Hearing What Black Women Have Been Telling Us All Along: On Patricia Hill Collins’s Black Feminist Thought

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. 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. 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.

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.

Black Feminist Thought has been canonized primarily through the constructs of the matrix of domination and controlling images. It has lasted, too, for its intentional polyvocality that foregrounds the diversity of thought that contributes to "Black women's intellectual tradition" and its path breaking force that contributed greatly to the "intellectual and political labor of intersectionality."9 To this end, we inheritors of this text are seemingly presented with an unassailable good: evidence of the potency of the work through its continued engagement. While the power and efficacy of Collins's work cannot be denied, after a series of reprints and anniversary editions, we might wonder how well we have actively listened to and engaged with the text, its objectives and its methods. Collins herself notes in the preface to the text's second edition in 2000 that, in 1990, her overarching "concerns centered on coming to voice, especially carving out the intellectual and political space that would enable [her] to be heard."10 Her emphasis on voice — speaking about "Black women's collective struggle," of which she felt her experiences and theorizations were emblematic — functions to clear conceptual and theoretical space for the soundings of Black women's experiences, and at the same time demands a hearing for Black woman-centered knowledges. After the first edition's publication, Collins notes that her concern shifts away from coming to voice and toward its effective deployment, as an acknowledgement of "how quickly voice can be taken away."11

Collins's concerns with voice and the possibility of forced silencing also beg consideration about the nature of canonization. How do we understand Black Feminist Thought's place within an academic canon that seeks representative voices from members of marginalized communities as an authenticating measure of diversity and inclusion? We must consider what it means for the academy to amplify voices that it fails to fully hear, while conscripting these same voices to silence others. Black Feminist Thought's initial success explicitly depended upon its capacity to prove the validity of Black feminist theory as theory. As such, it was canonized as perhaps the definitive, authoritative text of Black feminism, an authentic representation of Black women's academic and cultural work, and frequently cited as evidence of one's familiarity with Black feminist theory within women's studies circles. In relation to women's studies, Black feminist theory typically attains legitimacy insofar as it serves as a diagnostic and corrective tool for white feminist and other discourses by pointing to their incapacity to account for the varied experiences of Black women. We might go so far as to say that within the academy, a new "controlling image" of Black feminism has been articulated, such that, as Jennifer Nash argues in Black Feminism Reimagined: After Intersectionality, Black feminist knowledge production is only heard within the framework of intersectional discourse by the broader field of women's studies. Moreover, the embodied aspects of Black womanhood come to conceptually overwrite what these theorists and creatives may actually voice in the fullness of its multiplicity and diversity, much in the same way that the Black female body "breaks in upon the [social] imagination" in a manner that figuratively overwhelms and mutes these women's insights, as their very bodies-as-flesh denote "disruption" and "illegitimacy."12 This runs counter to Collins's project in Black Feminist Thought, wherein she sought to articulate the theoretical potency of Black women's experiential knowledges by situating them within a relational matrix to other models of feminist theory.

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.

A recent spate of Black feminist criticism that also comprises (loving) critique of the project of Black feminism itself, including work by Nash and Brittney Cooper, suggests that earlier Black feminist writings, including Black Feminist Thought, largely performed the function of validating Black feminist criticism. Subsequent to this validation, these scholars assert, Black feminist theory was coopted as a model of "intervention" within women's studies — one that simultaneously disrupts the flow of white-centered feminist discourse and theory, as well as provides the critical language used to nuance and correct the shortcomings of the field.

Cooper notes the ways that, "despite the citational ubiquity of intersectionality" — in general, but I find it applicable specifically to Collins's Black Feminist Thought — "in fields and disciplines across the humanities and social sciences and despite the proliferation of vibrant cultures of Black feminisms on the interwebs, academic Black feminisms still confront a culture of justification in which one is always asked to prove that the study of Black women's lives, histories, literature, cultural production and theory is sufficiently academic."16 Moreover, Cooper continues, the persistent pressures heaped upon Black feminist scholars and theorists to both say "something new" and to repeatedly respond to demands to justify the necessity of their intellectual and creative works, necessarily means that the types of sustained conversation with, and exploration of, the themes and questions introduced within earlier pioneering scholarship such as by Collins have largely not occurred, and where they have occurred, have been denied recognition.17

Collins's hard-earned voice, then, was persistently re-echoed over three decades, but one must wonder if it was truly heard. If the field of women's studies functionally denies, or refuses to acknowledge, the productive interrogation of these founding insights, then the "citational ubiquity" attached to Black Feminist Thought ultimately serves to mute the volume's founding ambitions, and to silence emerging Black feminist voices. In this way, the text's canonical status belies an intellectual refusal that forces Black women to continuously re-echo previous insights, thereby attempting to enforce a theoretical stasis upon Black feminist work seeking validation in the field of women's studies. Contra Collins's expansive vision, the enforced re-echoing of Black Feminist Thought as a means of vetting one's familiarity with Black feminist theory demands surface engagement rather than intensive critical conversation. While not exactly silencing Collins's hard-won voice, the "citational ubiquity" of only certain aspects of Black Feminist Thought, detached and decontextualized from the body of the text as a whole functions as a form of muting, slyly yet systematically taking voice away from Collins and the Black women featured in the text, as well as future Black feminist theorists. Collins's voice, as well as that of others whose works question, build upon, or revise her work are simultaneously muted. Rather than ethically close-listening to, and conversing with, the voices that converge within Collins's text, from Ida Wells Barnett and Maria Stewart, to Barbara Christian and Cheryl Clarke, to Gwendolyn Brooks and Gayl Jones, to "Sarah Brooks, a Southern domestic worker" and anonymous Black women survey respondents, we encounter a dynamic wherein referencing one of the two most-cited paradigms in Black Feminist Thought connotes one's feminist diversity bona fides.18 Within this dynamic, Black women's theoretical labors are in danger of becoming conscripted into an echo-chamber of white feminist self-reflection without engagement, essentially enforcing Black feminist repetitions of previously voiced insights, effectively silencing critical engagements that reframe, refashion, or refute academic Black feminism's pioneering works.

In light of this quandary we must ask what conditions are necessary to engender a moment wherein Black feminist theory and Black women can be truly heard, rather than persistently enjoined to repeat themselves?

---

Meina Yates-Richard is an Assistant Professor of African American Studies and English at Emory University. Her work appears in American Literature (2016), the Journal of West Indian Literature (2019), and amsj: American Studies (2019).

---

References