SOURCE: “‘Don't You Explain Me’: The Unreadability of Eva's Man,” in Black Women Novelists and the Nationalist Aesthetic, Indiana University Press, 1994, pp. 89-105.

In the following excerpt, Dubey examines Eva's Man in light of the prescribed writing structures of the Black Aesthetics movement, arguing that Jones's focus on gender issues over racial inequality led to unfavorable reviews of the novel.

Unlike Corregidora, Gayl Jones's Eva's Man (1976) cannot be even partially recovered into the Black Aesthetic critical mode. Each of the novel’s salient thematic and formal features, such as its treatment of castration and lesbianism, and its use of stereotypes, first-person narration, and black dialect, resists a Black Aesthetic reading. This defiance of the contemporary conditions of readability produces a visible sense of strain in the text. The most subversive moments of Eva's Man are shrouded in an incoherence that seriously jeopardizes the reader’s interpretive function, and...