Higginbotham to Brubaker


Dear Rogers Brubaker,

I believe that we have a lot to learn from each other. In my essay, “African-American Women’s History and the Metalanguage of Race”, I examine and bring to light the dichotomies that exist in our cultural, social, and historical conceptions of race. In several chapters of “Trans”, you take an approach to conceptions of race and gender that also localize on dichotomies, but then expand in transformational ways. While you situate gender and race as topics to be compared, you do not analyze them in tandem (I think Elsa Barkely Brown might critique you for this absence, for, as she says, “histories exist in dialogue with one another”).

My work regarding race and gender focuses on its application to African-American women, and the reality of racism has historically placed African-American women on a scale of humanity in regards to sexuality. The scale creates a dichotomy between savagery and deviance to civilization and normality, with white and black women on opposite sides of the scale. I am curious to see the scholarship you would produce if you moved beyond separate conceptualizations of race and gender like I have.

Another dichotomy I have identified is the double-voiced discourse surrounding race. While white people use race and language to oppress and exploit, black people transform language of race to serve black liberation and empowerment. You might also find the perspective of H. Samy Alim pertinent to our studies of language and race. In his essay, “Who’s Afraid of the Transracial Subject?”, he describes language as a means of becoming transracial – a concept that complements your different perceptions of anti-categorical conceptions and creations of race.

Additionally, I enjoyed learning about the way you explained gender as normally viewed as volunteerism and not tightly coupled to the body, as opposed to race which is tightly coupled to the body, especially in North American ancestral perceptions of race. I examine the different ways gender and race work in the United States through the lens of the metalanguage of race. Through this, I understand race as having a totalizing and determinant effect on class and gender.

Most importantly, I think it would do you well to read my work on the way the dichotomies of race function in American society, both in the past and the present. While you describe the current cultural flux of fluidity and permissiveness in regards to race, I argue that fluidity and flux have always been a part of American racial identity. To me, race is an unstable complex of social meaning that is being constantly being transformed by political struggle. Most importantly, race is strategically necessary for the functioning of power in countless institutional and ideological forms. Realizing the concrete ways race and gender directly and intimately effect every interaction of people of all races is central to my work, and perhaps this emphasis could be incorporated into your academic scholarship as well.

Best,
Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham

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