1 - Anna Julia Cooper on Slavery’s Afterlife: Can International Thought “Hear” Her “Muffled” Voice and Ideas?

Summary

This essay discusses Anna Julia Cooper’s analysis of slavery, imperialism, and the Age of Revolution: it also raises questions about the politics and practices of recovery. Cooper’s writings offer a rich resource for countering the erasure of Black women’s contributions to international thought: readers are invited to theorize alongside Cooper's anti-racist, anti-sexist, and anti-imperialist work as a scholar-educator. Navigating several absences, she encountered when working in French colonial archives in the 1920s, Cooper unpacked dominant frameworks, exposed gaps, and pivoted attention to the histories, ideas, and actions of people of color. Cooper’s identity, as a Black American woman in interwar France, a former slave who argued with white supremacist exponents of the ‘Nordic vogue,’ was central to her writing. While structurally marginalized by gender, race, class, age and nationality, Cooper refused to be silenced and dared to criticize the greats of French sociology while completing her doctoral work in Paris.