Black Feminist Studies: The Case of Anna Julia Cooper

2009 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 11-15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Beverly Guy-Sheftall
Keyword(s):  
Feminist Studies ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Anna Julia Cooper

Curricula of Care and Radical Love

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Racheal Banda ◽  
Ganiva Reyes ◽  
Blanca Caldas
Keyword(s):  
Research Policy ◽  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
Relationship Building ◽  
Critical Education ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Nel Noddings ◽  
Marginalized Communities ◽  
Policy Practice ◽  
Personal Connections ◽  
Anna Julia Cooper

Curricula of care and radical love encompass a collective and communal responsibility for education practitioners, leaders, and researchers to meet the needs of the historically marginalized communities they serve and of their work toward social change. These articulations are largely drawn from the ontologies, ways of knowing, communal practices, and traditions of the Global South as articulated by Black and Chicana/Latina women. Starting in the 1980s, Nel Noddings’ work around ethics of care sparked philosophical discussions of care within the education field. Educational scholars, including critical scholars of color, have been influenced by care theories that emphasize care as rooted in relationships and everyday interactions between educators and students. Feminists of color and critical education scholars have expanded theories of care in education by pointing out the ways in which race and other social identifiers impact interpretations of care. Even before the work of current care theorists, by the turn of the twentieth century, Anna Julia Cooper argued for a love-politic that decentered romantic love and instead centered a self-determining and emancipatory form of love. This opened a pathway for a radical, Black feminist conceptualization of love. Black feminist scholars have since further developed and expanded upon conceptualizations of a love-politic contributing to a more robust understanding of care and love. Latina/Chicana feminists have also contributed to onto-theoretical insights that highlight how care is a necessity toward critical understandings, personal connections, self-work, and movement building. Concepts such as convivencia and cariño from Latina/Chicana feminists demonstrate how care is co-constructed through relationship building over time and through the sharing of life experiences. Moreover, practices like othermothering and radical love further reveal how intimate and personal interactions are necessary for critical self-growth and communal love toward liberation. From this view, to love and care in ways that advance justice in education requires an expansive approach to curriculum and pedagogy, which includes spaces beyond classroom walls like the home, families, communities, culture, and non-school organizations. Taken together, scholars, educators, and other stakeholders in education may find use in drawing upon feminist of color conceptions and literature of care and love to reimagine transformative possibilities for education research, policy, practice, and curriculum.

scholarly journals Vibing with Blackness: Critical Considerations of Black Panther and Exceptional Black Positionings

Arts ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 85
Author(s):  
Derilene (Dee) Marco
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Feminist Studies ◽  
Diaspora Studies ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Black Panther

This article considers different ways in which Blackness is represented as exceptional in the 2018 film Black Panther. It also considers other iterations of Black visibility and legibility in the current popular culture context which appears to privilege Black narratives in interesting ways. The essay uses conceptual lenses from diaspora studies, Afro science fiction and Black feminist studies to critically engage the film and to critically question the notion of Black exceptionalism.

Anna Julia Cooper's Black Feminist Love‐Politics

Hypatia ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-53
Author(s):  
Vivian M. May
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Interpersonal Relations ◽  
Political Orientation ◽  
Care Work ◽  
Domestic Sphere ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Collaborative Action ◽  
Anna Julia Cooper ◽  
Love Marriage

To flesh out love's potential for transformative imaginaries and politics, it is important to explore earlier examples of Black feminist theorizing on love. In this spirit, I examine Anna Julia Cooper (1858–1964), an early Black feminist educator, intellectual, and activist whose work is generally overlooked in feminist and anti‐racist thinking on love, affect, and social change. Contesting narrow readings of Cooper, I first explore how critics might engage in more “loving” approaches to reading her work. I then delineate some of her contributions to a Black feminist love‐politics. In unmasking dominance enacted in love's name, Cooper analyzes romantic love, marriage, and gendered care‐work in the domestic sphere. Using an intersectional lens, she contests gendered‐raced hierarchies and links normative masculinity and femininity with white supremacy, xenophobia, and imperial rule. Cooper also extolls the possibilities of love rooted in nonhierarchical, intersubjective cooperation: such loving has the potential to transform interpersonal relations and foster broad collaborative action to eradicate inequality, locally and globally. Structural subjection, internalized oppression, and colonized imaginations have no part in Cooper's reciprocal, political love‐force. Unfortunately, her ideas about transforming gender relations, contesting racism, challenging imperialism, seeking decolonized selves, and pursuing solidarity as a loving political orientation remain relatively unknown.

