A Quarter-Century of “The Politics of Respectability”

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 at Brown University, September 19-20, 2019
"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 roundtable, facilitated by Professor Tricia Rose, 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that responded to “the politics of respectability,” the ways “respectability” has traveled beyond its initial historical reference point, and the evolution of black women’s studies in general.
Opening comments by Emily Owens, Assistant Professor of History and Tricia Rose, Director of CSREA and Chancellor’s Professor of Africana Studies.
SPEAKERS
13:05 Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Victor S. Thomas Professor of History and of African and African American Studies, Harvard University
32:18 Sharon Harley, Associate Professor of African American Studies, University of Maryland
44:35 Darlene Clark Hine, John A. Hannah Distinguished Professor, Department of History, Michigan State University
52:38 Farah Jasmine Griffin, William B. Ransford Professor of English and Comparative Literature and African-American Studies, Columbia University
1:02:15 Martha S. Jones, Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor and Professor of History, Johns Hopkins University
Hosted by the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America at Brown University. 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.
Thursday, September 19, 2019
Brown University