In Black Feminist Thought, Patricia Hill Collins explores the words and ideas of Black feminist intellectuals as well as those African-American women outside academe. She not only provides an interpretive framework for the work of such prominent Black feminist thinkers as Angela Davis, Alice Walker, and Audre Lorde, but she shows the importance of self-defined knowledge for group empowerment. In the tenth anniversary edition of this award-winning work, Patricia Hill Collins expands the basic arguments of the first edition by adding (...) several important new themes. A new discussion of heterosexism as a system of power, an expanded treatment of images of Black womanhood, U.S. Black feminism's connections to Black Diasporic feminisms, and more attention to the importance of social class and nationalism all appear in the new edition. In addition, the new edition includes recent developments in black cultural studies, especially black popular culture, as well as recent events and trends such as the Anita Hill hearings and the backlash against affirmative action. (shrink)

The most popular uniting theme in feminist peace literature grounds women's peace work in mothering. I argue if maternal arguments do not address the variety of relationships different races and classes of mothers have to institutional violence and/or the military, then the resulting peace politics can only draw incomplete conclusions about the relationships between maternal work/thinking and peace. To illustrate this I compare two models of mothering: Sara Ruddick's decription of "maternal practice" and Patricia Hill Collins's account of racial-ethnic women's (...) "motherwork.". (shrink)

A new collection of critical essays from bell hooks takes as its theme the deep longing for a critical voice. I explore some motifs that operate across the divergent topics of her essays. She writes of the dangers of commodification, of "reassuring" images, of individualism. I also explore the paths of hooks's uniquely black postmodernism: her critique of various essentialisms, her philosophically important conception of subjectivity, and her beautiful and powerful transformations of multiple discourses.