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. 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.
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. 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. The text's strength lies within its polyvocal representations of an inclusive "Black women's intellectual tradition." 1 Over time, Black Feminist Thought's epistemological polyvocality has been heralded as emblematic of the potency of Black feminisms, and, conversely, persistently and subtly undermined within women's studies.Ĭrucial 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. Collins's intentional centering of Black women's voices in order to theorize Black women's lived experiences offered a departure from feminist analyses rooted in the ostensibly unmarked category of "woman" that tended to obscure racial, ethnic, and cultural differences, and from Black cultural studies frameworks that subordinated gender to race. Patricia Hill Collins's Black Feminist Thought (1990) helped to announce and participated in a watershed moment in Black feminist theory, one that ushered in what might be understood as the era of intersectionality within women's studies.
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