In spite of the double burden of racial and gender discrimination, African-American women have developed a rich intellectual tradition that is not widely known. In Black Feminist Thought, Patricia Hill Collins explores the words and ideas of Black feminist intellectuals as well as those African-American women outside academe. She provides an interpretive framework for the work of such prominent Black feminist thinkers as Angela Davis, bell hooks, Alice Walker, and Audre Lorde. The result is a superbly crafted book that provides the first synthetic overview of Black feminist thought.
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In spite of the double burden of racial and gender discrimination, African-American women have developed a rich intellectual tradition that is not widely known. In Black Feminist Thought, Patricia Hill Collins explores the words and ideas of Black feminist intellectuals as well as those African-American women outside academe. She provides an interpretive framework for the work of such prominent Black feminist thinkers as Angela Davis, bell hooks, Alice Walker, and Audre Lorde. The result is a superbly crafted book that provides the first synthetic overview of Black feminist thought.
Crucial to Collins's project was troubling the imposed hierarchies among Black women's theoretical knowledge wherein academic knowledge was prized and privileged, and the vital, unique, experiential knowledges of the Black woman masses marginalized. Black Feminist Thought places multiple Black women's voices in conversation with one another, encompassing a collectivity-oriented citational practice that refuses the compulsory silencing of Black working-class women's voices. Collins instead harmonizes these women's experiential and theoretical claims with the amplified vocalizations of the academic elite to present a varied and multitudinous understanding of Black feminist epistemologies. For instance, the opening chapter (re)mixes Maria Stewart's prescient words concerning the power of Black women's knowledge with Fanny Barrier Williams's proclamation that "the colored girl is not known and not believed in," and the thoughts of "Nancy White, a Black inner-city resident," who stakes a claim concerning her own capacity for knowledge production with the statement "I understand all these things from living."2 These early juxtapositions prepare the reader for the egalitarian citational praxis that permeates Black Feminist Thought. In "highlighting that knowledge economies are engines for oppression," Collins marks how Black women's intellectual work has been suppressed along racial, gender, class and educational lines.3 In so doing, she simultaneously "offers an explanation of why so few people have 'heard of'" the Black woman-centered theory she presents, as well as preemptively contests advanced academic training as the site of legitimation for Black feminist theory.4 Moreover, Collins's theorization of the concept of the "matrix of domination," which refers to "how...intersecting oppressions, for example issues of race and gender, or of sexuality and nation...are actually organized" and the ways in which "structural, disciplinary, hegemonic and interpersonal domains of power reappear across quite different forms of oppression" offers a key analytic that addresses Black women's varied social positionings, in part, by including the words of women typically understood as objects, rather than subjects, of knowledge. The matrix of domination remains productive for interrogating social location and structural violence, particularly within the social sciences.5
The construct "controlling images," as well, continues to shape discussions of how Black women are historically and contemporaneously mischaracterized and misrepresented in ways that "justify U.S. Black women's oppression."6 The continued salience of Collins's theorization of controlling images lies precisely within its capacity to assess how "controlling images are designed to make racism, sexism, poverty, and other forms of social injustice appear to be natural, normal, and inevitable parts of everyday life."7 That is, the continued discursive and sociopolitical naturalization of the various modes of inequality and oppression faced by Black women hinges in large part upon the projection of stereotypical notions of an a priori abased Black womanhood against which "other groups define their normality."8 The resonances of Collins's potent assessment are heard in contemporary Black feminist work on Black girlhood, notions of Black respectability politics as they intersect with gender, the continued denigration of Black mothering practices, and work concerning how Black women and girls remain persistently devalued, as well as deemed responsible for various social ills. Indeed, in many ways Black women and girls are thought to be the authors of their own lived oppressions.
As Nash notes, centering Black feminism via intersectional theory within the academy is "both filled with promise and emptied of specific meaning," because "US women's studies" as a discipline organizes itself "around the symbol of the black woman even as the field retains little interest in the materiality of black women's bodies, the complexity of black women's experiences, or heterogeneity of black women's intellectual and creative production."13 Nash's concerns dovetail with Collins's. The heterogeneous nature of Black women's creative and intellectual production, the lived and material experiences of Black women, the profound complexities which inhere in living as a Black woman within matrices of domination that position these women differently while also in relation to one another, and the resistance to limiting and demeaning reductions of Black womanhood into a symbolic grammar of enforced otherness are at the very root of Collins's project. We should linger in what it means in this moment to celebrate Black Feminist Thought's thirty-year intellectual life and afterlives within US women's studies, and question whether or not its profound insights concerning the nature and meaning of Black feminist epistemology, theory, and praxis, and Black women's empowerment have truly been heard.
Black Feminist Thought's theoretical interventions certainly resonate within contemporary Black feminist theory and activism. Implicitly interwoven within the Black Lives Matter movement are Collins's analyses concerning the matrix of domination and the suppression of Black feminist knowledge production. Collins's citational inclusivity, too, is echoed in the movement's fundamental commitment to inclusion. As Alicia Garza, cofounder of Black Lives Matter, asserts, "We [in the movement] can't afford to follow just one voice. We have so many experiences that are rich and complex. We need to bring all those experiences to the table."14 In academic quarters, many Black feminist scholars, including Kristie Dotson, view Black Feminist Thought as a profound theoretical inheritance that cleared important ground for future work.15 Far from approaching the text as a closed object, Dotson, and others, understand themselves not as inheritors of a fixed legacy, but as inheriting the questions and the unresolved problems of the work. Despite evidence of thoughtful, robust, critical engagement with Black Feminist Thought and other pioneering Black feminist works, there remains an intransigent insistence within women's studies broadly concerning the function and legitimacy of Black feminist intellectual production. That is, these forms of engagement with Collins's works are muted in the service of continuing a dynamic wherein the validity of Black feminism itself is persistently called into question, and which demands repetition of the field's founding voices.
In this essay, we rely on a black feminist lens to challenge and extend what is appraised as rigorous research methodology. Inspired by a diverse, intergenerational group of black women referred to as the Black Women's Gathering Place, we employ black feminist thought (BFT) as critical social theory and embrace a more expansive understanding of BFT as critical methodology to analyze the experiences black women share through narrative. Our theoretical and methodological approach offers a pathway for education and research communities to account for the expansive possibilities that black feminism has for theorizing the lives of black women.
How do we begin? First we classicists have to move away from the notion ofdiscipline. We speak of the discipline of classics; it evokes an image of narrowboundaries and rigid inflexibility and exclusion. The discipline of classics purportsto study the ancient world, yet, in fact, only studies Greece and Rome . ButGreece and Rome were not the only cultures in the ancient world . We need tothink of classics in terms of ethnic studies and leave ourselves open to allpossibilities. Likewise, feminists, whether Black or White, need to rethink thepreference for theory over thought (Christian 1988; Lugones and Spelman 1983).Central to this relearning and to my foregoing interpretation of ancient Egypt isthe acknowledgement of different standpoints. The standpoint of Black womenand its validity is in fact fundamental to Black feminist thought and forms; alongwith reclaiming our foremothers, it is the core of this ideology (Collins 1990: 2ff7e9595c
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