The Costs of Black Feminist Uplift: Anna Julia Cooper as Prometheus

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Please join us for a lunchtime workshop with Dr. Emily Greenwood (Harvard University, Department of Classics and Comparative Literature). We will discuss Dr. Greenwood's paper "The Costs of Black Feminist Uplift: Anna Julia Cooper as Prometheus" which will be pre-circulated to attendees.

This essay is work in progress towards a chapter for a book provisionally entitled The Recovery of Loss: Ancient Greece and American Erasures. The book explores the conjugation of ancient Greece and modern America and how classicizing American visions of ancient Greece have sometimes served to stifle and suppress plural American histories and to erase counternarratives. In this draft chapter I am interested in a specific dimension of loss: the investment in the study of ancient Greece by prominent Black women intellectuals, spanning the nineteenth and twentieth century, whose academic over-attainment was checked by the under-fulfilment of structural racism. I suggest that Macy Church Terrell (1863-1954) and Anna Julia Cooper (1858-1964) developed an eloquent grammar of loss to parse and document counter-factual possibilities and the civilizational foreshortening that resulted from their denial.

Please register to receive the password to access the pre-circulated paper.

Dr. Greenwood will deliver the Frederick and Catherine Lauritsen Lecture in Ancient History at 4:00 pm on 5/1. Find out more here.