Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (Routledge Classics)

A seminal text in Black Feminist Thought, Collins lays down her multi-faceted and intersectional framework as oppose to the traditional "white feminist thought" that excludes and marginalizes voices of color or uses them as props in its spectacle. Collins also espouses a road of resistance to those traditional and narrow understandings of feminism with the idea of transversal politics and with a both/and political framework in which to understand oppression rather than the contemporary bifurcated, dichotomized, and highly polarized either/or politics and moralizing.

In spite of the double burden of racial and gender discrimination, African-American women have developed a rich intellectual tradition that is not widely known. In Black Feminist Thought, originally published in 1990, Patricia Hill Collins set out to explore the words and ideas of Black feminist intellectuals and writers, both within the academy and without. Here Collins provides an interpretive framework for the work of such prominent Black feminist thinkers as Angela Davis, bell hooks, Alice Walker, and Audre Lorde. Drawing from fiction, poetry, music and oral history, the result is a superbly crafted and revolutionary book that provided the first synthetic overview of Black feminist thought and its canon.