Black feminism's fighting words

by Maya Jhansi

I recently spoke on a panel put on by Affinity, a Chicago based Black lesbian group. Though the meeting was about successful models of organizing, it quickly turned into a debate about the possibility of revolution.

Just that day, I had finished reading Patricia Hill Collins' new book, FIGHTING WORDS: BLACK WOMEN AND THE SEARCH FOR JUSTICE, (University of Minnesota Press, 1998), which seemed to address questions women raised at the Affinity meeting. This showed me the strength of Collins' attempt to link academic theorizing to activism. Nevertheless, Collins' book also reveals the problem discussed at the Affinity meeting: namely, the refusal or failure to "theorize" the idea of revolution itself. This ultimately undercuts Collins' seemingly anti-elitist concept of critical social theory.

Where Collins' first book, BLACK FEMINIST THOUGHT: KNOWLEDGE, CONSCIOUSNESS, AND THE POLITICS OF EMPOWERMENT (1990), concentrated on defining and defending the existence of an Afrocentric feminist standpoint and a Black feminist tradition, her new book attempts to go further by interrogating Black feminism's potential for galvanizing women towards actual social transformation.

FIGHTING WORDS is divided into three parts. Part I takes up the new politics of containment that reinscribe the new visibility of Black women into old relations of power. Part II engages the theoretical frameworks of sociology, postmodernism and Afrocentrism, revealing Collins' avowed eclecticism. As she herself explains in the introduction: "I try to take the best from positivist science, Marxist social theory, postmodernism, Afrocentrism, North American feminism, British cultural studies, and other intellectual traditions" (xviii). Part III attempts to move beyond mere critique of society to a more "visionary pragmatism" which Collins sees operative in the everyday struggles of Black women.

The prototypical Black feminist intellectual for Collins is Sojourner Truth. Truth's "migratory status," her ability to cross borders of race, class, gender, geography and so on, serves as a symbol of Black women's freedom struggles. What Collins highlights about Truth is her multi-dimensionality, her ability to move in and out of several worlds, all the while expanding her definition of freedom. Likewise, Collins argues, Black feminism needs to be "simultaneously particular and universal" (241). She writes, "Black feminist thought must remain situated in African-American women's particular experiences yet must also generate theoretical connections to other knowledges with similar goals" (241).

The fact that she calls for Black feminists to look for connections to other knowledges is what makes Collins treatment of Marx and Marxism especially disappointing. Where to Raya Dunayevskaya, Sojourner Truth's act of naming herself revealed a whole revolutionary philosophy of freedom that linked inherently to Marx's philosophy of freedom, to Collins, Marxism remains a "grand narrative" guilty of linear thinking.

The only use Collins has for Marx is Marx's historical method in theorizing class. Though "in the postcolonial, desegregated contexts of advanced capitalism, Marxist class categories lose validity," she argues, his historical, rather than economic or theoretical, approach to class remains useful (213). She is not interested, she says, in his discussion of socialism or capitalism.

Collins' eclectic attitude towards Marx leads to all kinds of simplifications, caricatures and falsehoods. In her attempt to patch together disparate thought, she often falls into logical inconsistencies. I would argue that it is just not true that Marx's class categories are not relevant to today's society. Furthermore, it is a gross simplification to say that Marx was historical INSTEAD of theoretical. But because Collins merely throws this out without proof or distinction between what passes as "Marxism" and Marx's own views, it becomes difficult to engage Collins' discussion of Marx in a serious way.

I don't think this would really bother Collins though, since her focus in this book reiterates the academic fashion of the moment, i.e. the notion of border crossing. She valorizes eclecticism and pragmatism for measuring an idea by its functionality in the specific context, rather than by its content.

While Collins presents a lot in FIGHTING WORDS to think about and discuss, it seems to me that the weakest aspect of the book is its refusal to engage in a serious way with Marx. This is not unrelated to the fact that in talking about justice and the "visionary pragmatism" of Black women, Collins loses sight of the idea of revolution, both as it has manifested in Black women's freedom struggles and as a possiblity for the future. I agree with Collins that "without some sense of where we're going and why we want to go there, and some 'righteous rage' to spur us on, we won't even know if we're headed in the right direction" (251). This need to know the direction, to have a vision of a new society, makes Marx indispensable for Black feminism and the freedom movement as a whole, if we want to make revolution a living reality.