ABSTRACT
Like other oppositional discourses, Black feminist thought can never remove itself totally from the ideas expressed by more powerful groups. Although it challenges social theories dominant to itself, in order to be both comprehensible and legitimated, it must use the constructs, paradigms, and epistemologies of those discourses. These tensions become apparent in the relationship of Black feminist thought to a loose constellation of academic discourses in the United States best known as postmodernism.1 On the one hand, postmodernism opposes some of the core tenets of positivist science, structuralist literary criticism, and other discourses of modernity. Thus, postmodernism can foster a powerful critique of existing knowledges and the hierarchical power relations they defend. For example, postmodernism questions the taken-for-granted nature of categories such as race, gender, and heterosexuality and suggests that these seeming “biological truths” constitute social constructions. By focusing on marginalized, excluded, and silenced dimensions of social life, postmodernism destabilizes what has been deemed natural, normal, normative, and true. Overall, postmodernism rejects notions of epistemological and methodological certainty provided by the natural sciences, social sciences, and other discourses of modernity that have been used to justify Black women’s oppression (Best and Kellner, 1991; McGowan, 1991; Rosenau, 1992).
