Shirley Moody-Turner
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- May 2014
- ISBN:
- 9781617038853
- eISBN:
- 9781621039785
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781617038853.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, Folk Literature
Chapter three argues that the work of the Hampton Folklore Society must be understood within, but also beyond, the bounds of both the Hampton Institute and the “scientific” frame offered by the ...
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Chapter three argues that the work of the Hampton Folklore Society must be understood within, but also beyond, the bounds of both the Hampton Institute and the “scientific” frame offered by the American Folklore Society. This chapter shows how the folklorists, focusing specifically on folklorists Robert Moton, resisted having their work confined to the ideology of the Hampton Institute, while also questioning the politics of assuming a “scientific,” and often objectifying, approach to the study of their own traditions. Set within the context of the emergence of the “New Negro” ideal, the second half of this chapter examines how the Society became a site of lively dialogue, where members of the larger black intellectual community, particularly Anna Julia Cooper, debated folklore’s role in creating a “new,” distinctly African American literature rooted in a social justice agenda.Less
Chapter three argues that the work of the Hampton Folklore Society must be understood within, but also beyond, the bounds of both the Hampton Institute and the “scientific” frame offered by the American Folklore Society. This chapter shows how the folklorists, focusing specifically on folklorists Robert Moton, resisted having their work confined to the ideology of the Hampton Institute, while also questioning the politics of assuming a “scientific,” and often objectifying, approach to the study of their own traditions. Set within the context of the emergence of the “New Negro” ideal, the second half of this chapter examines how the Society became a site of lively dialogue, where members of the larger black intellectual community, particularly Anna Julia Cooper, debated folklore’s role in creating a “new,” distinctly African American literature rooted in a social justice agenda.
Carol Wayne White
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- September 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780823269815
- eISBN:
- 9780823269853
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823269815.003.0004
- Subject:
- Religion, Theology
Chapter three introduces Cooper’s late nineteenth-century romanticized feminism, discussing her creative use of nature as a trope for inspiring the young American nation to transform itself of its ...
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Chapter three introduces Cooper’s late nineteenth-century romanticized feminism, discussing her creative use of nature as a trope for inspiring the young American nation to transform itself of its racist and sexist practices and become the arena where all humans could flourish. It also discusses the theoretical underpinnings of Cooper’s expanded view of humanity, showing her points of convergence with Goethe’s philosophy of science and her vision of a communal ontology that is often a key idea within later developments in religious naturalism. Finally, this chapter shows that Cooper’s Romantic vision anticipated the capacious humanistic view associated with the concept of sacred humanity. As such, it contends that Cooper’s ideas of the creative interplay of the one and all provide a nice entry point for the African American intellectual trajectory that contributes to the later emergence of African American religious naturalism.Less
Chapter three introduces Cooper’s late nineteenth-century romanticized feminism, discussing her creative use of nature as a trope for inspiring the young American nation to transform itself of its racist and sexist practices and become the arena where all humans could flourish. It also discusses the theoretical underpinnings of Cooper’s expanded view of humanity, showing her points of convergence with Goethe’s philosophy of science and her vision of a communal ontology that is often a key idea within later developments in religious naturalism. Finally, this chapter shows that Cooper’s Romantic vision anticipated the capacious humanistic view associated with the concept of sacred humanity. As such, it contends that Cooper’s ideas of the creative interplay of the one and all provide a nice entry point for the African American intellectual trajectory that contributes to the later emergence of African American religious naturalism.
Regis M. Fox
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780813056586
- eISBN:
- 9780813053431
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Florida
- DOI:
- 10.5744/florida/9780813056586.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, African-American Literature
Anna Julia Cooper condemns ideals of abstraction and universality within the traditions of U.S. Constitutionalism, Episcopalianism, and in the literature of leading establishment writers, including ...
