Black feminist anthropology : theory, politics, praxis, and poetics /

This refreshing and inspiring collection of nine articles and a superb introduction seeks to come to terms with, if not resolve, the triple contradictions found in the title. Treating topics as wide-ranging as the Tuskeegee syphilis study; the grotesque exploitation of Sarah Baartman, the "Hottentot Venus"; and contemporary ethnographic fieldwork in the US, Dominican Republic, Brazil, Gambia, and elsewhere, the combined articles address the history of anthropology, comparative feminism in Africa and the US, global sexual commodification, biomedical ethics, the Jim Crow contexts of conducting research, and what is known as "native anthropology." Each author brings personal experiences of racism, sexism, and other challenges to bear on what are without exception successful examples of what C. Wright Mills called "the sociological imagination," where biography, intellectual activity, and activism are presented as a seamless whole. This book succeeds in going beyond Mills's vision in unparalleled ways. As Spelman College President Emerita and anthropologist Johnnetta Cole states in the foreword, despite the challenges that blackness and feminism bring to anthropology, the field "is clearly better off" because of these articles and the critiques they embody. All levels and collections. K. S. Fine-Dare Fort Lewis College