Anna Julia Cooper, Visionary Black Feminist: A Critical Introduction - Hardcover

May, Vivian M.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0415956420 ISBN 13: 9780415956420

Publisher: Routledge, 2007

Synopsis

Vivian M. May explores the theoretical and political contributions of Anna Julia Cooper, a renowned Black feminist scholar, educator and activist whose ideas deserve far more attention than they have received. Drawing on Africana and feminist theory, May places Cooper's theorizing in its historical contexts and offers new ways to interpret the evolution of Cooper's visionary politics, subversive methodology, and defiant philosophical outlook. Rejecting notions that Cooper was an elitist duped by dominant ideologies, May contends that Cooper's ambiguity, code-switching, and irony should be understood as strategies of a radical methodology of dissent.

May shows how across six decades of work, Cooper traced history's silences and delineated the workings of power and inequality in an array of contexts, from science to literature, economics to popular culture, religion to the law, education to social work, and from the political to the personal. May emphasizes that Cooper eschewed all forms of mastery and called for critical consciousness and collective action on the part of marginalized people at home and abroad. She concludes that in using a border-crossing, intersectional approach, Cooper successfully argues for theorizing from experience, develops inclusive methods of liberation, and crafts a vision of a fundamentally egalitarian social imaginary.

About this title

From the Back Cover

May has written the first book to really situate Cooper as a radical intellectual. She elucidates not only Cooper's brilliant critique of racism and sexism, but her cross-disciplinary analysis of literature, education, religion, law and American culture. Most importantly, May establishes Cooper's philosophy of liberation--one that is global, historically grounded, passionate, and lived. From now on, anyone teaching 20th century intellectual history must come to terms with Anna Julia Cooper.
--Robin D. G. Kelley, Columbia University, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination

"May persuasively argues that Cooper's philosophical ideas are much more revolutionary--radical even--and subversive of dominant ideology than previously judged. This book will become central to the scholarship on 19th and early 20th century African American women writers."
--Trudier Harris, UNC Chapel Hill, author of Saints, Sinners, Saviors: Strong Black Women in African American Literature

"May places Cooper in a rich political, philosophical and literary context in which her prescient work can at long last be fully appreciated. She enables readers to understand just how and why Cooper might have been misunderstood, and links such misunderstanding with some of the very political constraints under which Cooper labored. This promises to be the kind of book about which people will say, `Wow! How can we have missed out on all this?'"
--Elizabeth V. Spelman, Smith College, author of Fruits of Sorrow: Framing Our Attention to Suffering

About the Author

Vivian M. May is Assistant Professor of Women's Studies at Syracuse University. Her research focuses on African American literature, feminist theory, and marginalized knowledge practices. She has published essays about the work of James Baldwin, Gwendolyn Brooks, Anna Julia Cooper, Melvin Dixon, and Shani Mootoo.

About this edition

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0415956420
• ISBN 13: 9780415956420
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 24