Sojourner Truth Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

When Sojourner Truth phrased her "Ain't I a Woman?" speech, she demonstrated that theology can be radically transformed when the gospel story is taken literally, and seriously, in the mind of a despised woman. With boldness, she confronted a clergyman who argued for the natural marginalization of women, based on biblical principles. The courage to confront her male rival is only outdone by the power of her re-interpretation of the gospel.

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- Feminist Theology, Childbirth, Seventh-day adventist theology, Sojourner Truth

Ever since the publication of the Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass in 1845, autobiographical testimonies were a mainstay of the abolition movement in the United States. Being or having been held as slaves and all the attendant injury is the very theme of the documents in question, which are testimonies, rather than theoretical works, because the authors maintained the first-person point of view. Since autoethnography aims at overcoming the preset mentality of the researcher in order to gain insight into what it is like to live in a particular social environment, slave narratives, beyond any abolitionist agenda, may serve as a paradigm for autoethnographic interpretation of historic sources. For an understanding of the authentic perspective of the speakers, external redactions need to be filtered out when reading those documents. On the other hand, certain tropes are worth considering (such as ignorance of the speaker's date and place of birth or stereotypical names) because these narrative gestures indicate the state of mind of the narrator. I will propose methods for finding interpretive tools to identify the Self and the world of the slave-narrators. Such interpretation relies on the close reading of narratives as I will show by examples.

This pdf contains the Table of Contents and Introduction to Black Women's Intellectual Traditions: Speaking Their Minds (Burlington: University of Vermont, 2007), co-edited by Kristin Waters and Carol B. Conaway. Also included from the book: "Some Core Themes in Nineteenth-Century Black Feminism," by Kristin Waters. The volume, which contains 19 essays on authors such as Maria W. Stewart, Sojourner Truth, Frances E. W. Harper, Pauline Hopkins, Mary Ann Shadd Cary, Anna Julia Cooper, and Ida B. Wells, was a recipient of the 2007 Letitia Woods Brown Award from the Association of Black Women Historians,

Sojourner Truth's 1851 speech in Akron, commonly titled "Ain't I a Woman," stands as a landmark in the fight for racial and woman's equality. Truth spoke before a woman's rights convention, making arguments about women's physical and intellectual capacities, as well as religious arguments in support of equal rights. While it is clear that she asserted her identity as a woman and a citizen in this speech, our understanding of her words is complicated by the lack of an authentic text of her remarks. This essay explores the challenges in recovering Truth's rhetoric and offers an analysis of her arguments for equal rights. http://voicesofdemocracy.umd.edu/sojourner-truth-address-at-the-womans-rights-convention-in-akron-ohio-29-may-1851/

- by Michael Phillips-Anderson
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- Rhetoric, Public Address, Civil Rights, Feminism

Resumen
El feminismo negro o afrofeminismo surgió como fenómeno social y político a finales del siglo XIX, cuando las mujeres blancas estadounidenses líderes del movimiento sufragista decidieron dar prioridad a su derecho al voto sobre el de las mujeres de color, dejando un espacio para el activismo de quienes querían luchar contra esta doble discriminación por igual. El presente trabajo se centrará en los sesenta del siglo XX, años en los que se desarrollaron con mayor fuerza los movimientos por los derechos civiles en Estados Unidos. Mediante el estudio de casos específicos de activistas del feminismo afroamericano, analizaré la evolución del papel desempeñado por las mujeres en el Movimiento por los Derechos Civiles, en la lucha por la liberación de la mujer afroamericana y contra el racismo de la sociedad estadounidense.
Abstract
Black feminism, also known as afrofeminism, started as a socio-political event in the end of the 19th century. Internal differences in the suffragist movement from the United States of America led to a scission with the white women fighting only for their own right to vote, thus generating an activism against the double discrimination former black slaves were subjected to. The following paper will provide a general overview of the US Civil Rights mobilizations and, more specifically, the paper women emancipation movement had during the sixties of the 20th century. Through the political experiences of some of its main afrofeminist activists, I will analyse the evolution of female role in the Civil Rights Movement, their role in the Afro-American woman’s liberation and their battle against the racism in the US society.

- by Ana Medrano López
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- Bell Hooks, Malcolm X, Angela Davis, Feminismo Negro

Postcolonial theory and intersectionality are the most prominent approaches in current critical social sciences. Surprisingly, both approaches have hardly talked to each other. Influenced by the German academic debate on these, I illustrate the (disconnecting g relations of both approaches and initiate a dialogue. In a first step, I focus on the work of Chandra T. Mohanty and of Kimberlé Crenshaw. While Mohanty bases her criticism on a discourse analysis of writings about 'Third-World-Women' and develops a postcolonial feminist approach, Crenshaw analyzes the intersection of gender and 'race' and criticizes the blindness of the interconnection in court decisions in the US. I demonstrate the differences and resemblances of both approaches and argue in particular that both approaches follow a constructivist methodology which creates four nodal points for the fruitful dialogue. I illustrate this by analyzing the works of Sojourner Truth and Clara Zetkin. Both feminists focus on different categories in the triangle of 'race', class and gender. Through a close reading of crucial selected works, I show that Truth perceives gender and 'race' as equivalent forms of subordination. Zetkin, however, emphasizes the hierarchical subordination by the specific class position of women. I conclude that a closer dialogue between both theoretical perspectives can help to sharpen the view on multiple discrimination and injustice in times of neoliberal capitalist hegemony.

