In the introduction to this book, Cynthia Burack articulates her self-identity as multiple and shifting—nonblack, feminist, and interested in working through questions of group identity for personal, political, and intellectual reasons (p. 4). She summarizes the relationship delineated by black feminist theorists themselves regarding group membership and the relative power of the interpreter's voice: “Black feminist theorists are themselves often scholars in the humanities and social sciences. They write of their own struggles…. They do not reject outright the possibility that non-group members can participate in group discourse as readers or interpreters. Rather, they hold that participation confers responsibilities: to listen respectfully to the voices of group members, to claim the grounds and consequences of one's own interests, methods, and perspectives; and to avoid Olympian forms of closure that end intellectual conversation” (p. 4).

Burack successfully engages these standards throughout the book. Her respectful listening includes an attentiveness to black feminist theory beyond the “three divas” so often celebrated and cited in most mainstream feminist theory but far less frequently interpreted: Patricia Hill Collins, bell hooks, and Audre Lorde. Burack would frame my claim as a charge of idealization, a defense mechanism that prevents engagement with the difficult issues presented by black feminists (p. 134). She proposes a different approach: to engage with black feminist thought as a discourse on its own terms, from within.

This approach is not without its ethical hazards. That this book attempts such a discursive analysis reflects a move to take black feminist thought seriously; to de-idealize black feminists and their work. In this regard, Burack's approach should be celebrated. Yet a less skilled analyst could again relegate the subject of black women to a position of object, replicating many of the same issues black feminists have struggled against for centuries—the power to define oneself and one's social context on one's own terms, rather than have it defined for them by someone else. I read this book with some ambivalence about the degree to which black feminist thought should be situated as a case for discursive analysis instead of an analytical framework from which analyses emerge.

Burack attempts to locate and interpret a discourse of black feminist theory that contributes to a psychoanalytic, reparative theory of groups. In so doing, she uses black feminist theory as an exemplar of reparative group leadership, conflict management, within-group solidarity, and coalitions. Her fluency in the language of psychoanalytic political theory is enlightening and presents a tantalizing proposition—revising the dour pessimism of psychoanalytic political theory and relational theory more generally toward an empowering, reparative theory of groups. Put most succinctly, Burack asks if in fact it is human “nature” to form groups, and groups have many destructive tendencies if left to their own devices, how might we learn from another discourse about processes that serve to heal and empower group members, groups themselves, and ultimately intergroup relations? She justifies attention to black feminist theory based on the pessimism in relational theory as well as the mixed record that psychoanalytic political theorists have “in acknowledging the existence and salience of subordinated groups, whether racial/ethnic or gender” (p. 52).

I take Burack at her word when she claims that psychoanalytic political theorists could do a better job (presumably hewing to all the standards cited here) of attending to marginalized populations. Yet her fluency in psychoanalytic theory and her close readings of black feminist discourse are shadowed by a repeated tendency to use language that consistently places “race/ethnicity” and “gender” on either side of an “or,” suggesting, falsely, that they are mutually exclusive categories.

The author later reifies this placement, positing it as a limitation of both earlier relational theory and current black feminist psychoanalytic research: “While [Melanie] Klein's thought does not allow [Amina] Mama to disaggregate the effects of identity of race and of gender, it does enable her to analyze the effects of social and cultural pressures and meanings on the construction of identity”(p. 57). This use of language serves to resplit the self after the reparation process so heralded by Burack. Most importantly, it is a split enforced by the interpreter, rather than the black feminist theorist herself. Much of the literature she cites, Kimberle Williams Crenshaw and Patricia Williams especially, argues explicitly that the disaggregation motivation is misplaced regarding black women, based upon an unjust, liberal individualist legal system and political history. This is an important hindrance to Burack's interpretation.

A second interpretive obstacle emerges in Chapter 5, which discusses solidarity. The author depends on Gail Pheterson's definition: “Solidarity is knowledge of, respect for and unity with persons whose identities are in certain essential ways common with one's own” (quoted on p. 116). While I agree with Burack that solidarity is undertheorized, Pheterson's definition and Burack's subsequent analyses are impoverished by a premise that solidarity among individuals is based on the commonality of identity “in certain essential ways.” In her dependence upon Pheterson, Burack first limits her analyses of solidarity to the creation of within-group solidarity, which ignores a significant contribution of black feminist theory to political theory more generally—an egalitarian process of how “like-minded” but not “like-identified” individuals can stand in solidarity with a group. This omission disconnects Burack from the aforementioned interpretive standards set by black feminist theorists.

More importantly, however, this dependence limits her later interpretation of Hannah Arendt's exchange with Gershom Sholem. Arendt is also making a larger point beyond Burack's claim regarding multiplicity of identity. Choice, not essence of identity or sociopolitical location, is at the heart of politics and should be part of any group constituted in the political sphere, according to Arendt. Addressing this matter would entail a broader analysis of solidarity.

How might Burack, as a nonblack feminist, stand in solidarity with the goals and tenets of black feminist theory? How does Cornel West or Manning Marable stand in solidarity with black feminist theory? Burack's serious engagement with black feminist theory as a discourse serves as an entrée into two traditionally underinvestigated areas of political theory. Issues of interpretation and language notwithstanding, Healing Identities may convince many black feminist theorists and psychoanalytic political theorists that many important reparative conversations and stands are yet to be taken—together, in solidarity.