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Anna Julia Cooper condemns ideals of abstraction and universality within the traditions of U.S. Constitutionalism, Episcopalianism, and in the literature of leading establishment writers, including William Dean Howells. As articulated in Chapter 3, “‘Wondering under Which Head I Come’: Sounding Anna Julia Cooper’s Fin-de-Siècle Song,” an avowed embrace of difference, pluralism, and conflict characterizes Cooper’s prose, while her analyses of black male gender bias in the realm of higher education signal keen insights into the nuanced constraints of ostensibly liberal politics of the era. In A Voice From the South (1892), her reconceptualization of dominant tenets of civility and equality as “critical regard”; her invocation of musical metaphor; and her irruptions of sarcasm, compel a radical reevaluation of ways of recognizing social change. Cooper also extends an indictment of the provinciality and subtle maintenance of racial hierarchies within the (white) Women’s Movement which holds relevance today.Less
Anna Julia Cooper condemns ideals of abstraction and universality within the traditions of U.S. Constitutionalism, Episcopalianism, and in the literature of leading establishment writers, including William Dean Howells. As articulated in Chapter 3, “‘Wondering under Which Head I Come’: Sounding Anna Julia Cooper’s Fin-de-Siècle Song,” an avowed embrace of difference, pluralism, and conflict characterizes Cooper’s prose, while her analyses of black male gender bias in the realm of higher education signal keen insights into the nuanced constraints of ostensibly liberal politics of the era. In A Voice From the South (1892), her reconceptualization of dominant tenets of civility and equality as “critical regard”; her invocation of musical metaphor; and her irruptions of sarcasm, compel a radical reevaluation of ways of recognizing social change. Cooper also extends an indictment of the provinciality and subtle maintenance of racial hierarchies within the (white) Women’s Movement which holds relevance today.
Stephanie Y. Evans
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- September 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780813032689
- eISBN:
- 9780813039299
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University Press of Florida
- DOI:
- 10.5744/florida/9780813032689.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, African-American History
This book chronicles the stories of African American women who struggled for and won access to formal education, beginning in 1850, when Lucy Stanton, a student at Oberlin College, earned the first ...
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This book chronicles the stories of African American women who struggled for and won access to formal education, beginning in 1850, when Lucy Stanton, a student at Oberlin College, earned the first college diploma conferred on an African American woman. In the century between the Civil War and the civil rights movement, a critical increase in black women's educational attainment mirrored unprecedented national growth in American education. The author reveals how black women demanded space as students and asserted their voices as educators — despite such barriers as violence, discrimination, and oppressive campus policies — contributing in significant ways to higher education in the United States. She argues that their experiences, ideas, and practices can inspire contemporary educators to create an intellectual democracy in which all people have a voice. Profiles include Anna Julia Cooper, who was born enslaved yet ultimately earned a doctoral degree from the Sorbonne, and Mary McLeod Bethune, founder of Bethune-Cookman College. Exposing the hypocrisy in American assertions of democracy and discrediting European notions of intellectual superiority, Cooper argued that all human beings had a right to grow. Bethune believed that education is the right of all citizens in a democracy. Both women's philosophies raised questions of how human and civil rights are intertwined with educational access, scholarly research, pedagogy, and community service. This history of black women traces quantitative research, explores black women's collegiate memories, and identifies significant geographic patterns in America's institutional development.Less
This book chronicles the stories of African American women who struggled for and won access to formal education, beginning in 1850, when Lucy Stanton, a student at Oberlin College, earned the first college diploma conferred on an African American woman. In the century between the Civil War and the civil rights movement, a critical increase in black women's educational attainment mirrored unprecedented national growth in American education. The author reveals how black women demanded space as students and asserted their voices as educators — despite such barriers as violence, discrimination, and oppressive campus policies — contributing in significant ways to higher education in the United States. She argues that their experiences, ideas, and practices can inspire contemporary educators to create an intellectual democracy in which all people have a voice. Profiles include Anna Julia Cooper, who was born enslaved yet ultimately earned a doctoral degree from the Sorbonne, and Mary McLeod Bethune, founder of Bethune-Cookman College. Exposing the hypocrisy in American assertions of democracy and discrediting European notions of intellectual superiority, Cooper argued that all human beings had a right to grow. Bethune believed that education is the right of all citizens in a democracy. Both women's philosophies raised questions of how human and civil rights are intertwined with educational access, scholarly research, pedagogy, and community service. This history of black women traces quantitative research, explores black women's collegiate memories, and identifies significant geographic patterns in America's institutional development.
Stephanie Y. Evans
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- September 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780813032689
- eISBN:
- 9780813039299
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Florida
- DOI:
- 10.5744/florida/9780813032689.003.0001
- Subject:
- History, African-American History
This book chronicles the struggles of African American women in gaining access to formal education and presents the philosophies of influential black women academics. This book aims to investigate ...
