Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham

“The Metalanguage of Race,” Then and Now

Twenty-five years after the publication of Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham’s 1992 Signs essay, she not only responds to the contributors’ arguments and queries but revisits and apprises her theory of the metalanguage of race and calls for more attention to race as both a liberatory discourse and a discourse of violence and repression. Higginbotham argues that in reflecting on the discipline of history and the ideas and events that inspired her Signs article, it is useful to look backward and forward from 1992, thereby covering what amounts to three generations of scholarship. The position in the middle offers a unique vantage point, since it allows Higginbotham an opportunity to reflect upon the “then” and “now” of African American women in history, with the hindsight and foresight of the metalanguage of race.

Righteous Discontent: The Women's Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920.

Acknowledgments 1. The Black Church: A Gender Perspective 2. The Female Talented Tenth 3. Separatist Leanings 4. Unlikely Sisterhood 5. Feminist Theology, 1880-1900 6. The Coming of Age of the Black Baptist Sisterhood 7. The Politics of Respectability Notes Index