Healing Identities: Black Feminist Thought and the Politics of Groups. By Cynthia Burack. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 2004. 203 pp. $45.00 cloth, $19.95 paper.

In the introduction to this book, Cynthia Burack articulates her self-identity as multiple and shifting—nonblack, feminist, and interested in working through questions of group identity for personal, political, and intellectual reasons (p. 4). She summarizes the relationship delineated by black feminist theorists themselves regarding group membership and the relative power of the interpreter's voice: “Black feminist theorists are themselves often scholars in the humanities and social sciences. They write of their own struggles…. They do not reject outright the possibility that non-group members can participate in group discourse as readers or interpreters. Rather, they hold that participation confers responsibilities: to listen respectfully to the voices of group members, to claim the grounds and consequences of one's own interests, methods, and perspectives; and to avoid Olympian forms of closure that end intellectual conversation” (p. 4).