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Username: Tonya
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Registered: 07-2006
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Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, August 14, 2006 - 12:11 am: | 
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Recommended viewing: The Future of Black Women's History 17:32
Click Link to Watch:
http://athome.harvard.edu/programs/gar/gar_video/gar_1.html
Darlene Clark Hine: The Future of Black Women's History
Darlene Clark Hine, professor of American history at Northwestern University, discusses what she sees as three major grids in black women's history. In addition, Hine refers to two areas in need of greater research: interiority and internationalization. "Black women's history has deepened our understanding of the multiple systems of stratification" in this country, she explains, and it has "introduced into American history the intersectional approach to examining interlocking systems of oppression that create hierarchal patterns of power and privilege that produce and perpetuate women's social marginalization, economic insecurity, and political underrepresentation."
"This formal or academic history of black women as a social class, a community of shared memory at the intersections of the construction of race, class, and gender, has developed along three parallel grids."
The first grid began in the 1970s and today remains concerned with the creation of archives, such as the Schlesinger Library's Black Women's Oral History Project, the Black Women in the Middle West Project, and the accumulation of manuscript collections. This grid is also concerned with the preparation of reference works, including the Black Women in America encyclopedia.
"The second grid witnessed the emergence of important monographs about major sociopolitical movements that expanded rights for women and all excluded groups. Black women's participation in the anti-slavery movement, the suffrage movement, the women's club movement, the civil rights movement, and feminist movements all demand sustained attention and have received important historical work." This grid is most noted for the production of many important biographies of individual women.
"The third grid is characterized in part by theoretical conversations that dissect the tensions, conflicts, and contradictions embedded in black women's multiple agendas and in their sexual identities."
The unifying rope that links these three grids is black women's relentless quest for human rights and dignity.
Hine believes the future of black women's history will focus on two areas of research: interiority and internationalization. States Hine, "Our challenging future task will be to explore the interior culture of consciousness of black women. At one point or another, each of us resides within multiple systems of inequality. Black women, however, had to negotiate all the central mechanisms of inequality, while embarking upon collaborative projects and forging necessary coalitions. Such a complex existence dictated that they construct interior worlds.… We need to hear their voices, to see their bodies, to appreciate their struggles—victorious and otherwise." Professor Hine says few black women are willing to reveal the depths of pain they have experienced from colorism, domestic violence, and self-hatred. "In other words, a conspiracy of silence and a veil of secrecy still cover their vulnerability." Developing a postnationalistic framework within which to study the experiences of black women, global women of color, and white western women is the international challenge. "In sum, the internationalization of black women's history dictates that we map complexities of identity, distribution of social power, and material resources...and meticulously explore the links between patriarchy, colonialism, capitalism, and racism in the perpetuation of the sexual exploitation of women." |
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