Abstract
Black Feminist Thought is grounded in the experiences of African American women yet it does not stop there. . . . I also hoped that my ideas would travel beyond U.S. borders, not as yet another American export to the rest of the world, but rather as part of the beginnings of a dialogue with similarly subordinated groups in a global context as well as all those who wish to build vibrant, multiethnic societies.
What happens when Black Feminist Thought travels beyond the borders of the United States? What elements are necessary for the creation of a cross-border dialogue about intersectionality? In this essay I chart the book’s journey from the perspective of a junior sociologist who both participated in this travel as a translator and strives to utilize intersectional theory and frameworks in a transnational context. I am honored to share what the scholarship of Patricia Hill Collins has meant to me and fellow diasporic feminist researchers who are “outsiders within” North American academia. Furthermore, I discuss the process of translating and publishing Black Feminist Thought in South Korea, and offer my thoughts about bringing intersectional and transnational feminist analyses into a fruitful dialogue with one another.
My initial encounter with Collins’s work occurred during my first semester as a graduate student in sociology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. I was assigned to read Collins’s article on the significance of Black feminist thought (1986), along with the work of Chandra Mohanty, in the required sociological theory course—although only in the final week, which focused on “non-canonical” theory. I was immediately struck by the article’s encouragement to learn to “trust [one’s] own personal and cultural biographies as significant sources of knowledge” (Collins 1986, 529). After that first encounter, “When in doubt, read Collins” became my axiom throughout graduate school; whenever I doubted whether I wanted to pursue the discipline of sociology, I re-read Collins as a reminder of what sociological scholarship can be. On these occasions, I had a great deal of reading material from which to choose, given the depth and breadth of her scholarship. However, among the many volumes of monographs and articles, Black Feminist Thought has always served as a particularly important source of inspiration for me, later motivating me to commit myself to participate in the book’s transnational journey to South Korea.
Translation is an integral element of transnational knowledge production, because it requires transforming and expanding the circle of readership beyond the intended audience of the original text. Although translators remain invisible (except for the occasional footnote) to ensure that the text reads seamlessly, translation was an embodied process that transformed the way I think and conduct my research. In 2007, Mi Sun Park, an English literary critic based in South Korea, took the initiative of translating Black Feminist Thought and asked me to join her as a co-translator. Given Park’s expertise in multiracial feminist theory and American literature, after many rejections she was able to secure a contract with a publisher, and she wanted to collaborate, because, as she said, “You are a sociologist!” “Am I?” I asked myself, having just finished my preliminary exams. If I didn’t fully consider myself a sociologist then, I have certainly become one since that time—learning from Collins’s scholarship and working word-by-word with Black Feminist Thought for 10 months during a period that overlapped with my dissertation field research in South Korea were a vital part of my sociological education.
During the translation process, I began to reflect on the creative potential of my own outsider within position as a member of a diaspora in North American academia as well as in South Korea, my country of origin and citizenship. In American academia, speaking about gender issues in my “home country” as a diasporic feminist was often tricky in the midst of the increasing demand for non-Western stories and bodies as part of a global move in which the universality of Western-centered issues and agendas nevertheless remains intact. In fact, doing so required navigating simultaneously among various unfamiliar roles such as “emissary,” “mirror,” and “authentic insider” (Narayan 1997), sometimes strategically and other times unwillingly. At times, my diasporic feminist colleagues and I laughed at one another, at how we seemed to have turned into cultural nationalists of some kind, downplaying and seemingly defending undoubtedly patriarchal cultural and institutional practices in our “home” countries, in our attempts to counter the colonial representation of “Third World women.” At other times, we found ourselves romanticizing the resistance movements “at home” to emphasize the presence of collective agency when its absence was assumed in the prevalent critiques of the harms of the “bad West.”
The diasporic position in which I found myself involved “simultaneous experiences of privilege and marginalisation across national and transnational contexts” (Purkayastha 2010, 29) and necessitated “multiple mediations” (Mani 1990) across these contexts. Such processes of mediation, I believe, led to critical perspectives in the development of transnational feminist scholarship (Alexander and Mohanty 1997; Kim-Puri 2005), as well as the production of empirically grounded scholarship attuned to transnational linkages by diasporic scholars; in the examples of South Korea, such scholarship has focused on emigration (N. Kim 2008; Yuh 2002), transnational adoption (E. Kim 2010), cross-border marriages (M. Kim 2008), neoliberal governance (Song 2009), and the American military network (Höhn and S. Moon 2010; K. Moon 1997).
