In Changing the Subject Writing Women across the African Diaspora K. Merinda Simmons argues that in firstperson narratives about women of color contexts of migration illuminate constructions of gender and labor. These constructions and migrations suggest that the oftemployed notion of authenticity is not as useful a classification as many feminist and postcolonial scholars have assumed. Instead of relying on socalled authentic feminist journeys and heroines for her analysis Simmons calls for a selfreflexive scholarship that takes seriously the scholars own role in constructing the subject. The starting point for this study is the nineteenthcentury Caribbean narrative The History of Mary Prince 1831. Simmons puts Princes narrative in conversation with three twentiethcentury novels Zora Neale Hurstons Their Eyes Were Watching God Gloria Naylors Mama Day and Maryse Conds I Tituba Black Witch of Salem. She incorporates autobiography theory to shift the critical focus from the object of studyslave historiesto the ways people talk about those histories and to the guiding interests of such discourses. In its reframing of womens migration narratives Simmonss study unsettles theoretical certainties and disturbs the very notion of a cohesive diaspora.