Black Intersectionalities: A Critique for the 21st Century ed. by Monica Michlin and Jean-Paul Rocchi (review)

Based on the spring 2011 Collegium for African American Research’s ninth international conference, Black States of Desire: Dispossession, Circulation, Transformation, held in Paris, the collection, Black Intersectionalities offers fourteen essays divided into four sections. The essays are wide-ranging and African diasporic, though there is also a good deal of excellent literary analysis. Using law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality, which was put to use most popularly in Patricia Hill Collins’s Black Feminist Thought: Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment, to draw out the importance of theorizing intersectionality as well as recognizing the importance of politics, the editors and the authors therein recognize theory and practice as core to the premise of intersectionality. Co-edited by Monica Michlin and Jean-Paul Rocchi, an exceptional scholar in his own right, Black Intersectionalities is part of a four-part series of volumes on questions of blackness in our times, across disciplines and continents.