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Patreci Hill Collins. From Black Power to Hip Hop: Racism, Nationalism, and Feminism Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2006. 256 pp. $20.95.
In her new book Patricia Hill Collins reminds us why she is one of the most prolific and insightful sociologists to diagnose contemporary racial and sexual politics. While the book's title suggests a historical trajectory from Black Liberation to what is called the present-day "Hip Hop Generation," Collins instead invokes this rhetoric to engage a familiar subject for her: contemporary black feminist thought. This new book functions like the fourth in a series. If Collins repeats herself by highlighting similar themesracism, nationalism, and feminism- and updating them for the new century, her message nevertheless bears repeating.
From Black Power to Hip Hop comprises six essays in three sections. The open- ing essay concerns the discourse of the family in US national identity, followed by a chapter on "family planning" and the ugly specter of eugenics in welfare policies. Collins effectively relies on the black female subject as strategic "out- sider within," her concept now important in Sociology, African American Studies, and Women's Studies. Interweaving political science and literature in her sociological framework, Collins revisits the figures of the Domestic Worker and the Welfare Mother to critique the gendered and racialized hierarchies present in public discourse on the US family- a discourse that renders black women outsiders, paradoxically "one of the family" in the former example but summarily dismissed in the latter.
If the nation excludes the black woman from the family model, then Black Nationalism seeks to confine her, a subject explored in part two. The first essay in this section examines Afrocenfrism as "civil religion," borrowing the trappings of "Black...