This study of recent black popular culture stands as an insightful contribution. The author has chosen three disparate case studies that are united by their controversial nature: Alice Randall's novel The Wind Done Gone (2001), selected works of visual artist Kara Walker, and The Source (during the years 1989–99), the most prominent magazine of hip-hop culture. A starting premise is that they all traffic self-consciously in black stereotypes, and that this engagement is, in important ways, productive. In the face of the “common-sense” view in America of being colour-blind and “beyond race,” these works force readers and viewers into uncomfortable recognition of the persistence of racial thinking and racial inequality and of the role culture plays in this perpetuation. Worsley challenges advocates of “racial uplift,” who would too readily castigate anti-black stereotypes: “to shift critical commentary from a need to censor these questionable images to a complex consideration of … these alternative anti-racist strategies” (9). Randall's novel, which parodies Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind (1936) by seizing on the stereotypes of Mammy and Jezebel; Walker's striking silhouettes of “demeaning black character types” (2); and the black ghettocentric masculinity championed in The Source – all confrontationally invoke the continuing significance of race.

Alongside textual reading, Worsley is deeply concerned with authorial “motivations” and most especially audience “effects” (9). Given the provocative nature of these works, this approach, which persistently moves beyond close reading, seems necessary, and gives rise to compelling instances of racial contestation. She recounts how the Margaret Mitchell Estate sued Randall for violation of copyright prior to the publication of The Wind Done Gone, in a case that exposed the continuing financial and cultural investments in the racist plantation classic. With each case study, Worsley tests professed authorial intention and textual reading against actual reader responses. In the case of Kara Walker, she uses anecdotal evidence from the museum comment books of her exhibitions, finding that, contrary to expectation, viewers “did not find Walker's work ‘good’ because it depicted negative imagery in a seemingly innovative or productive way, or ‘bad’ simply because it depicted negative images of black people” (65). Though Walker's acclaimed work has received considerable scholarly attention, viewer responses have been underexplored, so this analysis of the affective investments and effectivity of these charged images is welcome. The final two chapters on The Source offer something of a departure, since this magazine was founded and edited by two affluent white males (in contrast to black female Randall and Walker). This throws up different questions to do with authorial intention and commercial appropriation of black stereotyping. In the expanding field of hip-hop studies, Worsley's analysis constitutes one of the most detailed readings of this highly influential magazine, which constructed and propagated the idea of the “Hip-Hop Nation” (86) based on a black, male, working-class subjectivity. Worsley draws out the ironies of this ghettocentric identity in a magazine that was increasingly bankrolled by high-end fashion advertisements hawking products that were out of reach for its ideal (though often not actual) readers. Analysing the Letters to the Editor, she explores how The Source engaged in critiques of its own representational politics, which worked at once to trouble and redouble its authentic black male image.

There are many incisive moments in this study, which displays a consistent commitment to exploring the lived relations of contemporary black popular culture.