Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham Analysis

In 1992, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham addressed the need for greater voice in African American women’s history, naming the limits of white feminist scholarship and theory in its appeal to homogeneous conceptions of “womanhood,” “woman’s culture,” and “patriarchal oppression of women.” Diagnosing how this narrow practice of the field had resulted in an extensive backgrounding of race in the crossings of gender, sexuality, and class, Higginbotham’s critical intervention not only entailed the corrective exhortation to include race alongside these other metrics of social difference, she also called attention to role of race as a “metalanguage,” describing its “all-encompasing effect on the construction and representation of other social and power relations, namely, gender, class, and sexuality.” The purchase of her argument, which in many ways is taken for granted in more recent studies and theory, is to show how race is not subordinate or epiphenomenal to class, gender, and sexuality. And, more strongly, these markers themselves are already raced, meaning that their very “power to mean” is coextensive with racialized identity and perception. I begin by recalling Higginbotham’s watershed essay because it calibrates a parallel argument I would like to make regarding …show more content…
White scholars, other white religionists, and white fundamentalist pastors all derided, condemned, and ridiculed the revivals. The press was no better. Alexander points to an early Los Angeles Times “Weird babel of tongues” which condescendingly caricatured the revivals of