Research Interests
During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Americans struggled to define democracy, fought to end slavery, attempted to assert their statehood on a global stage, and wrestled with the meanings of citizenship. As the nation debated what it meant to live freely, African-American women experienced the epitome of unfreedom; nevertheless, they articulated advanced theoretical interpretations of freedom, racial injustice, and women’s rights. Historians, Africana theorists, and feminist scholars have rightly framed nineteenth- and twentieth-century black women as key actors in the ongoing struggle against white supremacy. Yet, as they emphasize black women’s roles as doers, they often neglect their roles as thinkers. I study nineteenth- and twentieth-century Black women’s intellectual thought in order to reveal how they have debated and given meaning to concepts including liberty, equality, and power. My research aims to historicize Black women thinkers in order to illuminate how they advanced political movements, shaped modern institutions, and defined the American national identity. Collectively, my projects foster a fuller understanding of the range of actors and ideologies that have shaped Black radical thought, furthered Black liberation, and promoted women’s rights.
Mary Ann Shadd Cary: Essential Writings of a Nineteenth-Century Black Radical Feminist
Oxford University Press, 2023
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In 1852, Mary Ann Shadd Cary published her landmark pamphlet, “A Plea for Emigration, or Notes of Canada West,” in which she proposed that African Americans pursue a simple solution to the problem of racism in the United States: leave. Shadd Cary’s disavowal of the American nation-state situated her among a cadre of well-known Black thinkers and activists such as Frederick Douglass, Martin Delany, and Henry Highland Garnet, who vigorously debated whether African Americans should remain in the United States. Shadd Cary continued to advocate for emigration in the Provincial Freeman, the newspaper that she founded and edited beginning in 1853. Today, Shadd Cary’s emigrationism continues to dominate her historical and philosophical framing. However, throughout her decades-long career as an educator, abolitionist, suffragist, editor, and lawyer, Shadd Cary examined a range of topics including labor, women’s rights, and racial uplift. Although scholars tend to emphasize the earlier period of Shadd Cary’s work, her writing and activism continued into the 1880s.
Mary Ann Shadd Cary: Essential Writings of a Nineteenth-Century Black Radical Feminist aims to illuminate new dimensions of Shadd Cary’s lifework and promote further research into her theoretical contributions to Black feminism and Black radicalism. It seeks to expand our understanding of the modes in which Africana theorists articulated their intellectual thought, and to foreground how nineteenth-century Black women, who are frequently characterized as doers rather than thinkers, laid the foundation for Africana philosophy. Several scholars of African American women’s literature and history such as Carla Peterson, Martha Jones, and Mia Bay have endeavored to treat nineteenth-century Black women’s intellectual thought with rigor. This project will continue their work by solidifying Shadd Cary’s status as an early Black radical thinker. Of particular import are two points: first, that Shadd Cary’s activism extended beyond editorship, and second, that she participated in public discourse on a range of topics beyond emigration. By introducing new readers to Shadd Cary’s body of work, and reintroducing acquaintances to a fuller picture of Shadd Cary, this volume will illustrate how African American women shaped early Africana philosophy.
(Re)defining Radicalism: The Rise of Black Feminism and the Politics of Respectability in the Nineteenth Century
book manuscript, University of Pennsylvania Press (Under contract)
(Re)defining Radicalism: The Rise of Black Feminism and the Politics of Respectability in the Nineteenth Century is a study of early African American women’s radical thought that centers the work of Sojourner Truth, Maria Stewart, Mary Ann Shadd Cary, Frances Harper, Ida B. Wells, and Anna Julia Cooper. Its argument is threefold. First, (Re)defining Radicalism posits that nineteenth-century Black feminism was a form of Black radicalism, thus reconsidering the masculinist bounds of the Black radical imaginary. Second, rather than framing individual women’s theorizing as exceptional and divorced from that of her contemporaries, it suggests that nineteenth-century Black feminism was a coherent tradition shaped by a burgeoning cohort of thinkers. Finally, the book argues that African American women were neither universal nor monolithic in their endorsements and/or rejections of respectability. In so doing, it illuminates the contentious and conflicted relationship between respectability politics and nineteenth-century Black feminism. By highlighting how respectability and radicalism function in tandem rather than in opposition to each other, it will be possible to redefine what “Black radicalism” is and recover the centrality of nineteenth-century African American women to the formation of Black radical thought in the United States.
