Abstract
Redefining the Political: Black Feminism and the Politics of Everyday Life, by Alex J. Moffett-Bateau, examines the political lives, engagements, and powers of U.S. Black women. Set within the Altgeld Gardens housing development on the South Side of Chicago, Moffett-Bateau questions present political scholarship’s ability to capture the realities of the political lives of Black women in poverty. Moffett-Bateau argues that Black women’s political engagement has been othered because it does not align with traditional definitions or perceptions of what is considered political. Moffett-Bateau uses an original ethnographic investigation into the everyday lives of poor Black women living in one of Chicago’s public housing developments. She examines how Black women engage within their communities, develop and foster a sense of belonging, and utilize power to exert their political prowess. The book contends that Black women claim their rightful place in sociopolitical explorations, encouraging political scholarship to both widen and reimagine its limited view on what counts in the political sphere.
Moffett-Bateau uses an intersectional Black feminist foundation to develop two theoretical frameworks. These frameworks are central to her assertion that present political literature must extend beyond its current confines to embrace Black women and their experiences as political practitioners. The first is the Political Possible-Self (PPS), which refers to an individual’s sense of belonging in their community. Moffett-Bateau engages 31 women through in-depth interviews, triangulating her data with participant observations and archival analyses. Throughout her chapters, Moffett-Bateau’s participants share their experiences navigating the Chicago Housing Authority. The women disclose the extent to which they developed strategies and sociopolitical tools with their community members, which directly informed their sense of belonging and political imagination.
The second framework, the Black Feminist Definitional Criterion (BFDC) of Politics and the Political, speaks to the ideas and activities of groups with the intention of using their collective power to reach a political goal. Moffett-Bateau’s case study method allowed her deep insight into the political identities of the women occupying the Altgeld Gardens community. The author makes it clear that it is the flexibility of her theoretical frameworks that makes her findings unique and applicable to Black women as traditionally overlooked political practitioners.
Moffett-Bateau’s findings illuminate necessary reflections about the status of political examination. She explains the extent to which present political theories fail to capture the truths of poor Black women’s everyday lives. Most imperative among her findings is the precision with which the Altgeld Gardens residents spoke about the geographic dislocation they experienced. The women in Moffett-Bateau’s study shared their stories about the spatial characteristics of their neighborhood and how violence and isolation, among other geographically informed factors, affected the relationships they built and maintained with one another and the street-level bureaucrats they often encountered. This, coupled with Moffett-Bateau’s necessary critique of the narrowness of broken windows theory, provides essential texture to conversations about blight, abandonment, and the value of neighborhoods. Together with her participants, Moffett-Bateau rightly returns the responsibility of broken windows theory to government actors. She emphasizes that, for the women of Altgeld Gardens, the neglect of their community by government bureaucracies speaks to the government’s disengagement, not the detachment of the community members. Importantly, even despite the long history of dilapidation of the Altgeld Gardens area, the community members there have almost always come together to build collective political action for the betterment of their homes and families.
Moffett-Bateau masterfully incorporates her participants’ experiences as they fall along the axes of the PPS. Their stories exemplify her theoretical framework in action. The participant vignettes permit the reader space to absorb the respondents’ experiences. Not only this, but the visual aid of the PPS allows practitioners to gain understanding and practice in utilizing the framework more broadly. Informed by their stories, she tracks the levels of alienation to belonging against respondents’ levels of political imagination. Moffett-Bateau’s critique of present political theory is ultimately strengthened by the proposed PPS and BFDC theoretical frameworks. She illustrates her contribution to better cultivated theories that are dynamic enough to more fully realize poor Black women’s experiences. Moffett-Bateau sets out to gain knowledge about Black women actors as political entities in their communities, and she skillfully accomplishes this mission, attuning to the delicate nature of political life, belonging, and exertion of power among the women she observed.
Redefining the Political is a paradigm-shifting contribution to political theory. From its foundation in the radical Black Feminist Thought tradition to its robust participant-informed insights, Moffett-Bateau’s work is an exemplar for political theory concept development. Her detailed accounts of community development and political engagement underline her central point: “belonging and political imagination are two key factors in accurately recognizing and documenting individual political identity within marginalized Black communities” (p. 190). In order to better understand and engage with diverse political practitioners, present political theory must stretch and expand its bounds. Moffett-Bateau equips political practitioners and scholars alike in this journey, through centering the voices of poor Black women who are navigating some of the most oppressive systems in the country.