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This book chronicles the struggles of African American women in gaining access to formal education and presents the philosophies of influential black women academics. This book aims to investigate the history of black women in higher education, to interpret the historic relationship between cultural identity and education, and to demonstrate how the struggles of these women on gaining access to education can inspire contemporary educators to modify the academy into a tool that will serve as a catalyst for social equity and opportunity. In this book, the discussion traces the history of the educational struggles of black women wherein they demanded a niche in the academy as students and asserted their voices as educators whereby, despite the challenges and barriers posed by violence, oppressive campus policies and discrimination, they made a significant contribution in the modification and transformation of higher education in the United States. This book examines the lives of Anna Julia Cooper who was born enslaved yet earned a degree from the Sorbonne University and Mary McLeod Bethune who founded the Bethune-Cookman College. These two women exposed the hypocrisy in American notions of democracy and discredited European notions of intellectual superiority. They also worked for the assertion of equality in access to education wherein they contended that education is an inviolable right of all individuals in a democracy. Their philosophies as well brought a question on how human and civil rights were intertwined with education, scholarly research, pedagogy, and community service.Less
This book chronicles the struggles of African American women in gaining access to formal education and presents the philosophies of influential black women academics. This book aims to investigate the history of black women in higher education, to interpret the historic relationship between cultural identity and education, and to demonstrate how the struggles of these women on gaining access to education can inspire contemporary educators to modify the academy into a tool that will serve as a catalyst for social equity and opportunity. In this book, the discussion traces the history of the educational struggles of black women wherein they demanded a niche in the academy as students and asserted their voices as educators whereby, despite the challenges and barriers posed by violence, oppressive campus policies and discrimination, they made a significant contribution in the modification and transformation of higher education in the United States. This book examines the lives of Anna Julia Cooper who was born enslaved yet earned a degree from the Sorbonne University and Mary McLeod Bethune who founded the Bethune-Cookman College. These two women exposed the hypocrisy in American notions of democracy and discredited European notions of intellectual superiority. They also worked for the assertion of equality in access to education wherein they contended that education is an inviolable right of all individuals in a democracy. Their philosophies as well brought a question on how human and civil rights were intertwined with education, scholarly research, pedagogy, and community service.
Vincent W. Lloyd
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780199362189
- eISBN:
- 9780190610593
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199362189.003.0002
- Subject:
- Political Science, American Politics, Political Theory
The chapter examines how Anna Julia Cooper appealed to the natural law (sometimes framed as higher law or God’s law). It explores Cooper’s life and writings, placing a particular emphasis on the way ...
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The chapter examines how Anna Julia Cooper appealed to the natural law (sometimes framed as higher law or God’s law). It explores Cooper’s life and writings, placing a particular emphasis on the way that she understood human nature as reflecting God’s image. The chapter examines Cooper’s major work, A Voice from the South, and it also draws on archival research, engaging with material not previously discussed in the scholarly literature. Cooper brought a particular focus on family and local community to her reflections on natural law. It concludes that Cooper used natural law as a means of ideology critique and as a means for catalyzing social movements.Less
The chapter examines how Anna Julia Cooper appealed to the natural law (sometimes framed as higher law or God’s law). It explores Cooper’s life and writings, placing a particular emphasis on the way that she understood human nature as reflecting God’s image. The chapter examines Cooper’s major work, A Voice from the South, and it also draws on archival research, engaging with material not previously discussed in the scholarly literature. Cooper brought a particular focus on family and local community to her reflections on natural law. It concludes that Cooper used natural law as a means of ideology critique and as a means for catalyzing social movements.
Brittney C. Cooper
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780252040993
- eISBN:
- 9780252099540
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5406/illinois/9780252040993.003.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Gender Studies
Beyond Respectability employs an Anna Julia Cooperian approach to reading and interrogating the theoretical work and lived experiences of Black women intellectuals. To understand this methodological ...
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Beyond Respectability employs an Anna Julia Cooperian approach to reading and interrogating the theoretical work and lived experiences of Black women intellectuals. To understand this methodological approach, one needs to first become acquainted with two of Cooper’s cardinal commitments. They include: 1) a commitment to seeing the Black female body as a form of possibility and not a burden, and 2) a commitment to centering the Black female body as a means to cathect Black social thought. In Voice, Cooper places the Black female body and all that it knows squarely in the center of the text’s methodology. She fundamentally believed that we cannot divorce Black women’s bodies from the theory they produce. The author recognizes these forms as an embodied discourse, which predominates in Cooper’s work. Embodied discourse refers to a form of Black female textual activism wherein race women assertively demand the inclusion of their bodies and, in particular, working class bodies and Black female bodies by placing them in the texts they write and speak. By pointing to all the ways Black women’s bodies emerge in formal and informal autobiographical accounts, archival materials, and advocacy work, this work disrupts the smooth function of the culture of dissemblance and the politics of respectability as the paradigmatic frames through which to engage Black women’s ideas and their politics.Less
Beyond Respectability employs an Anna Julia Cooperian approach to reading and interrogating the theoretical work and lived experiences of Black women intellectuals. To understand this methodological approach, one needs to first become acquainted with two of Cooper’s cardinal commitments. They include: 1) a commitment to seeing the Black female body as a form of possibility and not a burden, and 2) a commitment to centering the Black female body as a means to cathect Black social thought. In Voice, Cooper places the Black female body and all that it knows squarely in the center of the text’s methodology. She fundamentally believed that we cannot divorce Black women’s bodies from the theory they produce. The author recognizes these forms as an embodied discourse, which predominates in Cooper’s work. Embodied discourse refers to a form of Black female textual activism wherein race women assertively demand the inclusion of their bodies and, in particular, working class bodies and Black female bodies by placing them in the texts they write and speak. By pointing to all the ways Black women’s bodies emerge in formal and informal autobiographical accounts, archival materials, and advocacy work, this work disrupts the smooth function of the culture of dissemblance and the politics of respectability as the paradigmatic frames through which to engage Black women’s ideas and their politics.
