Review: Black Feminist Thought

[Patricia Hill Collins. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. New York: Routledge, 2009.]

A Black feminist classic, and deservedly so. An effort by one of the most prominent Black feminist sociologists in the US to create a sort of overview and synthesis of the rich and varied Black feminist tradition in that country. As you might expect, it methodically outlines the basis of that tradition and explores its core ideas and themes. It skillfully draws on the work of a diverse range of thinkers and presents its ideas in a way that is both rigorous and accessible.

There is so much important stuff in here that I'm not going to attempt even to summarize it. I think perhaps what I valued the most is the way that it constantly draws connections between social organization and intellectual practices – in this case, between the social organization of Black communities and Black women's lives at various points in history, and the preoccupations and ideas and approaches found in the intellectual work of Black women in those eras. So often, particularly in popular writing but in more 'serious' political writing as well, even when you have some acknowledgment that standpoint is a thing or that who we are shapes what we know and how we understand the world, it's often left as an abstracted, shallow, and somewhat essentialized notion. In contrast, this book makes very clear that those connections are material and practical and grounded and always in motion – they are about the kinds of labour that Black women have been forced into, the kinds of community institutions in which they have come together, the opportunities and constraints in their relationships, and all sorts of other very practical things. On related notes, I also appreciated the book's emphasis on epistemology, its insistence on Black feminist thought as an expansive social justice project, and its honesty about the strains being put on the tradition by the novel (i.e. neoliberal academic) circumstances in which an increasing amount of such work is being done today. And I thought that its examination of how Black feminist thought has always placed a high value on changes in individual consciousness, while never denying the need for collective action, was fascinating – a lesson, through the implicit contrast with superficially similar emphases in other political traditions, in how much the collective context shapes the political implications of individual change.

Collins does note in her preface that she perhaps gives the tradition an appearance of creater uniformity and cohesion than it (or any intellectual or political tradition) actually has. I'm not sure I know enough to comment on that in general, and anyway it's clearly just a predictable aspect of the form rather than any sort of problem. But I did find that reading some of her analysis with respect to sexuality so soon after reading adrienne maree brown's Pleasure Activism (and my greater affinity, at least on a first pass, to the focus and emphasis in some of brown's analysis) made me more conscious of differences within the tradition than I might otherwise have been. Not that I'm constructing some sort of false opposition between them – the two different works seem to exist in amiably dialogical relation to each other and to a broad set of shared ideas – but it's a useful reminder that any political tradition is comprised of many strands and many voices.

I'm a little puzzled by how slow a read I found this book to be. As I said, while it is certainly scholarly in character, it is equally obvious that great effort has been put into making it something that lots of different people could quite comfortably read rather than just other scholars. I would say that the writing isn't exciting, but it is skilled, clear, and precise, and therefore a quiet pleasure to read. And while there were some parts of the book that grabbed my interest more effectively and others less so, I would also say that overall I was quite interested in what it had to say. So I think perhaps reading it felt like a slow process in part for the very practical reason that it is one of these academic editions that's set in fairly small type, but also because of the form of the book – I think a summary and synthesis by its nature is going to be a slower read than other kinds of nonfiction because it likely will include a certain kind of methodical repetition as it applies its core approach and ideas to each area under scrutiny.

Anyway, an important book for understanding a vital political tradition that has had a great impact on a range of currents in the academy and in grassroots politics, and one whose influence will be made more politically sharp and valuable if those of us situated in other ways improve our understanding of its roots and of the histories of survival and struggle from which it emerged and from which it continues to emerge.