Fighting Words: Black Women and the Search for Justice.

Patricia Hill Collins. Fighting Words: Black Women and the Search for Justice. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1998. 335 pp. $47.95 cloth/$18.95 paper.

With Fighting Words: Black Women and the Search for Justice, sociologist and social theorist Patricia Hill Collins extends the arguments she began eight years ago in Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. The newer book forecasts the theoretical tools black people, especially black women, will need to thrive in the next century. Like Black Feminist Thought, Fighting Words promotes untiringly standpoint theory/praxis as a strategy for fighting the discourse and institutions which exclude and erase black women's contributions to African American culture, feminism, and post-modernism. Collins is as intent as ever to make her work accessible. She is committed to being understood by "a wide range of potential readers," and hopes that her efforts might encourage others "to make theoretical ideas in general," and those in her new book, "more comprehensible ... and more important to more people than just a select few." She wants her work to have democratic appeal and be opp ositional, too. I admire and value her ability and willingness to read across a wide range of discourses and synthesize vast amounts of material germane to black feminist thought.

Fighting Words enunciates itself in three parts, seven chapters, numerous sections, copious notes, a glossary, and an extensive and invaluable list of works cited. Part I, "Black Women's Knowledge and Changing Power Relations," pays homage to black women's negotiations--as objects and agents--with and within structures of containment. Collins reprises her theory of black women as "outsiders-within" white institutions. She has a full appreciation and big agenda for black women in such spaces. She surveys black feminist thought from its beginnings in the quotidian lives of African-American women to its commitments outside the structures of black civil society. How black feminist thought "came to voice" and broke "the silence" are the lessons given here. And, in light of the more sophisticated contemporary politics of containment--e.g. "segregation" and "surveillance"--voice and the momentary insubordination of breaking the silence have lost their oppositional power. Collins charges black women, "Black feminist s" and "womanists," to develop a "Black women's standpoint" so that black women's critical social theory can remain oppositional, can keep "talking back." Collins admonishes: "... womanism and Black feminism may have little meaning, especially in the absence of actual social institutions dedicated to investigating Black women's critical social theory."

Part II, "Black Feminist Thought and Critical Social Theory," orients the reader to the three crucial analytic tools black women must be able to deploy in the making of their critical social theory: social science/sociology, postmodernism, and Afrocentrism. Collins begins her narrative with the history of black women as agents of knowledge in the field of sociology from 1895 to 1970. Black women were largely absent from the field until 1960 and, at the same time, were objects of its "positivist" (racist and sexist) scholarship. In the 1960s the work of Black women sociologists Jacqueline Johnson Jackson, Joyce Ladner, LaFrances Rodgers-Rose, and others "recontextualize[d] existing interpretations of Black women's experiences."

Collins admits early on that she chooses the "outsider-within location vis-a-vis postmodernism" and proceeds to offer "a preliminary assessment of these ideas in light of their actual and potential utility for Black feminist thought." Perhaps only confirmed practitioners of postmodernism will feel cheated by Collins's rather linear discussion. "My approach," she tells us, "explores the political implications of the three rubrics of decentering, deconstruction, and difference for developing Black feminist thought as critical social theory." Though useful in repositioning subjectivity, reinterpreting knowledge, and resisting universality, because postmodernism offers only critique and no solutions, Collins feels that it is best left among black women in the academy as a tool with which to challenge the dominant discourses--a position which seems to contradict her stated commitment to making theoretical discourses more "comprehensible and more important to more people."

Black cultural nationalism's deployment of family paradigms as a strategy for effecting unity makes Afrocentrism a refuge for black people. The title of this volume, Fighting Words, also defines Afrocentrism's counter-aggressive stance in response to institutionalized racism. "Since predominantly male practitioners of Afrocentrism experience Western science as 'fighting words,' in response they generate 'fighting words' of their own." This practice, along with Afrocentrism's suppression of heterogeneity, its racialism, and its theoretical rigidity, makes it a most problematic praxis for black feminists--if not for Collins. In the face of unceasing and violent racism, "Black essentialism may be the best defense against White essentialism." Collins longs for a "revitalized" Afrocentrism "sensitive to Black heterogeneity and difference and prepared to engage in principled coalitions."

Part III, "Toward Justice," promotes standpoint theory with the modification of situatedness--i.e., "situated standpoint," a concept borrowed from theorist Donna Haraway's article "Situated Knowledges" (1988). Standpoint, "because of its resemblance to the norm of racial solidarity," claims Collins, still resonates with African-American women. Collins wants African-American women to act out of our "shared histories based on [our] shared locations in unjust power relations" and adopt "intersectionality" and thereby illuminate the complexities of race, gender, class, sexuality, nation, etc. as they structure black women's experiences in the United States. As in Black Feminist Thought, Sojourner Truth reemerges in Fighting Words as Collins's icon of a Black woman theorist/activist. She offers Truth as a model of moral authority, spirituality, and, most importantly, "visionary pragmatism"--that wisdom of black women derived from historical commonalities and passed on to succeeding generations.

"Visionary pragmatism" and black women's collectivities can construct a Black women's critical social theory that might "manage to move people toward justice." Collins could have devoted more space to theories of justice, especially since her narrative has black women searching for it.

Outside the fields of literature and cultural studies, reflections on Black feminist thought are rare. The importance of Collins's work is the panoramic context within which she locates black feminist thought. Because the book assembles, annotates, and synthesizes the major contemporary oppositional theories of the day, I foresee that Fighting Words will influence the women's studies classroom--as has Black Feminist Theory. But the more recent book suffers from many of the same conflations, reductiveness, false unities, false dichotomies, and oversimplifications as Black Feminist Theory. Despite the call for intersectionality--and perhaps her own work demonstrates its limitations--"Black feminist thought" and "Black women" are still as undifferentiated as a conceptual framework and a social group as they were in Black Feminist Theory. Collins's failure to put a lens on sexuality (as culture and politics) is disappointing. She claims to eschew binary thinking but constructs a false dichotomy between "womanism " and "Black feminism" early in the book, and she does not critique the hostility between black civil society--another undifferentiated mass--and feminism. Is it that black women's critical social theory is only good for policing the borders between black women and white women--the final binary? Collins quotes June Jordan's 1992 observation that somewhere beyond "race and gender" is the concept of justice. Fighting Words does not imagine justice beyond a narrowly constructed racial border.