{"id":277,"date":"2014-03-27T19:33:30","date_gmt":"2014-03-27T23:33:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/confluence\/?p=277"},"modified":"2025-05-12T16:25:11","modified_gmt":"2025-05-12T20:25:11","slug":"a-voice-from-the-south","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/confluence\/2014\/03\/27\/a-voice-from-the-south\/","title":{"rendered":"Anna Julia Cooper\u2019s A Voice from the South, By a Black Woman from the South"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Voice<\/a>Anna Julia Cooper\u2019s A Voice from the South, By a Black Woman from the South<\/i><\/p>\n

Deconstruction of the White Aesthetic Gaze<\/p>\n

Historically, African Americans have viewed the literary canon as a space for resistance, and for the expression of political thoughts on racial uplift. \u00a0Within the contours of language, black writers and intellectuals have established a foundation of social influence. Although traditionally silenced and obscured in academia and the literary sphere, the voices of black women, and particularly 19th<\/sup> century women writers, signify the locus of this African American literary tradition. One of the monumental writers of the era was Anna Julia Cooper, a \u201cself-made woman born into slavery,\u201d devoted educator, spokesperson and the fourth black woman to earn a PhD. [1]<\/a> Cooper published a number of commendable works; however, the most laudable is A Voice from the South, By a Black Woman from the South<\/i>.[2]<\/a> Published in 1892, this collection of essays and speeches is revered as an \u201cunparalleled articulation of black feminist thought.\u201d[3]<\/a> Cooper cultivates a language that interrogates pressing issues of the 19th<\/sup> century such as racial uplift and womanhood. \u00a0In the text, Cooper emphasizes that, \u201cOnly if the black woman can say \u201cwhen and where I enter, in the quiet, undisputed dignity of my womanhood, without violence and without suing or special patronage, then and there the whole Negro race enters with me.\u201d[4]<\/a> In this illuminating declaration, she asserts that the progress of African Americans is impossible without black women. Cooper also advances in A Voice from the South<\/i>, that black women are not only the gatekeepers of not only the black community, but modern American civilization.<\/p>\n

In achieving her goals of educating her audiences and informing their political perspectives, Cooper not only utilizes an interdisciplinary method, but employs a multi-voice rhetorical strategy. One of the voices Cooper adopts is that of her white audience and this is noted in her accommodation of \u201cthe cult of true womanhood.\u201d[5]<\/a> Cooper applies \u201ctrue womanhood\u201d characteristics to black women and emphasizes the value of domesticity and motherhood. Scholars argue that this identification allows Cooper to demonstrate shared values between white and black women. In establishing these similarities, Cooper anticipates an inclination amongst her white female audience to sympathize with black women and broaden their efforts to support their black sisters. [6]<\/a> Cooper\u2019s identification with the voices and views of her white audience emerges as a plausible strategy and effective method of persuasion, as she appears to challenge the white, aesthetic gaze.<\/p>\n

In The Mask of Art: Breaking the Aesthetic Contract \u2013 Film and Literature<\/i>, Clyde R. Taylor defines aesthetics as having two institutionalized functions. One of these dimensions \u201crelates to cognition, in which a space of contemplation is marked out as characterized by the aesthetic or experience.\u201d[7]<\/a> Aesthetic functions like an \u201cinternalized psychic policeman operating through the body politic, maintaining the society\u2019s symbolic order.\u201d[8]<\/a> For a capitalist society, the honesty of workers, value of patriarchal linage and the honor of womanhood exemplify \u201caesthetic expressions of respect for the established order.\u201d[9]<\/a> Historically, for capitalist and Eurocentric societies, a racialized hierarchy is the \u201cestablished order\u201d that the aesthetic maintains. The aesthetic is essentially, as indicated by Taylor, \u201can ethnic gaze and a class-bounded one at that.\u201d[10]<\/a> The ethnic gaze is \u201cfixed on discrimination of self\/other, sameness\/difference, or identity\/monstrosity.\u201d[11]<\/a> The gaze reinforces whiteness as ideal, knowledgeable and beautiful and black humanity as immoral, undesirable and the obscure other.<\/p>\n

Cooper debases the ethnic gaze and the notions of whiteness and blackness to which it is attached through her use of the multi-voice strategy. In A Voice from the South, <\/i>she radically shifts from the position of the \u201cobject\u201d to the \u201cgazer.\u201d Traditionally, whites are the \u201cgazers\u201d and define the aesthetic experience, determine what is aesthetically displeasing and police themselves and society based upon their own sameness, as well as their own difference from blacks. In advocating for the values of her white audience Cooper places herself in this customarily white position, and asserts herself as a producer of knowledge, capable of dictating the aesthetic. Cooper emerges as a \u201cblack beauty\u201d and pushes her audience to question the value of the enduring and undisputed \u201cparasitical\u201d system of \u201cWhite beauty\u201d and \u201cBlack ugliness\u201d upon which they depend.[12]<\/a><\/p>\n