Regis M. Fox
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780813056586
- eISBN:
- 9780813053431
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University Press of Florida
- DOI:
- 10.5744/florida/9780813056586.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, African-American Literature
A reimagining of liberal ideologies of selfhood, privilege, and consent is a significant legacy of nineteenth-century black feminist knowledge production. Yet, analyses of black women’s critical ...
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A reimagining of liberal ideologies of selfhood, privilege, and consent is a significant legacy of nineteenth-century black feminist knowledge production. Yet, analyses of black women’s critical engagement with theliberal problematic—the disjunction between democratic promise and dispossession, between freedom and subjection in the American nation-state—remain incomplete. Resistance Reimagined: Black Women’s Critical Thought as Survival repositions a spectrum of discourses, from canonical nineteenth-century American literary studies to black women’s history, to interrogate black women’s disruptions of the liberal problematic as a medium of resistance. It deploys African-Americanist and feminist literary criticism by scholars such as Saidiya Hartman and Lindon Barrett, post-1960s histories of enslavement and black political consciousness by Stephanie M. H. Camp, and rhetorical theories developed by Shirley Wilson Logan and Vorris Nunley, to expand the bounds of contemporary critical inquiry in two key ways. First, Resistance Reimagined spotlights nineteenth-century black women’s intervention into the effects of liberalism as juridical, economic, and affective performance. This unsettles sedimented perspectives of black resistance as inherently militant, male, and vernacular, while problematizing how scholars have read nineteenth-century African-American women’s activism—against Sojourner Truth or Ida B. Wells-Barnett, for instance—as inauthentic or accommodationist. Second, the text juxtaposes early writers and thinkers, including Harriet Wilson, Elizabeth Keckly, and Anna Julia Cooper, with authors of modern neo-slave narrative, including Sherley Anne Williams, to grapple more effectively with the neoliberal present.Less
A reimagining of liberal ideologies of selfhood, privilege, and consent is a significant legacy of nineteenth-century black feminist knowledge production. Yet, analyses of black women’s critical engagement with theliberal problematic—the disjunction between democratic promise and dispossession, between freedom and subjection in the American nation-state—remain incomplete. Resistance Reimagined: Black Women’s Critical Thought as Survival repositions a spectrum of discourses, from canonical nineteenth-century American literary studies to black women’s history, to interrogate black women’s disruptions of the liberal problematic as a medium of resistance. It deploys African-Americanist and feminist literary criticism by scholars such as Saidiya Hartman and Lindon Barrett, post-1960s histories of enslavement and black political consciousness by Stephanie M. H. Camp, and rhetorical theories developed by Shirley Wilson Logan and Vorris Nunley, to expand the bounds of contemporary critical inquiry in two key ways. First, Resistance Reimagined spotlights nineteenth-century black women’s intervention into the effects of liberalism as juridical, economic, and affective performance. This unsettles sedimented perspectives of black resistance as inherently militant, male, and vernacular, while problematizing how scholars have read nineteenth-century African-American women’s activism—against Sojourner Truth or Ida B. Wells-Barnett, for instance—as inauthentic or accommodationist. Second, the text juxtaposes early writers and thinkers, including Harriet Wilson, Elizabeth Keckly, and Anna Julia Cooper, with authors of modern neo-slave narrative, including Sherley Anne Williams, to grapple more effectively with the neoliberal present.
Carol Wayne White
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- September 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780823269815
- eISBN:
- 9780823269853
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823269815.001.0001
- Subject:
- Religion, Theology
This book explores a new religious ideal within African American culture that emerges from humanistic assumptions and is grounded in religious naturalism. Identifying African American religiosity as ...