My diasporic position as an outsider within has been salient in a different way in South Korea, where I wanted to bring Collins’s work on intersectionality into the sociological dialogue. As I prepared to leave South Korea to pursue graduate study in the United States, a progressive feminist professor of mine revealed her sense of disappointment. “Why the U.S.?” she asked. “Don’t you think you need to do nationalist (minjok) sociology?” Her comment was based on a critical stance—not uncommon among Korean progressives—of resistance to the hegemonic production of knowledge on a global scale; in her view, I was becoming part of this hegemonic production by joining an academic institution in the metropole. More bluntly, my decision was seen as selling out at a personal level, and even worse, selling out the nation in pursuit of Western/colonial academic consumption. Although I empathize with the need for critical revision of knowledge production, I am doubtful about the adequacy of the nationalist scholarship for such endeavors, as the South Korean nation-state is increasingly confronting the question of migrants’ rights and belonging in the absence of shared nationhood.
In fact, my empirical research has demonstrated the need for an intersectional lens that counters the myth of ethnic and national homogeneity by showing the uneven burden migrants have carried in South Korea in the shadows of nationalist ideology via the pressure of assimilation and exclusion. My research has explored the governance of gender that emerges from the marginal spaces in which migrant women negotiate their citizenship in South Korea, specifically focusing on three overlapping groups: factory workers, wives of Korean men, and hostesses at American military camptown clubs. During my fieldwork, I met Kumiko, a Japanese woman in her mid-40s who married a South Korean man and has lived in South Korea for 17 years. Given the Japanese colonial occupation of Korea in the early decades of the twentieth century and the ethnicization of Koreans as lesser than the Japanese, Kumiko’s natal family disapproved of her marriage to a Korean man; in addition, she faced anti-Japanese hostility in South Korea. I told her the story of my Japanese grandmother, who experienced a similar situation and passed as Korean for most of her life, even forgetting how to speak her mother tongue. “Oh, I understand. It would be so nice,” said Kumiko. I didn’t understand her response until she elaborated: “I wish I could just be like that. In order to forget Japanese, you must be able to speak Korean perfectly!” It was certainly not the answer I expected, considering the increasing use of multiculturalism rhetoric on the part of the South Korean state and civil society; however, Kumiko’s statement reflected the continuing burden of self-effacement necessary to buttress ethnic nationalism in South Korea. Then the important question remains: how can we listen to the experiences of migrant women like Kumiko and my grandmother in a way that does justice to them, when the expression of their differences has been fraught with danger, disapproval, and pressure to silence?
By facilitating the travel of Black Feminist Thought to South Korea, I hoped to cultivate the ability of the South Korean public to understand and respect the diverse ways in which minority groups make their claims based on lived experience. In the words of Collins’s (2009) preface to the Korean edition: “It is important to have an awareness of the possibility that minority groups can feel and think differently; it is important to listen to minorities’ voices in order to understand their unique experiences and thus build an inclusive multicultural society.” These minority voices also included that of Ate Roselle, a Filipina woman I met during my dissertation research who had been working in South Korea as an undocumented worker. While recounting her 15 years of work at a furniture factory in a small factory town, Ate Roselle pointed to her right hand where she had held the sanding tool, and exclaimed, “Look, the bone here on my thumb has moved to over here. Don’t I deserve something for this?” She continued, explaining that at the very least the South Korean government owed her a working visa as a sign of respect. Ate Roselle’s mode of claims making via embodied experiences mirrored the well-known actions of Sojourner Truth, who bared her arm to reveal her muscle, before raising the question, “Ain’t I a woman?” Although the two women are situated many miles and many decades apart, they both represent the struggle for human dignity and social justice that Collins synthesized beautifully in Black Feminist Thought.
It is premature to discuss the reception of the Korean version of Black Feminist Thought given that it has been in print just over a year. However, I am confident that although some South Korean scholars may initially have doubts about the translation of Black Feminist Thought and may wonder whether it is “just another American theory,” on reading the work many will discover the common struggles and possibilities of solidarity and coalition building. I believe in the analytic merit of using an intersectional framework for social science research (Choo and Ferree 2010), which I assert would benefit South Korean academic discourse by fostering more complexity and diversity. More importantly, however, I hope the stories and lived experiences of people such as Ate Roselle in South Korea can mesh with the experiences of Black women explored in Black Feminist Thought, and that together these stories will travel beyond national boundaries to become the building blocks of a newly emerging intersectional and transnational feminist scholarship and advocacy. Such engagement with non-Western contestations and struggles for justice, I believe, would further facilitate the incorporation of the global hierarchy of nations as one of the intersectional nexuses of analysis, thus enriching intersectional scholarship beyond the boundaries of the West.