| Project Detail |
Anna Julia Cooper and Black existentialism across the Atlantic
Anna Julia Cooper (1858-1964) was a writer and teacher who advocated for education among African Americans and women while making contributions to social science. However, her work remains relatively understudied. Supported by Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA), the AJ Cooper project aims to address this gap. It will draw upon Cooper’s insights to analyse the development of Black existentialism across the Atlantic. The project highlights the intersectionality within feminist movements and prompts questions regarding the historical origins and emergence of these issues. Advocating for a shift from the prevailing centre, it suggests illuminating the present from a different geographical perspective and through a broader historical lens.
By going back to Anna Julia Cooper — an important though understudied figure of the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries —, the present project draws on my doctoral research in critical phenomenology of lived oppression and applies it to the analysis of the transatlantic constitution of Black existentialism. The importance of issues related to intersectionality within existing feminist movements led me to question the history and conditions of emergence of these issues; it made a decentering necessary in order to illuminate the present from another geographic space (the United States) and according to a longer history. By tracing the genealogy of intersectional thought, I wish to make feminist thought more complex from its margins, and from a philosophical perspective (Black existentialism) in which womens figures are still under-represented. |