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This book explores a new religious ideal within African American culture that emerges from humanistic assumptions and is grounded in religious naturalism. Identifying African American religiosity as the ingenuity of a people constantly striving to inhabit their humanity and eke out a meaningful existence for themselves amid culturally coded racist rhetoric and practices, it constructs a concept of sacred humanity and grounds it in existing hagiographic and iconic African American writings. The first part of the book argues for a concept of sacred humanity that is supported by the best available knowledge emerging from science studies, philosophy of religion, and the tenets of religious naturalism. With this concept, the book features capacious views of humans as dynamic, evolving, social organisms having the capacity to transform ourselves and create nobler worlds where all sentient creatures flourish, and as aspiring lovers of life and of each other. Within the context of African American history and culture, the sacred humanity concept also offers new ways of grasping an ongoing theme of traditional African American religiosity: the necessity of establishing and valuing blacks’ full humanity. In the second part, the book traces indications of the sacred humanity concept within select works of three major African American intellectuals of the early and mid-twentieth century: Anna Julia Cooper, W. E. B. Dubois, and James Baldwin. The theoretical linkage of select ideas and themes in their writings with the concept of sacred humanity marks the emergence of an African American religious naturalism.Less
This book explores a new religious ideal within African American culture that emerges from humanistic assumptions and is grounded in religious naturalism. Identifying African American religiosity as the ingenuity of a people constantly striving to inhabit their humanity and eke out a meaningful existence for themselves amid culturally coded racist rhetoric and practices, it constructs a concept of sacred humanity and grounds it in existing hagiographic and iconic African American writings. The first part of the book argues for a concept of sacred humanity that is supported by the best available knowledge emerging from science studies, philosophy of religion, and the tenets of religious naturalism. With this concept, the book features capacious views of humans as dynamic, evolving, social organisms having the capacity to transform ourselves and create nobler worlds where all sentient creatures flourish, and as aspiring lovers of life and of each other. Within the context of African American history and culture, the sacred humanity concept also offers new ways of grasping an ongoing theme of traditional African American religiosity: the necessity of establishing and valuing blacks’ full humanity. In the second part, the book traces indications of the sacred humanity concept within select works of three major African American intellectuals of the early and mid-twentieth century: Anna Julia Cooper, W. E. B. Dubois, and James Baldwin. The theoretical linkage of select ideas and themes in their writings with the concept of sacred humanity marks the emergence of an African American religious naturalism.
Cheryl D. Hicks
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- July 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780807834244
- eISBN:
- 9781469603759
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/9780807882320_hicks.4
- Subject:
- History, African-American History
This book begins with a description of how Anna Julia Cooper and Lucy Cox both struggled to be understood as women of intelligence and vision. Their differing positions, however, shaped how they ...
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This book begins with a description of how Anna Julia Cooper and Lucy Cox both struggled to be understood as women of intelligence and vision. Their differing positions, however, shaped how they voiced their grievances regarding the treatment of black women in America. Cooper, born into slavery in 1858 in Raleigh, North Carolina, exemplified racial advancement after emancipation. Influenced by the Reconstruction era and the dictates of the dominant nineteenth-century gender ideology, she was one of a handful of black women to graduate from Oberlin with bachelor's and master's degrees. Eventually earning a Ph.D. in 1925 at the Sorbonne in Paris, she had a long career as an activist and educator in Washington, DC. Cooper consistently questioned the sexism and racism she encountered and is best known for her germinal 1892 black feminist text, A Voice from the South.Less
This book begins with a description of how Anna Julia Cooper and Lucy Cox both struggled to be understood as women of intelligence and vision. Their differing positions, however, shaped how they voiced their grievances regarding the treatment of black women in America. Cooper, born into slavery in 1858 in Raleigh, North Carolina, exemplified racial advancement after emancipation. Influenced by the Reconstruction era and the dictates of the dominant nineteenth-century gender ideology, she was one of a handful of black women to graduate from Oberlin with bachelor's and master's degrees. Eventually earning a Ph.D. in 1925 at the Sorbonne in Paris, she had a long career as an activist and educator in Washington, DC. Cooper consistently questioned the sexism and racism she encountered and is best known for her germinal 1892 black feminist text, A Voice from the South.
Nick Bromell
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- September 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780199973439
- eISBN:
- 9780199367771
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199973439.003.0006
- Subject:
- Political Science, Political Theory
This chapter discusses the expressions of faith in the works of several black American writers and thinkers. These figures—Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, Anna Julia Cooper, Pauli Murray, James ...