Du Bois and Women Activists: Mentorship, Interracial Organizing, and Race Leadership
The Oxford Handbook of W.E.B. Du Bois, (New york: oxford university press, online 2022), edited by Aldon morris, walter allen, karida brown, dan green, marcus anthony hunter, cheryl johnson-odim, and michael schwartz
W.E.B. Du Bois’s relationships to women activists and women’s activism—particularly that of Black women—are fraught with tensions. He at times writes with clarity about women’s rights, but at other points in his career, Du Bois sidelined Black women contemporaries and minimized how they influenced his work. This paper undertakes a network analysis of how Du Bois worked with women activists in order to identify and reconcile the contradictions in his work. Through examining Du Bois’s relationships with Jessie Fauset, Zora Neale Hurston, Mary White Ovington, Ida B. Wells, and more, it argues that Du Bois often mentored younger Black women and collaborated with white women allies, but erased established Black women activists. The paper contends that Du Bois’s divergent treatment of Black and white women activists stemmed from their differential access to power in early suffrage and reform movements, which influenced how he approached potential collaborations with women.
“Leave that Slavery-Cursed Republic”: Mary Ann Shadd Cary and Black Feminist Nationalism, 1852-1874
atlantic studies: global currents special issue on black editorship in the early atlantic world (Summer 2021)
This paper argues that Mary Ann Shadd Cary theorized and practiced Black feminist nationalism as she edited the newspaper that she founded, the Provincial Freeman, and wrote a variety of pieces throughout her career. The decades-long union between her editorship and writing allowed her to craft a Black feminist nationalism that infused her writings, speeches, and activism during and after the newspaper’s publication. An examination of how the Provincial Freeman and Shadd Cary herself fostered public discourse on Black people’s labor and women’s rights reveals how Shadd Cary practiced and theorized Black feminist nationalism. The union between Shadd Cary’s resistance strategies – editing and writing – illustrates how Black editorship in the early Atlantic world created opportunities for editors to not simply disseminate, but produce knowledge. It affirms that editing was an inherently political practice that allowed activists to fashion themselves as both editors and intellectuals.
Black Women and Africana Abolitionism
The Routledge Companion to Black Women’s Social and Cultural Histories (New York: Routledge, 2021), edited by Janell Hobson
This chapter explores how Black women participated in a process that I term “Africana abolitionism.” I define Africana abolitionism as a shared set of practices that African-diasporic people deployed to dismantle systems of slavery throughout North America, the Caribbean, and Latin America. Africana abolitionism sought to eradicate not simply regional systems of slavery, but racialized epistemologies that justified the enslavement of African-descended peoples. Africana abolitionism bridges the particular and the universal by offering a framework for understanding how localized abolitionist movements facilitated global emancipation.
“Black Women and Africana Abolitionism” first describes how Africana abolitionism can enrich the study of abolitionist movements by interrogating two central questions: How might we understand abolitionism differently if we decenter colonizers and the roles that European nations played in undoing slavery? How might we understand abolitionism differently if we frame the movement’s internationalism not in relation to colonial powers, but in relation to Black people’s shared visions for and approaches to freedom? Next, it highlights Black women’s participation in three arenas of Africana abolitionism: slave revolts, the Black press, and lecture circuits. To conclude, it describes how framing local and national struggles against slavery as Africana abolitionism can allow us to reevaluate the roots of Black transnationalism.
Black Male Feminism and the Evolution of Du Boisian Thought, 1903-1920
Palimpsest: A journal of women, gender, and the black international, Volume 9, Number 1 (Spring/summer 2020), 1-27.
W. E. B. Du Bois consistently offered visionary analyses of racism in the United States. Yet, his early claims are largely applicable to black men alone, as is demonstrated by his 1903 The Souls of Black Folk. Seventeen years later, “The Damnation of Women,” a chapter from Du Bois’s 1920 Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil, exemplifies his ability to use intersectional approaches to discuss black women’s oppression. This article illustrates how Du Bois’s relationship to black feminism evolved from 1903 to 1920. First, it argues that his writings from the early 1900s largely focused on black women’s representation and their social marginalization, while his work from the late 1910s onward also critiqued the structural elements of black women’s oppression, particularly their economic exploitation and lack of political rights. Second, the article contends that black women’s writing and activism at the turn of the twentieth century radicalized Du Bois and catalyzed the shift in his political thought. It concludes that black women’s political activity at the turn of the twentieth century motivated Du Bois to embrace an incipient form of black male feminism.