- by Stefan Wallaschek
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- Critical Theory, Social Theory, Gender Studies, Feminist Theory

This paper was originally attended to provide a new introduction to the reissue of my first book, Black Macho and the Myth of The Superwoman, but it has grown into a larger project composed of notes and ruminations towards a memoir.... more

African American photographer, Ayana V. Jackson, recently curated a show at Gallery Momo in Cape Town, South Africa, entitled Selling the Shadow. The show takes its name from Sojourner Truth’s well known custom of selling carte-de-visite—small photographs mounted on thick paper—of herself, to finance her abolitionist practices. Truth’s practice of “selling the shadow, to support the substance” disrupts slavery as an institution predicated on economic gain—particularly as blackness sutures modern capitalism. Taking a nod from Truth, the show, grapples with the juxtaposition between blackness, aesthetics, and capital. This article uses the cultural production from Selling the Shadow, to examine aesthetic deception as a mode of suspension alongside and within contemporary capitalism and neoliberalism. While the show draws on a variety of visual work I look specifically at the interventions of Torkwase Dyson and Mary Sibande among others. Aesthetic deception presents a modality that might hold in suspension the space of pause, with which to apprehend the management of the visual and its aesthetic counter action despite criminality, capital, and blackness. I argue, much like the context, that Truth sells her likeness, and precisely where black embodiment struggles through illicit criminality we might envision liminal spaces where blackness re-writes subjecthood and the figure of the human. I begin by illustrating how Sojourner Truth’s oratory and photographic practice informs aesthetic deception and pay attention to how her subjective performance traverses criminality and capital of the time. I then turn to aesthetic deception to think through a selection of work from Selling the Shadow (2016).

- by Sarah Stefana Smith
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- Visual Studies, Queer Theory, Affect (Cultural Theory), Black Women's Art
- by Alan MacKenzie
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- Consciousness, Intentionality, Metaphor, Theories of truth (Philosophy)

This article argues that Pinkster should be understood as an Atlantic Creole festival in a Dutch-American context, rather than a Dutch-African festival in an American context. It claims that the syncretic character of Pinkster did not originate in North America and that, before arriving on the American East Coast, the essence of what came to be known as Pinkster already existed as a culturally hybrid Luso-African celebration.

Ever since the publication of the Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass in 1845, autobiographical testimonies were a mainstay of the abolition movement in the United States. Being or having been held as slaves and all the attendant injury is the very theme of the documents in question, which are testimonies, rather than theoretical works, because the authors maintained the first-person point of view. Since autoethnography aims at overcoming the preset mentality of the researcher in order to gain insight into what it is like to live in a particular social environment, slave narratives, beyond any abolitionist agenda, may serve as a paradigm for autoethnographic interpretation of historic sources. For an understanding of the authentic perspective of the speakers, external redactions need to be filtered out when reading those documents. On the other hand, certain tropes are worth considering (such as ignorance of the speaker’s date and place of birth or stereotypical names) becau...

- by Paul Richard Blum
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- Literature, Frederick Douglass, Slave Narratives, Olaudah Equiano

Building on the suggestion by the editors of the Routledge Companion to World Literature (2011) to re-frame the fi eld of literary studies from a global and transnational perspective, this article suggests a new approach to the concept of ‘contact literature’. Reading American literature as ‘contact literature’ assumes that even if an American literary text is written in English, the other languages of the ‘contact zone’ in which the text originated and/or to which it alludes also impacted the writing process and therefore need to be included in the analysis. This new approach to the analysis of American literature is applied here to Sojourner Truth’s famous slave narrative, published in 1850. Since Truth spent the first 30 years of her life as a slave in a
predominantly Dutch-speaking environment in the Hudson Valley, analyzing her narrative as ‘contact literature’ implies a focus on Dutch cultural traces. This is done in two chapters — one dealing with Dutch language and literature, the other with Dutch Pietism and the slave narrative of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw — that present new perspectives on the impact of Dutch culture on Truth’s Narrative.

- by Sarah Tyson
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- Slavery, Luce Irigaray, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Seneca Falls

In her last will and testament, educator-activist Mary McLeod Bethune (1875–1955) declared, “I LEAVE YOU LOVE. Love builds.” A direct descendant of former chattel slaves, Bethune believed in building from the bottom up: beginning with love, or positive thoughts, and manifesting those thoughts. By accretion of goods and goodwill, she built not only a physical school which fostered the arts as a bridge toward world citizenship for disenfranchised black people but also a school of thought, extending to encompass purposeful government service at local and federal levels, toward achieving a just society. Bethune’s determined example of building by accretion informs and helps us to better understand and articulate a wide variety of African American women’s collecting in, of, and through, the arts. This article explores and defines—according to philosophy, purpose, practice, type, scope, and audience—various examples of collecting and collections among selected African American women in th...

This course offers an introduction to American Political Thought. American Political Thought is an ongoing – and contentious – conversation about the meaning of and relationship between liberalism, democracy, race, gender, pluralism, violence, and the rule of law in the United States. The course explores these issues in three units. The first unit, "America at the Founding," examines the principles, concepts, and debates that shaped the American system of federal government during and after the Revolutionary War. The second unit, "Democratizing America?" investigates 19th century debates over democratic citizenship in light of the country's history of slavery, the exclusion of women from public life, and the rise of a modern industrial economy. The third unit, "20th Century Questions and Traditions," introduces some of the most dynamic American political theorists in the 20th century and beyond: pragmatist John Dewey, anarchist Emma Goldman, civil rights icons Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X, and contemporary African American thinkers Cornel West and Ta-Nehisi Coates.

- by Patrick T Giamario
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- Political Philosophy, Political Theory, Political Science, Thomas Jefferson