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This chapter discusses the expressions of faith in the works of several black American writers and thinkers. These figures—Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, Anna Julia Cooper, Pauli Murray, James Baldwin, Martin Luther King, and Malcolm X—practiced a faith that strove toward the infinite while also respecting the pluralism inherent in individual experience and contingent historical conditions. Instead of imagining the transcendent and the worldly as either separated by an infinite expanse of empty time and space, or as one and the same thing, they saw them as always running parallel to each other and sometimes converging in a moment of action in the here and now.Less
This chapter discusses the expressions of faith in the works of several black American writers and thinkers. These figures—Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, Anna Julia Cooper, Pauli Murray, James Baldwin, Martin Luther King, and Malcolm X—practiced a faith that strove toward the infinite while also respecting the pluralism inherent in individual experience and contingent historical conditions. Instead of imagining the transcendent and the worldly as either separated by an infinite expanse of empty time and space, or as one and the same thing, they saw them as always running parallel to each other and sometimes converging in a moment of action in the here and now.
Carolyn L. Karcher
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- September 2016
- ISBN:
- 9781469627953
- eISBN:
- 9781469627977
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469627953.003.0002
- Subject:
- History, African-American History
Chapter 2 focuses on Tourgée’s 1890 novel Pactolus Prime, in which he blasted white racism and white Christianity through the mouth of his title character, an African American bootblack who has ...
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Chapter 2 focuses on Tourgée’s 1890 novel Pactolus Prime, in which he blasted white racism and white Christianity through the mouth of his title character, an African American bootblack who has earlier passed for white. By analyzing the reception of the novel by white Southerners, white Northerners, and African Americans, the chapter also illustrates the dialogue about the race question that Tourgée provoked. White Southerners accused Tourgée of fomenting hatred, as did Joel Chandler Harris, who branded him a “refugee from his race.” White Northerners generally praised the novel but complained that Tourgée offered no solution to the racism he excoriated. African Americans hailed Tourgée for eloquently expressing their own sentiments, as did Anna Julia Cooper, but some, including Charles W. Chesnutt, objected to the novel’s seeming endorsement of racial passing and to its pessimistic denouement.Less
Chapter 2 focuses on Tourgée’s 1890 novel Pactolus Prime, in which he blasted white racism and white Christianity through the mouth of his title character, an African American bootblack who has earlier passed for white. By analyzing the reception of the novel by white Southerners, white Northerners, and African Americans, the chapter also illustrates the dialogue about the race question that Tourgée provoked. White Southerners accused Tourgée of fomenting hatred, as did Joel Chandler Harris, who branded him a “refugee from his race.” White Northerners generally praised the novel but complained that Tourgée offered no solution to the racism he excoriated. African Americans hailed Tourgée for eloquently expressing their own sentiments, as did Anna Julia Cooper, but some, including Charles W. Chesnutt, objected to the novel’s seeming endorsement of racial passing and to its pessimistic denouement.
Regis M. Fox
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780813056586
- eISBN:
- 9780813053431
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Florida
- DOI:
- 10.5744/florida/9780813056586.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, African-American Literature
The conclusion explores the kinship between Resistance Reimagined: Black Women’s Critical Thought as Survival and the #SayHerName Movement, as articulated by the African American Policy Forum. A more ...
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The conclusion explores the kinship between Resistance Reimagined: Black Women’s Critical Thought as Survival and the #SayHerName Movement, as articulated by the African American Policy Forum. A more capacious roll call of instigators of black opposition encompasses sustained engagement with the philosophies and social achievements of intellectuals too frequently deemed incomprehensible as such. Accordingly, fully engaging with the liberal problematic entails grappling with fierce intricacies of black interiority and imagination, thereby upsetting time-honored biases regarding black resistance and power. Reading Harriet Wilson, Elizabeth Keckly, and Anna Julia Cooper’s literary endeavors differently likewise involves theorizing a counter-hegemony as concerned with vicious racial antagonism as subtle micro-aggression, with a theft of the black body as with a theft of black joy. In neglecting black knowledge production in its myriad forms, a history bereft of ambiguity and contradiction, and consequently, of humanity, emerges.Less
The conclusion explores the kinship between Resistance Reimagined: Black Women’s Critical Thought as Survival and the #SayHerName Movement, as articulated by the African American Policy Forum. A more capacious roll call of instigators of black opposition encompasses sustained engagement with the philosophies and social achievements of intellectuals too frequently deemed incomprehensible as such. Accordingly, fully engaging with the liberal problematic entails grappling with fierce intricacies of black interiority and imagination, thereby upsetting time-honored biases regarding black resistance and power. Reading Harriet Wilson, Elizabeth Keckly, and Anna Julia Cooper’s literary endeavors differently likewise involves theorizing a counter-hegemony as concerned with vicious racial antagonism as subtle micro-aggression, with a theft of the black body as with a theft of black joy. In neglecting black knowledge production in its myriad forms, a history bereft of ambiguity and contradiction, and consequently, of humanity, emerges.
