"So I have arrived at what for me is at the heart of what’s the matter. Much of the newfound interest in African American women that seems to honor the field of black feminist studies actually demeans it by treating it not like a discipline with a history and a body of rigorous scholarship and distinguished scholars underpinning it, but like an anybody-can-play pick-up game performed on a wide-open, untrammeled field. Often the object of the game seems to be to reinvent the intellectual wheel: to boldly go where in fact others have gone before, to flood the field with supposedly new “new scholarship” that evinces little or no sense of the discipline’s genealogy."
—Ann duCille (1994) ‘The Occult of True Black Womanhood: Critical Demeanor and Black Feminist Studies.’ Signs 19.3. p. 603. (via james-bliss)
