Black feminine enigmas, or notes on the politics of black feminist theory

Abstract

In this meditation on Darlene Clark Hine’s field-defining article, I pose two provocations: First, contemporary black feminist historiographical questions about the archive have deep roots in Hine’s work on dissemblance. Second, Hine’s article emphasizes that black feminist historiographical work is necessarily an imaginative practice, one that merges the historical and the literary, the archival and the speculative, the documented and the elusive. It is the fact that black feminist historical work is necessarily speculative that explains why black feminist historical analyses have provided some of the most enduring concepts for black feminist theory, including dissemblance, critical fabulation, the politics of difference, and the politics of respectability.