ABSTRACT
In Carolyn See’s 1992 review for the Los Angeles Times, she describes White Terry McMillan’s third novel as “part of another genre entirely, so new it doesn’t really have a name yet,” having to do with “women, triumph, revenge, comradeship,” arguing that Waiting to Exhale did something very different from either black women writers such as Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, or Bebe Moore Campbell, or black male authors such as Ishmael Reed and Charles Johnson. McMillan’s novel was one of many popular culture texts during this time period working to deconstruct stereotypes lodged in the cultural imaginary that defined black womanhood in demeaning ways by offering representations of black professional success. Centering McMillan’s text allows us to notice new features within chick lit novels and allows for new critical avenues and paradigms: namely, to center race as a framework and to understand explorations of cultural belonging as an essential convention of this genre.
