Patricia Hill Collins. From Black Power to Hip Hop: Racism, Nationalism, and Feminism. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006.
1 In her new book From Black Power to Hip Hop, a collection of previously published essays, Patricia Hill Collins probes the contested spaces of racism, nationalism, popular culture, and feminism in an attempt to expand the struggle for a truly democratic society for all. The first section, "Race, Family, and the US Nation-State" (chapters 1-2), features two essays that take an in-depth look at the intimate connections between motherhood and national identity. Section two, "Ethnicity, Culture, and Black Nationalist Politics" (chapters 3-4), offers two essays on the usefulness and efficacy of Afrocentrism, while section three, "Feminism, Nationalism, and African American Women" (chapters 5-6), offers strategies for empowerment.
2 In the past, one was unlikely to confront the work of Hill Collins outside the disciplinary confines of sociology and gender studies. However, From Black Power to Hip Hop should not suffer such a fate, as it fits well within the academic boundaries of cultural studies. Hill Collins regards culture as political — as a terrain of conflict, incorporation, and contestation. Culture is seen as a key site for the production and reproduction of the social, albeit unequal, relations of everyday life. Never for a moment does Hill Collins omit the idea that culture informs the structure and shape of history. She explores various epistemologies of emancipatory knowledge and by extension investigates with great depth ideologies of nationalism and feminism as well as influential knowledges of popular culture and everyday life. From Black Power to Hip Hop concludes that what is at stake are the connections between culture, power, and politics, the need for change, and the representations of and for marginalized groups.
3 Throughout the text it is clear that Hill Collins is indebted to many Cultural Studies scholars, most importantly Paul Gilroy. Similar to Gilroy's Ain't No Black in the Union Jack (1991), Hill Collins attempts to highlight the tension between ethnic and civic nationalism and also attempts to deal with the dilemma of racial solidarity, more specifically black solidarity. Hill Collins uses black nationalism as a background to the discussion of politics in the post-Civil Rights era and attempts to answer how black unity is to be conceived in the new millennium. Insightfully speaking, she is careful not to paint all ideological struggles concerning black solidarity as taking place within the black/white binary. Instead she begins and ends her analysis from within the black community, in turn illustrating that black solidarity can and does have variable meanings and that black solidarity has always been contextually and historically specific, located within diverse and sometimes overlapping discourses.
4 One point of departure from Gilroy and similar scholarship is Hill Collins' understanding of motherhood in relation to nationalism. According to Hill Collins, motherhood frames national identity: "the construction of infertility as a national tragedy and the huge amounts of media attention paid to this condition reflect [. . .] [a] preoccupation with increasing reproduction among women of the dominant group" (63). Many public services support white mothering, yet public policies drawing upon a logic of eugenics have been used to deal with women of color. She suggests that any new politics must take into account the racially coded language within colorblind discourses that speak of and about women of color (e.g. "unwed mothers" and "family values").
5 Furthermore, while Hill Collins concludes that feminist cultural texts and practices are multiaccentual she also regrets the fact that many black feminist activists have uncritically accepted the tenets of mainstream feminism, neglecting to pay attention to the structural causes of social inequality. Rather than resisting the matrix of power, many feminists are slowly and unknowingly becoming grunt workers for white patriarchal capitalism. Hill Collins criticizes the emphasis on personal politics: "The personal as a metaphor for more transgressive ideas about women's empowerment have [sic] given way to a version of personal politics that is increasingly narcissistic and amenable to the annexation by conservative political forces in the United States" (183). To the dismay of Hill Collins, feminism has become increasingly obsessed with the "self" at the expense of the "social."