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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.

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.

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.

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.

“Reconstructing Secularisms” describes how turn-of-the-century arguments over the boundaries of literary realism were inextricably linked to the politics of secularism. This chapter follows tropes of religious excess as they circulate throughout realist fiction, from William Dean Howells’s interlocking diagnoses of racial and religious hysteria in An Imperative Duty (1891) to W. E. B. Du Bois’s more ambivalent description of the “frenzy” of the black church in “Of the Coming of John,” his early experiment with realist narrative in The Souls of Black Folk (1903). Resonating through such descriptions is a question about the aesthetic and political function of ecstasy in the aftermath of Reconstruction. While Howells depicts the black church as a site of emotional and bodily excess, Anna Julia Cooper’s A Voice from the South (1892) and Frances E. W. Harper’s Iola Leroy (1892) radically challenge this formation, offering an important take on the uses of ecstatic collectivity. They also gesture to the imminent secularism of literary history, which has largely omitted these texts from the boundaries of realism, perhaps in part because they articulate a critical relationship to secularism as a silent but hegemonic force in the Jim Crow era’s hysterical regulation of racial difference.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Roman residencies of two American artists, nineteenth-century sculptor Edmonia Lewis and contemporary photographer Carrie Mae Weems, illustrate the value of locating classical receptions in the African diaspora in unexpected places and mediums. Rome’s status as the epicenter of ancient imperialism, as well as a hub for the intertwined legacies of race and neoclassicism in transatlantic modernity, makes it a particularly charged site for black women artists. Analyzing photographs in Weems’s 2006 series Roaming as portals into the cultural and geographic spaces occupied by Lewis as she designed her 1876 sculpture Death of Cleopatra, this chapter demonstrates the breadth and vibrancy of black women’s visual interventions into modern perceptions of the classical past. Inspired by the enduring material and cultural presences of ancient Egypt in modern Rome, both artists mark out Roman spaces as historic as well as contemporary spaces for blackness, rather than facades performing whiteness.

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.