John N. Duvall's monograph offers a new angle on southern fiction since the 1920s by examining white characters who take on (often unwittingly, but sometimes subversively) black identities. Duvall is renowned as a critic of William Faulkner and Toni Morrison, and these two writers inform the conceptual framework of Race and White Identity in Southern Fiction. Duvall draws on Faulkner's juvenilia, The Marionettes, to show how the European circus figure, Pierrot, emerges as a model for the “whiteface minstrel” who proliferates in Faulkner's work and white southern writing generally: “a kind of artificial Negro who presents a white face to the world, even as he performs cultural blackness” (x). Duvall is hardly the first critic to profess a debt to Playing in the Dark, but he departs from Morrison (and Ishmael Reed, one of the subjects of his final chapter) by questioning the notion that white performances of blackness are always already acts of cultural appropriation. Duvall sees such moments in white southern fiction as productive, if problematic, because they reveal how race is bound up with class and gender.

One of Duvall's premises is that the Great Migration of southern blacks generated an “economic need … for artificial Negroes” (9) – a need met by poor whites. Duvall offers a dazzling analysis of Faulkner's “Barn Burning” as a story about a poor white artificial Negro, but this does not entirely obscure a historical flaw in his argument. As James Gregory demonstrates in The Southern Diaspora (2005), white (especially working-class) southerners were also leaving the region in droves. Thus Duvall's claim that “there never was literally a white diaspora” (16) is problematic, inextricable as it is from his premise that poor white characters – Faulkner's Ab Snopes, Flannery O'Connor's Shortleys, Dorothy Allison's Boatwrights – represent the new Negroes of the southern labor market.

In a long chapter on Faulkner, Duvall begins by demonstrating how, despite the conspicuous absence of African American characters, Mosquitoes features “recurring figurations of blackness” (19) associated with nonnormative sexuality and artistic production. The novel's surreally self-reflexive reference to a “black man” named Faulkner encapsulates how, even early in his career, the author had identified “a semantic difference in which an individual can be black without being African American” (23). This distinction is teased out in Duvall's detailed reading of Sanctuary's Popeye, a character who is perceived – in accordance with stereotypes about black masculinity – as a primitive sexual brute. Popeye's poor background bears out Duvall's argument that, for Faulkner, “whiteness is not so much a race” as “a metaphysics of class privilege” (60): like Ab Snopes, Popeye can never be fully white.

The third chapter explores how, for O'Connor's white characters, blackness is associated with salvation: “moments of grace” are also “moments of race” (65, original emphases). Duvall develops fine readings of “The Artificial Nigger” and “The Displaced Person,” but some readers may find the relentless mining for figures of blackness in Wise Blood rather stretched. If one can accept that Haze Motes's black hat reveals his repressed status as an artificial Negro, the rest of the argument will seem persuasive. The fourth chapter assesses how “Faulkner's figuration of racial masquerade serves as a modernist residue in [John] Barth's postmodern metafiction” (94). Like Faulkner, Barth focusses on “the formation and contingency of white masculinity” (95); however, Barth's postmodern protagonists accept and even embrace the idea that racial identity can be performed. Todd Andrews in The Floating Opera is more of a trickster than a tragic figure in the Faulknerian vein.

The fifth chapter builds on Allison's statement that she read Zora Neale Hurston less as black than as working-class to argue that Bone Boatwright in Bastard out of Carolina becomes “nigger trash” (127). If this is a shorter and less daring chapter than others, it is still filled with original insights, as when Duvall connects Bone being banned from Woolworths in Greensville, South Carolina with the celebrated civil rights sit-ins at the Greensboro, North Carolina Woolworths in 1960. In the final chapter, Duvall considers how Hurston herself depicted a whiteface minstrel in Moses, Man of the Mountain. For Hurston as for Freud, the Moses story is one of “an explicit racial transformation” (146) – Moses is born Egyptian but chooses a Hebrew identity. Duvall argues that Hurston's Moses is a white man who chooses cultural blackness (by extension, her Hebrews are black southerners). Duvall is considerably less enamored of how Reed's “Mumbo Jumbo suggests that any white attempt to perform cultural blackness” constitutes “a form of blackface minstrelsy” (158). Duvall notes that Reed depicts Moses as a poseur who exploits authentic blackness, and argues that Mumbo Jumbo travesties Hurston because Reed resented her supposed “complicity with the white power structure” (160). It is a bracing end to an often provocative but always engaging book.