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The words of these epigraphs conjure up a description of a social environment in which the intellectual acumen of Blacks in the United States, both men and women, is continuously called into question.1 It is against this backdrop of historical social and scholarly malignment and academic racism that this book emerges. In positioning itself as an approach derived from but frequently in opposition to mainstream feminist anthropology, Black feminist anthropology becomes a conscious act of knowledge production and canon formation. Despite postmodern critiques of grand theory, master narratives, and canon formation, the reality is that graduate and undergraduate curricula still largely rely upon canonical works in training students. At the same time that Black feminist anthropology constructs its own canon that is both theoretical and based in a politics of praxis and poetics, it seeks to deconstruct the institutionalized racism and sexism that has characterized the history of the discipline of anthropology in the United States and Europe. This analysis pertains directly to the history of North American anthropology.
This book, Black Feminist Anthropology, is formulated out of a set of ideologies, theories, ethnographic methodologies, and social commitments that owe much to ideas both inside and outside anthropology. It is self-consciously fashioned as an act of knowledge production and sees itself as a form of cultural mediation between the world of Black scholars and the entire Western intellectual tradition, between Black anthropologists and the rest of the discipline, and between Black and white feminists. But more importantly, it is an intervention—a Black feminist anthropological intervention.2 As a strategy, interventions serve to either halt or resolve conflict. Medical interventions are intended to aggressively stem the onset of disease or other illness. Political interventions interfere in domestic or international political and economic affairs. An anthropological intervention, as this works deems itself, is intended to interrupt/disrupt the elitist, sexist, and racist dynamics that have plagued anthropology historically and that continue to inform its training, research funding, scholarly recognition, professional networks, and publications—in a phrase, all anthropological knowledge production and reproduction.
Both Lee D. Baker, a new critical historian of anthropology, and Faye V. Harrison, Black feminist anthropological theorist and ethnographer, have documented the way in which this less than stellar history of anthropology, replete with its pervasive biases, has reduced, marginalized, and erased the contributions of Black anthropologists in general, and U.S. Black women anthropologists specifically. 3 In his assessment of a crucial moment in the discipline’s history when Black anthropologists attempted to carve out an intellectual space for themselves, Baker notes that
the editors of, and contributors to, the JAFL [ Journal of American Folklore] fashioned Negro folklore into an important thrust within the anthropological discourse on race and culture. How- ever, African American scholars who forayed into the anthropological field of folklore immediately met with marginalization. They were limited in their access to funds and to publishers.4
Observing the contemporary scene in anthropology, Faye V. Harrison concludes that little has changed in these conditions of marginalization. She argues in a persuasive commentary, “Auto- Ethnographic Reflections on Hierarchies in Anthropology” (based on her own positionality), that although studying anthropology provided her with a level of intellectual confidence, the types of limitations and constraints Baker identified as characterizing the early history of anthropology continue today: Black anthropologists (and others with nonhegemonic positions and/or perspectives) continue to be ignored and marginalized, and their scholarship minimized. Harrison notes that
Harrison goes on to argue that the absence of citations of Black American anthropologists in the academic literature gives the appearance that they have not contributed much to the discipline.
However, she warns that this is misleading because it has been “constructed within a disciplinary context of racialized power disparities wherein intellectual validation and authorization have been and are conferred on a basis other than value-free, color- and genderblind merit.”6 It is out of these flames of racism, sexism, and Euroethnocentricism (which has shaped much of Western intellectual thought, and anthropology in particular) that this book rises like a mythical phoenix. Black feminist anthropology is marked by its acknowledgment of theoretical, ideological, and methodological diversity among it practitioners. This is largely because those Black women who dare proclaim themselves feminists draw on the tenets of feminism alongside those of anthropology and embrace an intellectual repertoire that includes women’s studies, African American studies, ethnic studies, and African, Caribbean, and Latin American studies. They also embrace the critiques, ideas, metaphors, wisdom, and grounded theories of organic intellectuals in the form of preachers, community activists, street-corner philosophers, and beauty shop therapists alike, who are eloquent about the way in which scholarship has rendered them victims, symbols of poverty, or people without histories; and who would agree with Othman Sullivan in Drylongso: “I think this anthropology is just another way to call me a nigger.”7
Most of the contributors to Black Feminist Anthropology are explicit about how their present-day thinking was forged out of a tradition of Black American resistance rooted in the politics, praxis, and poetics of runaway slaves, slave rebellions, Maroons, the underground railroad, slave narratives, Negro spirituals, anti-lynching campaigns, the Civil Rights movement, black organizations, the Black Nationalist movement, the Black Aesthetic, and most recently, reggae and consciousness hip-hop. These elements constitute significant cultural variables and moments in the collective memory of Black Americans (and they also have an importance beyond U.S. geographical boundaries). They stand as reminders (indicators) that social inequality, and especially Black America’s resistance to it, is structural, symbolic, and ever present in the cultural fabric of the United States, where we remain (as the words of Foreman, Hurston, and Sullivan remind us) part of the fringe work.
It is at this site, an imagined theoretical space/place, where Black feminist anthropology locates itself. It uses the description, analysis, and interpretations of social inequality and the concomitant resistance as an entry point to construct its own theory, praxis, politics, and poetics. It derives its content/data from the ethnographic study of African-descended people in the United States, Africa, the Spanish-, Dutch-, French-, and English-speaking Caribbean, Central and Latin America, and in other geographical spaces where the African Diaspora is located. Within this theoretical/spatial context, the multifarious dimensions of women’s lived experience in the Diaspora become a unifying and central element. What better entry point for a theory, politics, praxis, and poetics of Black feminist anthropology than the description, analysis, and interpretation of social inequality and the concomitant resistance? What better entry point for Black feminist anthropology than the ethnographic study of African-descended people? And what could be a worthier task than the study of Black women’s lives in these multiple contexts?
CONSTRUCTING A GENEALOGY OF BLACK ACTIVIST FEMINISM
The excavation of Black women’s lives and the theorization of lived experience and culture in the African Diaspora through the lens of feminism do not begin with this book; nor is the idea of a praxis that insists on research directed to reveal contradictions and affect social problems our novel idea. Few traditions—scholarly or otherwise —begin in a vacuum. Rather, they emerge from various historical moments, social movements, and the assemblage of intellectual consensus and unite to create the appearance of a seamless web of intellectual, political, and activist communities. As Black feminists, we cannot claim our genealogy exists ab origine (from day one).8 What we can claim is our own desire and political right to fashion (fictive) kin ties and seek ancestors from the past and present, and derive from their work a tradition composed of Black intellectual thought, feminism, and the gendered experience of African-descended people. Not all of those we claim as kindred would necessarily embrace the label of feminist or Black feminist, but fictive kin are made, not born (see table 1).
A Black feminist anthropological theory, and indeed the chapters in the this book, draws its inspiration from two very distinctive traditions (Black intellectual thought and feminism) that at different moments in time have overlapped, and sometimes conflicted, but frequently have shared a common vision of social transformation, equity, and justice. As part of a Black intellectual tradition, we claim a consciousness that identifies race as a social construction bolstered by a structural reality that is harsh and striking in its economic, political, and social ramifications. To understand how the “race” concept has come to pervade the thinking and policies of U.S. society and resulted in some of the most dehumanizing institutions, practices, and behaviors that defy rationality, morality, and spirituality, we trace our genealogy through the writings and speeches of Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells, Anna Cooper, Zora Neale Hurston,