“Free your mind.” – Morpheus, The Matrix
Black Women’s Studies theorizes and studies methodologies of/about, the intersectionality of Black women’s historical and contemporary experiences. Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham contends that feminist scholars, especially those of Black women’s history, must accept the challenge to bring race more prominently into their analyses of power. She accepts that challenge in “African American Women’s History and the Metalanguage of Race,” by investigating the three interrelated strategies for the explication of race: defining the construction and “technologies” of race, gender, and sexuality; exposing of the role and power of race as a metalanguage; and recognizing race as providing sites of dialogic exchange and contestation. In “Women of Harlem,” Kate Dossett accepts Higginbotham’s challenge and applies it to the Black women of the Harlem Renaissance.
Using Dossett’s filmed lecture, and the Higginbotham and Liu articles, discuss, interrogate, and opine intersectionality. How does the theory of intersectionality fundamentally and essentially change traditional analyses of power – from literary critique to historiography? How does ‘invisibility’ act as a double-voiced-discourse? How and why do the ‘politics of respectability’ illustrate the role of race in constructing gender’s power to mean? And how did contribute the artistic and intellectual work of the Black women of the Harlem Renaissance?
You may write in 1 st person singular
• Utilize proper and correct spelling, grammar and ‘language’
• Integrate points raised in class discussions
• Integrate your own opinions and observations
• Weave in other readings (your choice of which readings)
• Solid/sound intellectual observations, arguments and conclusion(s)
• Remember context: who, what, where, why, when, how
• Format, Font, Margins, etc (failure to follow = the loss of one letter grade):
– Standard page size (8.5×11)
– Normal margins (1” top, bottom, left and right)
– Times New Roman (size: 13)
– single spaced
– Double space between paragraphs
– Block quotes single spaced, centered, justified
– Document file format: PDF
– Google Docs, Word and links NOT accepted
• On Cover Page (required):
– Title
– First and last name
– Name of assignment (i.e., Mid-Term Essay)
– Name of Class
