INTRODUCTION

An Arc of Light:

Anna Julia Cooper’s A Voice from the South

WRITTEN IN 1892, Anna Julia Cooper’s groundbreaking essay collection A Voice from the South, by A Black Woman of the South is a cornerstone of black feminist and political theory, a literary achievement, and a call to action that remains relevant today. As an interrogation of power, a critique of empiricism, and a revelatory work of intersectional analysis, Cooper’s contribution in Voice is often condensed into her now well-known declaration, “Only the Black Woman can say, ‘when and where I enter, in the quiet undisputed dignity of my womanhood, without violence and without suing or special patronage, then and there the whole Negro race enters with me.’ ”¹ However, as one scholar has observed, the relatively recent prominence the text enjoys “belies the arduous history that characterized Cooper’s attempts to secure a public voice in print” during her own life.² This edition of her book owes its existence to black feminist scholars’ recovery and reclamation efforts that began in the 1970s and must be viewed in light of the genealogy of black women’s intellectual, literary, political, and social history which is only now receiving more widespread scholarly attention.³

Born into slavery in Raleigh, North Carolina, in 1858, Cooper rose to prominence as a leading scholar, educator, and activist at the end of the nineteenth century, producing Voice while she was the principal of the renowned M Street High School in Washington, D.C. An active public intellectual, Cooper was selected to speak before the World’s Congress of Representative Women in 1893 and at the Pan-African Congress Conference in London in 1900.⁴ In 1925, she became the fourth African American woman to receive her doctorate, which she did at the age of sixty-six, from the Paris-Sorbonne University. In the midst of her robust scholarly career, at the age of fifty-seven, Cooper adopted five orphaned children under the age of thirteen.⁵ Although Voice was her only full-length book, her writing and scholarship continued to evolve over the course of her long life (she lived to be 105), most notably in her doctoral dissertation, Slavery and the French Revolutionists, 1788–1805, as well as in the variety of her essays, speeches, letters, and memoirs.⁶ As both her life history and doctoral research show, Cooper was “a key theorist in the emergence of new forms of black internationalism”; nevertheless, her work is often overlooked in favor of more celebrated black men, such as W. E. B. DuBois and C. L. R. James, for whom she was an important and often unacknowledged interlocutor.⁷

Characterized by an emphasis on debate and her inimitable wit, the essays which comprise Voice feel simultaneously urgent and modern even while they bear the imprint of late-nineteenth-century social thought. In a passage which showcases both her rhetorical savvy and her analysis of the ways power dictates the very terms of social definition, Cooper rejects external determinations of what is considered “womanly,” arguing that the world needs more “women who can think as well as feel, and who feel none the less because they think.”⁸ Because of passages like this, Cooper has been criticized for hewing to the limited, ideologically freighted conventions of “True Womanhood”; however, the question remains open whether or not her assessment of women’s leadership as more “sympathetic” than men’s is an example of her taking up a dissident position within available narrative forms. In this vein, Vivian May—the author of the most comprehensive study of Cooper’s work to date—argues that Voice constitutes “a contestatory form of speaking up that both shatters and departs from dominant discourse.”⁹

Cooper’s polemical style and insistence on embodied knowledge are also key to Voice’s value as a work of literary criticism. At a moment when black authors were subject to patronizing protocols authorizing their literary contributions, Cooper defiantly takes up the position of the critic, piercing the assumption that white authors have access to universal truth. She criticizes William Dean Howells, among others, for tone-deaf and spurious characterizations of black people, which they offered as representative. Yet Cooper’s polemicism and close engagement with the social logic of her time are also responsible for the most troubling aspects of the text: its orientalism and Islamophobia. Overturning received notions of environmental determinism, Cooper underscores the vitality of black people—highlighting both their cultural accomplishments and biological potential—in part by drawing on racial hierarchies inherent in now outdated notions of “civilization.”¹⁰

Cooper’s intersectional analysis and insistence on black women’s essential role in social progress remain central to a contemporary scholarly agenda, even while her engagement with the social preoccupations and literary forms of her time mark its limits.¹¹ Perhaps, in the final assessment, we would do well to hew close to Cooper’s own words: “No finite mind can grasp and give out the whole circle of truth. We do well if we can illuminate just the tiny arc which we occupy and should be glad that the next generation will not need the lessons we try so assiduously to hammer into this.”¹²

JANET NEARY

Notes

1Anna Julia Cooper, A Voice from the South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988): 31.

2Shirley Moody-Turner, “ ‘Dear Doctor Du Bois’: Anna Julia Cooper, W. E. B. Du Bois, and the Gender Politics of Black Publishing,” MELUS 40.3 (Fall 2015): 47-68, 47.

3Cooper belongs to a formidable group of black women scholars and activists in the late nineteenth century, including Maria Stewart, Sojourner Truth, Fannie Barrier Williams, Charlotte Forten Grimké, Ida B. Wells, Fannie Jackson Coppin, Victoria Earle Matthews, Frances Harper, and Mary Church Terrell. The following texts place Cooper’s legacy in the context of these other black women scholars and activists: Mary Helen Washington, Introduction, A Voice from the South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988): li; Vivian M. May, “Writing the Self into Being: Anna Julia Cooper’s Textual Politics,” African American Review 43.1 (Spring 2009): 17-34, 17; and Beverly Guy-Sheftall, “Black Feminist Studies: The Case of Anna Julia Cooper,” African American Review 43.1 (Spring 2009): 11-15, 11.

4For a more comprehensive biography, see Mary Helen Washington, Introduction, A Voice from the South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).

5As Washington notes, the children “ranged in age from six months to twelve years and were the grandchildren of her half-brother,” xxxviii.

6Anna Julia Cooper, Slavery and the French Revolutionists, 1788-1805. Trans. Frances Richardson Keller (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1988). On her other writings, see The Voice of Anna Julia Cooper: Including a Voice from the South and Other Important Essays, Papers, and Letters, Eds. Charles Lemert and Esme Bhan (New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1998): 306. Lemert and Bhan’s book reprints much of her writing, including her two memoirs—one reflecting on her experiences at the Sorbonne and the other offering reminiscences of the Grimké family and her early years in D.C. On the evolution of Cooper’s writing, Moody-Turner writes that “By adding an examination of the material and political consequences of popular portrayals of African Americans and by critiquing her earlier position on voice, voicelessness, power, and domination, [Cooper’s] later texts suggest that [she]…continued to reflect on and revise her critical strategies for promoting agency, voice, and self-definition,” 8.

7Shirley Moody-Turner, Preface, “Anna Julia Cooper: A Voice beyond the South,” African American Review 43.1 (Spring 2009): 7-9, 7.

8Cooper, 50.

9May, “Writing,” 17.

10See Kyla Schuller, Biopolitics of Feeling: Race, Sex, and Impressibility in the Nineteenth-Century United States (forthcoming from Duke University Press).

11Cooper’s influence is evidenced by the intellectual debt acknowledged by the most foundational black feminist texts of our own era, including Paula Giddings’ When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America (1984) and Hazel Carby’s Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (1987), both of which quote A Voice from the South in their titles—Giddings’ book title and Carby’s chapter “ ‘In the Quiet, Undisputed Dignity of My Womanhood’: Black Feminist Thought after Emancipation.”

12Cooper, 183.