This is the first of a series of threads on chapters in our new volume - Vivian M. May’s essay on Anna Julia Cooper’s analysis of imperialism and colonialism in the Age of Revolutions. 1/9
Cooper’s thought is a rich resource for countering the active erasure of Black women’s writings on international relations, and Mays' essay invites readers to theorize with Cooper, not just about her. 2/9
Confronting the absences and silences she encountered when working in French colonial archives in
the 1920s, Cooper developed a methodology for recovering the voices of marginalized people of color in the French Empire. 3/9
Cooper’s identity, that of 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. 4/9
She was an outsider, marginalized by gender, race, class, age, and nationality, who dared to criticize the greats of French sociology while she completed her doctoral work in Paris. 5/9
Cooper had a complex relationship with her male academic mentors, not least her doctoral examiner Célestin Bouglé who became an ideological and methodological opponent. 6/9
Challenging Bouglé’s claims to racial superiority, Cooper tested her analytical tools in a scholarly confrontation that was always also a political act of insubordination. 7/9 cambridge.org/core/books/wom…
She "named ongoing legacies of slavery and settler colonialism and... the... interlocking nature of misogyny, white supremacy, economic exploitation, and imperialism. She is a foundational Black feminist thinker and important early contributor to Black Atlantic thought". 8/9