Black Feminist Anthropology: Theory, Politics, Praxis, and Poetics (review)

Abstract

BOOK REVIEW Feminist Anthropology: Theory, Politics, Praxis, and Poetics. Irma McClaurin (ed.). New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001; 272 pp. Irma McClaurin and her eight colleagues have written a very important and provocative book. This volume studies meaning of black feminist anthropology and challenges assumptions of anthropological theory-making and feminist theory in anthropology. This feminist anthropology constructs its own canon that is both theoretical and based in a politics of praxis and poetics and seeks to deconstruct institutionalized racism and sexism that has characterized history of discipline of anthropology in United States and Europe (2). McClaurin sees this book as an intervention, a form of cultural mediation between world of scholars and entire Western intellectual tradition. She views intervention as a strategy to halt or resolve conflict. The anthropological intervention, in this case, is to: interrupt/disrupt elitist, sexist and racist dynamics that have plagued anthropology historically and that continue to inform its training, research funding, scholarly recognition, professional networks and publications-in a phrase, all anthropological knowledge production and reproduction (2). McClaurin pays homage to over 30 women anthropologists from 1930's to present. From leaders such as Carolyn Bond Day, Irene Diggs, Zora Neal Hurston, Katherine Dunham, Pearl Primus, Manet Fowler and Vera Green in late 1960s, to Angela Gilliam (with a chapter in book), Sheila Walker, Diane K. Lewis, Niara Sudharkasa, Claudia Mitchell-Kernan, Theresa Singleton, A. Lynne Bolles (also with a chapter in book), Johnetta Cole, myself, Filomina Steday, Faye Harrison, Helan Page, Brackette Williams, and Gwendolyn Mikell of 1970s and 1980s. The 1990s exhibits a whole new generation of women, several of whom are authors of chapters in this volume. In addition to foraging a new feminist tradition for anthropology, feminist anthropological tradition espoused in this book has a pan-African or global perspective in order to locate or situate literal place of women in diaspora. As hard as it is to believe, this text ... is first to archive and compile in one place original essays that speak specifically, and from one anthropological perspective, about way in which race, gender and sometimes class has produced an ethnographic praxis informed by identity, social race, discriminatory practices in academy and society, and field encounters influenced by colonialism (19). From Zora Neale Hurston, who trained under Franz Boas at Columbia University, to authors in this volume, it is clear that feminist anthropological theory is deeply ethnographic, certainly cross-cultural (diasporic) and unashamedly self-reflexive, plus it is what McClaurin calls in Chapter 2 autoethnography, which blends autobiography and ethnography together. It represents speaker/writer's subjective discourse, but in language of colonizer (65). By speaking in colonizer's language, native demonstrates her ability to mediate-to be cultural broker. She characterizes this technique as a strategy of knowledge production that allows Black feminist anthropologists, and other speakers of subjugated discourses to have voice and authority...that is simultaneously innovative, reflexive and transformative (71). In Chapter One, Seeking Ancestors: Foraging a Feminist Tradition in Anthropology, A. Lynne Bolles cleverly shows that while female anthropologist foremothers did not explicitly foreground their gender oppression, the experiences and plights of these women anthropologists have been seeds from which current feminist tradition in anthropology has germinated (25). Bolles asserts that feminist anthropologists today have found solace and inspiration in research, scholarship, and courage gleaned through lives of these foremothers. …