Epilogue

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brittney C. Cooper
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Black People ◽  
Black Feminism ◽  
First Century ◽  
Toni Cade Bambara ◽  
Bell Hooks ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Feminist Politics ◽  
Anna Julia Cooper

Despite the fact that Black feminism, as a critical locus of Black women’s twentieth century knowledge production, has become a fully institutionalized field of academic specialization since the late 1970s, the contention of this book has been that there is still a requisite and tacit failure to take Black women’s work, as thinkers and theorists on broader questions affecting Black people, seriously. Yes, Black feminist women’s arguments about the centrality of gender to racial concerns have gained major academic currency, as evidenced by the broad use of intersectional discourse in numerous fields and disciplines. And yes, the new Black Lives Matter Movement, particularly as conceived by Garza, Tometi, and Cullors has made Black feminist politics the currency of Black radical thought. But the fact that Alicia Garza’s comments written in the second decade of the twenty-first century, sound eerily similar to commentary from Anna Julia Cooper writing in the nineteenth century, and Pauli Murray, Toni Cade Bambara and bell hooks writing in the twentieth suggests that not enough has changed.

Genres of History and the Practice of Loss

2021 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 167-174
Author(s):  
Marisa J. Fuentes
Keyword(s):  
British Empire ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Feminist Studies ◽  
Coffee Plantation ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Family Stories ◽  
Critical Questions ◽  
Book Discussion ◽  
The Caribbean

This book discussion essay addresses critical questions concerning historical methodologies when working with the archives of Atlantic-world slavery. Thinking with Hazel V. Carby’s Imperial Intimacies: A Tale of Two Islands, the essay considers the power of historical memoir to narrate the violence of the British empire through family stories. The long-intertwined histories of England and the Caribbean inevitably lead to slavery’s archives, and in the final section of the book, Carby describes the lives of her earliest ancestors on a Jamaican coffee plantation. In response, the essay author revisits her hesitations regarding slavery’s archive and the stakes of approaching the silences of enslaved people in the records. Drawing on pivotal work in black feminist studies, this essay rearticulates the nuances of Saidiya Hartman’s “critical fabulation” to bring attention back to archival boundaries and the limits of historical methodologies that make certain imaginings most difficult.

scholarly journals Resistance and liberation discourse in Audre Lorde’s “Sister Outsider”

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (14) ◽  
pp. 107-113
Author(s):  
I. Yakovenko
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Frame Of Reference ◽  
Feminist Studies ◽  
Audre Lorde ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Feminist Ideology ◽  
Second Wave Feminism ◽  
Second Wave ◽  
Wide Usage

The article focuses on the essays of Audre Lorde — African American writer, Black feminist and activist. Through the lens of African American and Feminist Studies the essay collection “Sister Outsider” by Audre Lorde is analysed as a political manifesto which critiques the Second Wave feminism, and suggests a unique perspective on issues of racism, sexism, heterosexism, homophobia, women’s erotic and creativity. Although Lorde’s early poetry collections are characterised by the wide usage of authentic imagery and Afro-centric mythology, the later poetry, the 1982 biomythography “Zami: A New Spelling of My Name”, and the 1984 essay collection “Sister Outsider”, are politicised writings in sync with the Black / feminist consciousness. In the essays, Audre Lorde argues that institutionalised rejection of race / gender / class / sexual differences stems from the Western European patriarchal frame thus aggravating discriminating practices. The writer emphasises the role of the oppressed groups — ethnic minorities, women, the working class, in the destruction of the societal patriarchal ‘norms’. Audre Lorde’s essay collection has become instrumental in initiating the feminist discussion on intersectionality, which will later be theorized by Kimberle Crenshaw, and in articulation of the Black feminist ideology. Lorde’s critique of White feminists is triggered by their dismissal of the non-European women’s heritage, and by their unwillingness to acknowledge differences inside the gender group, which for the Black feminist Audre Lorde was an adoption of the patriarchal frame of reference. The poet’s timely theory of differences urges to break up silences concerning societal discriminating practices towards the oppressed groups, thus challenging the hierarchies of powers in the society.

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