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Tired of watching, waiting and wandering for someone else to speak my mind.
Hancock, "Tired Too," 1993
In the introduction to this book, Cynthia Burack articulates her self-identity as multiple and shifting--nonblack, feminist, and interested in working through questions of group identity for personal, political, and intellectual reasons (p. 4). She summarizes the relationship delineated by black feminist theorists themselves regarding group membership and the relative power of the interpreter's voice: "Black feminist theorists are themselves often scholars in the humanities and social sciences. They write of their own struggles.... They do not reject outright the possibility that non-group members can participate in group discourse as readers or interpreters. Rather, they hold that participation confers responsibilities: to listen respectfully to the voices of group members, to claim the grounds and consequences of one's own interests, methods, and perspectives; and to avoid Olympian forms of closure that end intellectual conversation" (p. 4).
Burack successfully engages these standards throughout the book. Her respectful listening includes an attentiveness to black feminist theory beyond the "three divas" so often celebrated and cited in most mainstream feminist theory but far less frequently interpreted: Patricia Hill Collins, bell hooks, and Audre Lorde. Burack would frame my claim as a charge of idealization, a defense mechanism that prevents engagement with the difficult issues presented by black feminists (p. 134). She proposes a different approach: to engage with black feminist thought as a discourse on its own terms, from within.
This approach is not without its ethical hazards. That this book attempts such a discursive analysis reflects a move to...