2017 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Genders and Sexualities

June 01 - 04, 2017

Twenty-five years after its original publication in Signs: Journal of Women and Culture in Society, this roundtable revisits the black feminist historian Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham’s groundbreaking article, “African-American Women’s History and the Metalanguage of Race.” Higginbotham critiques various feminist theorists for ignoring issues of race in their studies of gender and power and suggests that their narrowness is particularly vexing given the centrality of race in African American scholarship and the fact that racism continues to grow with “verve and subtlety.” She asks feminist scholars to take on the challenge of bringing “race more prominently into their analysis of power” and to see race as a “global sign” or a “metalanguage” that “speaks about and lends meaning to a host of terms and expressions and to myriad aspect of life that would otherwise fall outside the referential domain of race.” In our roundtable LaMonda Horton-Stallings, Dayo F. Gore, Marlon M. Bailey, Robin D. G. Kelley, Tamar Carroll, and I will examine the breadth and impact of Higginbotham’s article. The roundtable concludes with Higginbotham’s response to our essays and her own reflections on “Metalanguage of Race” on the twenty-fifth anniversary of its publication. This Berkshire roundtable will also coincide with the publication of a special “Metalanguage” roundtable in Signs.