Elsa Barkley Brown, “‘What Has Happened Here?’ The Politics of Difference in Women’s History and Feminist Politics”

You will find a general prompt on the discussion board page that may offer insight into the reading. Focus your
questions and responses on the history we are studying, NOT ON TODAY. First, single out a passage or example that particularly strikes you and that has some weight to it. Then, express why you find it significant (or problematic, if that’s the case). Finally, articulate in question form what you like to discuss with others pertaining to this issue. Questions should identify specific
passages or examples in the text and be roughly 3 sentences long, including a comment about what you
found significant and what you want to raise for discussion with other students. Responses should pick up
on a particular thread and comment on a student’s question, giving your own detail or example from the
text to support your point. [Please stick within the guidelines for length.)

1. READ: Laurie Green, “Introduction: Migration, Memory , and Freedom in the Urban Heart of the Delta,” in Battling the Plantation Mentality: Memphis and the Black Freedom Struggle

For this Q/R, please consider whether you find any elements that offer new avenues for how you might approach the history of a social movement. You can stick with the examples offered in the introduction or, if there is something this essay brings to mind from a different historical context, you may bring that up too.

2. READ:

Elsa Barkley Brown, “‘What Has Happened Here?’ The Politics of Difference in Women’s History and Feminist Politics”

READ: https://www.bates.edu/news/2018/01/24/look-what-we-found-leslie-hills-prized-proclamation-of-protest/ -online account of the founding of African American Women in Defense of Ourselves along with a statement of protest by Black women historians including Elsa Barkley Brown that was published as a full-page ad in the New York Times on November 17, 1991, following the SEnate hearings on then-Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas. As you likely know, in addition to the intense public scrutiny of Justice Thomas over the past several months, President Biden in his candidacy was pressured to apologize to Anita Hill for the major role he played in Thomas’s confirmation..

This assignment 2 purposes:
1) to start a class conversation about how to think about, research, and write about gender and power in women’s history by studying Barkley Brown’s concepts as presented in this article

2) to prompt discussion on Brown’s concerns about the real-life consequences of “the politics of difference” within women’s history and feminist politics, and how she elaborates an alternative approach;

In your questions and responses, focus in on sorting out aspects of her central arguments and concepts. If you find that her argument about the Clarence Thomas Hearings and Anita Hill illuminates these arguments, you may bring that in too.

3. READ: Daniel Martínez HoSang and Natalia Molina, “Introduction: Toward a Relational Consciousness of Race,” in Molina, HoSang, and Ramón Gutiérrez, eds., Relational Formational of Race: Theory, Method, and Practice. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019, pp.1-18.

For this Q/R, Pulido’s book appeared in 2006, while Molina, HoSang, and Gutierrez’s edited collection came out 13 years later in 2019. Comparing the two, what overlaps and distinctions do you find? Consider the key concepts, what did you find particularly insightful and/or problematic and how might that matter in thinking about The First Rainbow Coalition?

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