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Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women

Online ISBN:
9780252099540
Print ISBN:
9780252040993
Publisher:
University of Illinois Press
Book

Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women

Brittney C. Cooper
Brittney C. Cooper
Rutgers University
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Published:
15 May 2017
Online ISBN:
9780252099540
Print ISBN:
9780252040993
Publisher:
University of Illinois Press

Abstract

In the late nineteenth century, a group of publicly active African American women emerged from the social and educational elite to assume racial leadership roles. Their work challenged thinking on racial issues as well as questions about gender, sexuality, and class. Beyond Respectability charts the development of African American women as public intellectuals and the evolution of their thought from the end of the 1800s through the Black Power era of the 1970s. Eschewing the Great Race Man paradigm so prominent in contemporary discourse, Brittney C. Cooper looks at the far-reaching intellectual achievements of female thinkers and activists like Anna Julia Cooper, Mary Church Terrell, Fannie Barrier Williams, Pauli Murray, and Toni Cade Bambara. Cooper delves into the processes that transformed these women and others into racial leadership figures, including long-overdue discussions of their theoretical output and personal experiences. As Cooper shows, their body of work critically reshaped our understandings of race and gender discourse. It also confronted entrenched ideas of how--and who--produced racial knowledge.

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