The subjective effects of oppression: Anna Julia Cooper and Black Existentialism

By going back to Anna Julia Cooper — an important though understudied figure of the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries —, the present project draws on my doctoral research in critical phenomenology of lived oppression and applies it to the analysis of the transatlantic constitution of Black existentialism. The importance of issues related to intersectionality within existing feminist movements led me to question the history and conditions of emergence of these issues; it made a decentering necessary in order to illuminate the present from another geographic space (the United States) and according to a longer history. By tracing the genealogy of intersectional thought, I wish to make feminist thought more complex from its margins, and from a philosophical perspective (Black existentialism) in which women's figures are still under-represented.