Vivian M. May

Fixated on Ability

This essay examines the ubiquitous use of ableist metaphors in contemporary feminist discourses and outlines two particular ways in which feminist theorists use disability to locate objects of remediation: first, the construction of disability in opposition to knowledge and second, the use of disability to highlight the subtle workings of power and privilege. In addition, we critique ableist notions of mobility and movement, which are used to define and imagine liberation, resistance, and transformation. Because many rhetorical uses of disability reinscribe normative and exclusionary paradigms within otherwise libratory feminist theories, we assert the need for new metaphors and frames of reference to more adequately theorize multiplicity and to more fully realize social transformation. Transforming the ways we use language in order to more fully realize its paradoxes and playfulness will, we argue, yield more intersectional analyses and more fruitful political coalitions.

It is Never a Question of the Slaves: Anna Julia Cooper's Challenge to History's Silences in Her 1925 Sorbonne Thesis

Most scholars of Anna Julia Cooper’s work have focused primarily on her influential 1892 collection of essays, A Voice from the South by a Black Woman of the South. However Cooper’s 1925 Sorbonne thesis, France’s Attitude toward Slavery during the Revolution,1 merits closer attention. In her dissertation, Cooper exposes many of the ethical, political, and epistemological contradictions at work in France’s emergent republican democracy. For instance, despite France’s professed ideals of egalitarianism and rationality, Cooper finds evidence of sanctioned ignorance and supremacy. She also emphasizes the historical salience of power to historiography. Moreover, Cooper underscores the actions of slaves and gens de couleur in Saint-Domingue as historically relevant, even though they have been silenced in the historical record or ruled out as insignificant. Though Cooper was the first black woman to earn a PhD at the Sorbonne, and, twenty-five years prior, was one of two African-American women to speak before the first Pan-African Congress in London in 1900,2 she is too often left out of genealogies of transnational race consciousness, of black Europe, and of Diaspora research on Europe. Of course, Cooper is not alone in this regard. A vibrant international black community emerged in Paris during the interwar years; however women’s contributions to this “new internationalism,” a comparative approach to Diaspora that built on earlier Pan-Africanist and Ethiopianist frameworks (Edwards 2–4), have not been fully acknowledged. Ula Taylor contends that the genealogy of the black Atlantic is frequently curtailed because the “theoretical, diasporic ‘root’ is largely constructed around an elite entourage of African American men,” obscuring the contributions of Amy Ashwood-Garvey and Amy Jacques-Garvey, for example (179–80). Likewise, the typical “narrative of the emergence of Négritude” is, too often, “a story of ‘representative colored men’: Senghor, Léon-Gontran Damas, and Aimé Césaire” (Edwards 120), to the exclusion of women like Jane and Paulette Nardal, Suzanne Lacascade, and Suzanne Césaire (Sharpley-Whiting 14 –20). Thus although francophone and allophone black women in Paris were key to the emergence of Négritude (Edwards