swabs to issues and themes already too public to ignore. In many cases, they do not take the work of African American scholars seriously. They resort, instead, to a “rigid perspectivism,” i.e. caricaturing all work by African Americans as a single perspective—one that the dominant discourse cannot have, at least along an essentialist line of thinking (Tolbert, 1995a:274). In light of these ideological controls, bell hooks (1990:7) suggests that there is a need to question all of our cultural products