepost 196oswomen's movement. It may be unfairto demand ofwhat sets out to be a theoretical survey(and a very comprehensive one) that there could be more attention to the particularitiesof political and theoretical debates. While Weedon gives a very even-handed account of developmentsin feministtheory over the past decades, the cool appraisal belies the passions and frictions that these debates generated. In an attempt to be all-inclusive and to embrace the global 'differences'within feminist difference, the excitements and energies of feminist practices become blurredand elide the fiercenessof the arguments.None the less, in a period in which 'feminism'can all too easilybe seen to have been displacedby 'post-feminism'and 'Difference'can be a term employed to erasethe inequalitiesof racial, political, and gender hierarchies, it is cheering to find a book that acknowledges the challenge of theory to simple definitions of gender, while unapologeticallydeclaringitsfeministand political allegiances. Weedon's book emerges from the experience of teaching students in America, and both its American and its educational origins show: this is an extremely useful book for Women's Studies and Gender coursesat whatever level. Forstudentswho tend to have a homogenized view of 'feminism' as a single perspective, this book will provide them with an account of the debates, the key thinkers,and issuesthat are centralto an understandingof the politics of feminismsin the new millennium. And, most importantly,Weedon gives the differencesthat have shaped thatpolitics a context, and one that isfirmlyrooted in the politics of theory. BRUNEL UNIVERSITY DEBORAH PHILIPS Colorand Culture: Black Writersand theMakingof theModemIntellectual.By Ross POSNOCK. Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press. I998. X+ 353 PP. ?21.95. The concept of the modern intellectual, in Ross Posnock's normative use of the term, firsttook shape in the wake of the 1898Dreyfus affair,when an assortmentof writers and thinkers, branded by their opponents as deracinated cosmopolitan meddlers, undertook to challenge the received dichotomy between aesthetics and politics, and to renounce the ancestralimperativesof race and nation in favour of 'universal'ideals. Focusingon mattersAmerican, Posnock'saim is to recover and reanimate this concept of intellectual endeavour. His project entails the bold reappraisalof a distinctivetraditionin AfricanAmericanwriting.The tradition,he andPost-Structuralist Theory (Oxford and New York:Blackwell, I987), this is a book that engages with the theoretical impact of post-structuralistand postmodern thinking, and emphatically with the politics of women's movements; it is an informedaccount of a complex history.Weedon faces an uncomfortablepraxisthat was once an apparentlystraightforwardfeminist politics, but has been challenged in thepoliticsof theoryby queertheory,psychoanalysis,and thepostsofmodernism, structuralismand colonialism.As Weedon puts it in the introduction:'The concern with difference has been driven by the ever-growing complexity of feminism as a political movement, and the strugglefor inclusion by groups of women who were marginalized.' That emphasis on marginalized voices is what marks the politics of the book, which is organized around those challenges to a universalizing 'feminist' theory, and to a white, middle-class and heterosexual woman's movement. Weedon's argument begins from 'The Question of Difference', outlining fluently (if a bit breathlessly)the post-war construction of a feminist politics. There is a refreshing celebration of women as a...