Telling of Cooper\u2019s tactful deconstruction of the white aesthetic gaze is Elizabeth Alexander\u2019s \u201cWe Must Be about Our Father\u2019s Business.\u201d Alexander argues that Cooper strategic use of \u201cI\u201d and the first person \u201callows her own experience \u2013 her own existence, even \u2013 to inform the rhetoric of her text as evidence of the feminist strategy she advocates.\u201d[13]<\/a> The extent to which her \u201cown existence\u201d strengthens the arguments of A Voice <\/i>is noted in her use of the first person in references to \u201cintellectual fathers.\u201d[14]<\/a> Alexander contends that by injecting \u201canecdotes from her own experience\u201d in her discussion of these canonical figures, Cooper fuses political theory with the lived experiences of African American women.[15]<\/a> The chapter \u201cHas America a Race Problem; If So, How Can it Best Be Solved?\u201d speaks to this fusion of the political with the lives of African American women. In this section, Cooper analyzes the historical role of peace and racial difference in various nations. Central to this section is her incorporation of the ideologies of French historian, Francois Guizot. In positing the voice and perspective of an African American woman as \u201cevidentiary,\u201d Cooper integrates \u201cfirst person-phrases\u201d in her explication of Guizot\u2019s philosophy and that of other intellectuals.[16]<\/a> Through this specific literary technique, \u201cCooper places herself as an active, visible agent in the writing of the book\u2026Cooper places herself in the active present tense; the book reads not like a moldering tome, but as work\u2026with a definite sense of source and agency.\u201d[17]<\/a><\/p>\n

Arguably, the persuasive and rhetorical strength of \u201cI\u201d lies in its ability to displace the gaze of whiteness. Through the use of first person, Guizot\u2019s thoughts on the predominance of one race in \u201cAsiatic types of civilization\u201d appear to become Cooper\u2019s own thoughts. [18]<\/a> In fusing her voice with the intellectuals she references, Cooper declares that the production of knowledge isn\u2019t specific to whiteness. Through her engagement of the first person, black women also emerge as gatekeepers of knowledge. She asserts that the obscurity of blackness and the perceived privileged knowledge of whites are fluid, indefinite categorizations.<\/p>\n

In \u201cThinking on the Margins, Acting at the Intersections: Anna Julia Cooper\u2019s A Voice from the South,<\/i>\u201d Vivian M. May poses that in identifying with her audience, Cooper constructs, \u201cinter-subjective, dialogic relationship with her audience, an active pedagogical and methodological space of encounter.\u201d[19]<\/a> A central manifestation of this \u201cspace of encounter\u201d are Cooper\u2019s challenges to white intellectuals such as August Comte. May states that in creating this dialogue, \u201cCooper inserts herself into a rhetorical position of authority, of a fully rational person speaking with other open \u2013 minded persons.\u201d[20]<\/a> Reflected in this use of dialogue is Cooper\u2019s negotiation of aesthetics. As stated by Taylor in \u201cThe Mask of Art,\u201d the aesthetic functions to maintain social order. The aesthetic expressions in a capitalist society reflect and reinforce social ideals. Cooper disrupts this aesthetic system of control on multiple levels. Cooper evokes an aesthetic expression in her language that removes her from the obscurity of blackness. Through this rhetorical technique, she not only emerges as a \u201cfully rational person speaking with other open-minded people,\u201d but a \u201cgazer,\u201d equipped with right and ability to mark a space of contemplation about aesthetic expression.<\/p>\n

Upon first sight the difference Cooper constructs between herself and black women prevents her from completely evoking black women\u2019s socio-political potential as the \u201cideological brush of true womanhood\u201d was largely incompatible with the realities of black women at the turn of the 20th<\/sup> century. [21]<\/a> However, as Alexander and May suggest, readers must be hesitant to employ the oversimplified, binary imposing white aesthetic gaze Cooper seeks to deconstruct. In A Voice from the South, <\/i>Anna Julia Cooper transforms the conventions and formalized symbols of <\/i>the genteel language of true womanhood. A revised language emerges; capable of communicating both racial and gendered politics and capable of speaking to the \u201cmultiplicity and complexity of her own situation\u201d.[22]<\/a><\/p>\n