Regis M. Fox
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780813056586
- eISBN:
- 9780813053431
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Florida
- DOI:
- 10.5744/florida/9780813056586.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, African-American Literature
The introduction examines processes by which nineteenth-century black women writers have been disassociated from legitimate forms of black struggle and defiance. Extending a definition of the liberal ...
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The introduction examines processes by which nineteenth-century black women writers have been disassociated from legitimate forms of black struggle and defiance. Extending a definition of the liberal problematic, and situating liberal ideology critique as a viable mode of resistance, the introductory chapter specifies methodology and content. It also addresses the ways in which Harriet Wilson, Elizabeth Keckly, and Anna Julia Cooper undermine fundamental liberal and Enlightenment precepts including reason, individualism, and the foregrounding of a transcendental subject. Each of these mix-raced, working, widowed women relies on distinct tropes of embodiment in their writing to contest reigning prescriptions toward objectivity, while making visible the constraints of practices of inclusion. Charting a “becoming together” of earlier thinkers with contemporary African-American art in the vein of Sherley Anne Williams’ novel Dessa Rose, the introduction to Resistance Reimagined offers rich insight into literary perspectives of liberalism.Less
The introduction examines processes by which nineteenth-century black women writers have been disassociated from legitimate forms of black struggle and defiance. Extending a definition of the liberal problematic, and situating liberal ideology critique as a viable mode of resistance, the introductory chapter specifies methodology and content. It also addresses the ways in which Harriet Wilson, Elizabeth Keckly, and Anna Julia Cooper undermine fundamental liberal and Enlightenment precepts including reason, individualism, and the foregrounding of a transcendental subject. Each of these mix-raced, working, widowed women relies on distinct tropes of embodiment in their writing to contest reigning prescriptions toward objectivity, while making visible the constraints of practices of inclusion. Charting a “becoming together” of earlier thinkers with contemporary African-American art in the vein of Sherley Anne Williams’ novel Dessa Rose, the introduction to Resistance Reimagined offers rich insight into literary perspectives of liberalism.
Vincent W. Lloyd
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780199362189
- eISBN:
- 9780190610593
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199362189.001.0001
- Subject:
- Political Science, American Politics, Political Theory
Black Natural Law offers a new way of understanding the African American political tradition. By telling the stories of Frederick Douglass, Anna Julia Cooper, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Martin Luther King ...
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Black Natural Law offers a new way of understanding the African American political tradition. By telling the stories of Frederick Douglass, Anna Julia Cooper, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Martin Luther King Jr., the book shows how appeals to a higher law, or God’s law, have long fueled black political engagement. Such appeals do not seek to implement divine directives on earth; rather, they pose a challenge to the wisdom of the world, and they mobilize communities for collective action. Black natural law is deeply democratic: While charismatic leaders may provide the occasion for reflection and mobilization, all are capable of discerning the higher law using human capacities for reason and emotion. At a time when continuing racial injustice poses a deep moral challenge, the most powerful intellectual resources in the struggle for justice have been abandoned. Black Natural Law recovers a rich tradition, and it examines just how this tradition was forgotten. A black intellectual class emerged that was disconnected from social movement organizing and beholden to white interests. Appeals to higher law became politically impotent: overly rational or overly sentimental. Recovering the black natural law tradition provides a powerful resource for confronting police violence, mass incarceration, and today’s gross racial inequities. Black Natural Law offers a new way to approach natural law, a topic central to the Western ethical and political tradition. While drawing particularly on African American resources, Black Natural Law speaks to all who seek politics animated by justice.Less
Black Natural Law offers a new way of understanding the African American political tradition. By telling the stories of Frederick Douglass, Anna Julia Cooper, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Martin Luther King Jr., the book shows how appeals to a higher law, or God’s law, have long fueled black political engagement. Such appeals do not seek to implement divine directives on earth; rather, they pose a challenge to the wisdom of the world, and they mobilize communities for collective action. Black natural law is deeply democratic: While charismatic leaders may provide the occasion for reflection and mobilization, all are capable of discerning the higher law using human capacities for reason and emotion. At a time when continuing racial injustice poses a deep moral challenge, the most powerful intellectual resources in the struggle for justice have been abandoned. Black Natural Law recovers a rich tradition, and it examines just how this tradition was forgotten. A black intellectual class emerged that was disconnected from social movement organizing and beholden to white interests. Appeals to higher law became politically impotent: overly rational or overly sentimental. Recovering the black natural law tradition provides a powerful resource for confronting police violence, mass incarceration, and today’s gross racial inequities. Black Natural Law offers a new way to approach natural law, a topic central to the Western ethical and political tradition. While drawing particularly on African American resources, Black Natural Law speaks to all who seek politics animated by justice.
