Stephens pays delicate attention to what she Lacanianly calls the "black letter" as an instance of the [black] unconscious (45). She proposes a retrospective interpretation of the play In Dahomey: "In Dahomey's script is like a letter from Bert Williams that has taken almost a century to arrive" (69). The rare and forgotten case of black men performing blackface in a Broadway show allows her to use that painted face as a metaphor for Fanon's concept of epidermalization. Stephens invites us to listen to the syncopated voice of Williams as defying the painful sight of his dehumanizing "coon gestures" and to hear in the grain of his music something like the skin of his voice, speaking from behind the mask. Similarly, in the rest of the case studies Stephens invites us to let the performances affect us in forms that go beyond the limited perception that they might have provoked in the original audience through the apolitical codes of the cultural industry. In the case of Bob Marley, for instance, she invites us to be alert to the works of a mass cultural market that reduced a historical subject to a seemingly immortal symbol of a struggle that became an empty signifier, devoid of its singular context. To find the grain of his voice, she extends the archive into marginal texts, such as his wife's biographical account. In this regard, Stephens is proposing a particular kind of phenomenology of the retrospective perception of the archive (one that mobilizes haptic and synesthetic optics, sound, and touch), while bringing the important question about the indetermination of meaning as it can be twisted and inverted by the wrong audiences. Talking about Bert Williams, she raises a question that she calls "the fundamental question of In Dahomey as a blackface performance text" (57). It is a question that could still be posed today regarding some of the works of, for instance, contemporary artist Kara Walker: "Can the author, the performer, ever really control the meaning of his letter when the recipient, the audience, can always make the letter mean something other than what the author intends?" (57). The black letter that a skin act offers is one that can only be interpreted with great care and with a sensibility that would be too optimistic to expect from the masses.