–\u00a0Channon Miller<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Works Cited<\/h3>\n

Cooper, Anna Julia. A Voice from the South<\/i> by a Black Woman from the South <\/i>(New York\/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 31.<\/p>\n

Alexander, Elizabeth. “”We Must Be about Our Father’s Business”: Ann Julia Cooper and the In-Corporation of the Ninetheenth-Century African-American Woman Intellectual.” SIGNS<\/i>, 1995: 336-356.<\/p>\n

Brown, Delindus R., and Wanda F. Anderson. “A Survey of the Black Woman and the Persuasion Process: The Study of Strategies of Identification and Resistance.” Journal of Black Studies<\/i> 9, no. 2 (December 1978): 233-248.<\/p>\n

Gates Jr, Henry Louis. “Foreword: In Her Own Write.” In A Voice from the South <\/i>, by Anna Julia Cooper, vii-xxvi. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.<\/p>\n

Logan, Shirley Wilson. We Are Coming: The Persuasive Discourse of Nineteenth Century Black Women.<\/i> Southern Illinois: Southern Illinois University, 1999.<\/p>\n

May, Vivian M. “Thinking from the Margins, Acting at the Intersections: Anna Julia Cooper’s “A Voice from the South”.” Hypatia<\/i>, 2004: 74-91.<\/p>\n

Taylor, Clyde R. The Mask of Art: Breaking the Aesthetics Contract – Film and Literature.<\/i> Bloomington and Indianapolis : Indiana University Press, 1998.<\/p>\n

Washington, Mary Helen. “Introduction: Anna Julia Cooper, A Voice from the South.” In Black Women’s Intellectual Traditions<\/i>, by Kristin Waters and Carol B. Conaway, 251-268. Burlington, Vermon: University of Vermont Press, 2007.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n
\n
\n

[1]<\/a> Shirley Wilson Logan, \u201cWe are Coming\u201d The Persuasive Discourse of Nineteenth-Century Black Women <\/i>(Carbondale\/Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999), 99.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[2]<\/a> Gates, Foreword, xvii.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[3]<\/a> Ibid., xxvii.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[4]<\/a> Anna Julia Cooper, A Voice from the South<\/i> (New York\/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 31.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[5]<\/a> Washington, Introduction, 262.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[6]<\/a> Delindus R. Brown and Wanda F. Anderson, \u201cSurvey of the Black Woman and the Persuasion Process: The Study of Strategies of Identification and Resistance,\u201d Journal of Black History 9, no. 2 (1978):\u00a0 236.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[7]<\/a> Clyde R. Taylor, The Mask of Art: Breaking the Aesthetic Contract \u2013 Film and Literature <\/i>(Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1998), 13.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[8]<\/a> Ibid., 14.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[9]<\/a> Ibid., 15.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[10]<\/a> Ibid., 15.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[11]<\/a> Ibid., 31.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[12]<\/a> Ibid., 31.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[13]<\/a> Elizabeth Alexander, \u201cWe Must Be about Our Father\u2019s Business\u201d: Anna Julia Cooper and the In-Corporation of the Ninteenth-Century African-American Woman Intellectual,\u201d SIGNS 20 no. 2 (1995) 338.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[14]<\/a> Ibid., 338.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[15]<\/a> Ibid., 338.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[16]<\/a> Ibid., 344.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[17]<\/a> Ibid., 345.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[18]<\/a> Anna Julia Cooper, A Voice from the South<\/i> (New York\/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 152.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[19]<\/a> Vivian M. May, \u201cThinking on the Margins, Acting at the Intersections: Anna Julia Cooper\u2019s A Voice from the South,\u201d<\/i> Hypatia 19, no. 2 (2004): 77<\/i><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[20]<\/a> Ibid., 77.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[21]<\/a> Washington, Introduction, 262.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[22]<\/a> Ibid.,339.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Anna Julia Cooper\u2019s A Voice from the South, By a Black Woman from the South Deconstruction of the White Aesthetic Gaze Historically, African Americans have viewed the literary canon as a space for resistance, and for the expression of political thoughts on racial uplift. \u00a0Within the contours of language, black writers and intellectuals have established … Continue reading Anna Julia Cooper\u2019s A Voice from the South, By a Black Woman from the South<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":328,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/confluence\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/confluence\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/confluence\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/confluence\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/328"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/confluence\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=277"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/confluence\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":323,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/confluence\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277\/revisions\/323"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/confluence\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=277"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/confluence\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=277"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/confluence\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=277"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}