Opening Plenary for “R-E-S-P-E-C-T-A-B-I-L-I-T-Y: Black Women’s Studies since ‘Righteous Discontent’” Conference

CSREA and the Workshop for WOC Feminisms at Brown.
, Room 120

Download a complete agenda.

Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 by Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham impacted a wide range of disciplines and areas, among them, gender and sexuality studies, histories of labor and resistance, and black feminist theory. This two-day symposium will gather together scholars working in African American women’s history and black feminist theory to celebrate and reflect upon the impact of “the politics of respectability” on the shape and substance of scholarship in these fields.

Free and open to the public. No registration required. 

Opening Plenary:
A Quarter-Century of “The Politics of Respectability”

Thursday’s plenary will take the format of a roundtable discussion about the moment in which Righteous Discontent emerged, facilitated by Professor Tricia Rose. The roundtable will consider the late 1980s/1990s with respect to the book and the field of African American women’s history, the relationship of the book to various fields, the impact of other key theoretical and historiographic interventions that responded to “the politics of respectability,” the ways “respectability” has traveled beyond its initial historical reference point, and the evolution of black women’s studies in general.

Speakers
  • Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Victor S. Thomas Professor of History and of African and African American Studies, Harvard University
  • Darlene Clark Hine, John A. Hannah Distinguished Professor, Department of History, Michigan State University
  • Martha S. Jones, Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor and Professor of History, Johns Hopkins University
  • Farah Jasmine Griffin, William B. Ransford Professor of English and Comparative Literature and African-American Studies, Columbia University
  • Sharon Harley, Associate Professor of African American Studies, University of Maryland

Reception to follow.

Co-sponsored by the Workshop for WOC Feminisms at Brown, Department of American Studies, Department of History, Department of Africana Studies, and the Pembroke Center.