Lida Maxwell
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- June 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780190920029
- eISBN:
- 9780190920067
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190920029.003.0002
- Subject:
- Political Science, American Politics, Political Theory
Through discussion of feminist and queer conceptions of “the outsider,” this chapter develops a distinctive conception of outsider truth-telling as the practice of refusing the public/private divide ...
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Through discussion of feminist and queer conceptions of “the outsider,” this chapter develops a distinctive conception of outsider truth-telling as the practice of refusing the public/private divide that structures norms of proper speech and comportment. Outsider truth-telling reveals a reality of oppression and domination that productively unsettles society and enables outsider survival as flourishing. Yet this outsider practice of truth-telling is also inhabited by a dilemma: how to maintain a capacity to speak truth to the public and private realms (and be heard by them) that depends at the same time on remaining outside of those realms in some sense. The chapter suggests that the creation and imagination of tenuous outsider spaces (focusing on Virginia Woolf’s “bridge” and Anna Julia Cooper’s “corner”) offers a promising way to negotiate this dilemma and create a political imaginary where one need not be absorbed by public and private realms to speak to them.Less
Through discussion of feminist and queer conceptions of “the outsider,” this chapter develops a distinctive conception of outsider truth-telling as the practice of refusing the public/private divide that structures norms of proper speech and comportment. Outsider truth-telling reveals a reality of oppression and domination that productively unsettles society and enables outsider survival as flourishing. Yet this outsider practice of truth-telling is also inhabited by a dilemma: how to maintain a capacity to speak truth to the public and private realms (and be heard by them) that depends at the same time on remaining outside of those realms in some sense. The chapter suggests that the creation and imagination of tenuous outsider spaces (focusing on Virginia Woolf’s “bridge” and Anna Julia Cooper’s “corner”) offers a promising way to negotiate this dilemma and create a political imaginary where one need not be absorbed by public and private realms to speak to them.
Regis M. Fox
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780813056586
- eISBN:
- 9780813053431
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Florida
- DOI:
- 10.5744/florida/9780813056586.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, African-American Literature
Novels such as Sherley Anne Williams’ Dessa Rose, as well as the focus of “‘Mammy Ain’t Nobody Name’: Power, Privilege, and the Bodying Forth of Resistance,” provoke dialogue with Wilson, Keckly, and ...
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Novels such as Sherley Anne Williams’ Dessa Rose, as well as the focus of “‘Mammy Ain’t Nobody Name’: Power, Privilege, and the Bodying Forth of Resistance,” provoke dialogue with Wilson, Keckly, and Cooper in important ways. Exploring Williams’s engagement with previous legacies of resistance, Chapter 4 draws attention to her disruption of a “neoliberal problematic” via her distinct problematization of the mind-body split and associated tropes of mediation such as the “as-told-to” dynamic. Like Wilson, Williams interrogates the indecipherability of black rage within both interracial and intra-racial liberal matrices of privilege and authority; like Keckly, she destabilizes the “Mammy” figure and undercuts liberal models of interracial friendship; and like Cooper, Williams cultivates an insurgent politics of sound. Becoming together with Wilson, Keckly, and Cooper in the aforementioned ways, Williams’s fiction exhibits a comparable attentiveness to situating blackness beyond conventional registers of containment, intervening into Enlightenment-era discourses of knowledge and self.Less
Novels such as Sherley Anne Williams’ Dessa Rose, as well as the focus of “‘Mammy Ain’t Nobody Name’: Power, Privilege, and the Bodying Forth of Resistance,” provoke dialogue with Wilson, Keckly, and Cooper in important ways. Exploring Williams’s engagement with previous legacies of resistance, Chapter 4 draws attention to her disruption of a “neoliberal problematic” via her distinct problematization of the mind-body split and associated tropes of mediation such as the “as-told-to” dynamic. Like Wilson, Williams interrogates the indecipherability of black rage within both interracial and intra-racial liberal matrices of privilege and authority; like Keckly, she destabilizes the “Mammy” figure and undercuts liberal models of interracial friendship; and like Cooper, Williams cultivates an insurgent politics of sound. Becoming together with Wilson, Keckly, and Cooper in the aforementioned ways, Williams’s fiction exhibits a comparable attentiveness to situating blackness beyond conventional registers of containment, intervening into Enlightenment-era discourses of knowledge and self.
