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Chapter 12 - A Heritage Unique in the Ages

The Politics of Black Southern Womanhood in Anna Julia Cooper’s A Voice from the South by a Black Woman from the South

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 April 2021

Harilaos Stecopoulos
Affiliation:
Department of English, University of Iowa
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Summary

Anna Julia Cooper’s 1892 A Voice from the South by a Black Woman from the South was prophetic in its formulation of a critical intersectional methodology to codify and analyze the oppressions black women confronted at the nexus of the post-Reconstruction South and nation. Framing herself as representative of region and nation and emissary of blackness and woman-ness, throughout the text Cooper locates herself and the black women for whom she speaks within complex and interchanging matrices of blackness, woman-ness, southernness, and U.S. nationalism. This chapter explores how Cooper’s intersectional critique of race, gender, region, nation, and empire is impelled by her centralization of the experiences and potential of black women in the South. Cooper’s understanding of the interlocking logics of patriarchy, racial purity, and U.S.-southern supremacy was shaped by her rejection of eugenics and sexology, pseudo-scientific ideologies which shaped thinking on race and gender – and thus on region and nation – in the U.S. at the turn of the century. Ultimately, Cooper’s critical intellectual response emphasizes and develops radical black southern mothering as the root of emancipatory social praxis.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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