Black Feminist Theory, Cultural Work, and Disrespectability

How has respectability traveled beyond the field of black women’s history to black women’s studies and black feminist theory? How have historians mobilized black feminist theory to shape their telling of black women’s stories? To what extent does respectabilty remain an organizing framework for black feminist theory? What other organizing categories have (and do) black feminists mobilize to theorize survival and resistance.
Opening comments by Emily Owens, Assistant Professor of History, Brown University.
SPEAKERS
4:15 Kevin Quashie, Professor of English, Brown University
8:34 Tanisha Ford, Associate Professor of African American Studies and History, University of Delaware
24:31 Faith Lois Smith, Associate Professor of African and African American Studies and English, Brandeis University
41:24 Shoniqua Roach, Assistant Professor in African and African American Studies (AAAS) and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program, Brandeis University
58:38 Discussant: Farah Jasmine Griffin, William B. Ransford Professor of English and Comparative Literature and African-American Studies, Columbia University
Conference: "R-E-S-P-E-C-T-A-B-I-L-I-T-Y: Black Women’s Studies since Righteous Discontent” at Brown University, September 20, 2019. 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.