“It is Never a Question of the Slaves”: Anna Julia Cooper’s Challenge to History’s Silences in Her 1925 Sorbonne Thesis

Most scholars of Anna Julia Cooper’s work have focused primarily on her influential 1892 collection of essays, A Voice from the South by a Black Woman of the South. However Cooper’s 1925 Sorbonne thesis, France’s Attitude toward Slavery during the Revolution,¹ merits closer attention. In her dissertation, Cooper exposes many of the ethical, political, and epistemological contradictions at work in France’s emergent republican democracy. For instance, despite France’s professed ideals of egalitarianism and rationality, Cooper finds evidence of sanctioned ignorance and supremacy. She also emphasizes the historical salience of power to historiography. Moreover, Cooper underscores the actions of slaves and gens de couleur in Saint-Domingue as historically relevant, even though they have been silenced in the historical record or ruled out as insignificant.

Though Cooper was the first black woman to earn a PhD at the Sorbonne, and, twenty-five years prior, was one of two African-American women to speak before the first Pan-African Congress in London in 1900,² she is too often left out of genealogies of transnational race consciousness, of black Europe, and of Diaspora research on Europe. Of course, Cooper is not alone in this regard. A vibrant international black community emerged in Paris during the interwar years; however women’s contributions to this “new internationalism,” a comparative approach to Diaspora that built on earlier Pan-Africanist and Ethiopianist frameworks (Edwards 2–4), have not been fully acknowledged. Ula Taylor contends that the genealogy of the black Atlantic is frequently curtailed because the “theoretical, dia-sporic ‘root’ is largely constructed around an elite entourage of African American men,” obscuring the contributions of Amy Ashwood-Garvey and Amy Jacques-Garvey, for example (179–80). Likewise, the typical “narrative of the emergence of Négritude” is, too often, “a story of ‘representative colored men’: Senghor, Léon-Gontran Damas, and Aimé Césaire” (Edwards 120), to the exclusion of women like Jane and Paulette Nardal, Suzanne Lacascade, and Suzanne Césaire (Sharpley-Whiting 14–20). Thus although francophone and allophone black women in Paris were key to the emergence of Négritude (Edwards 122), the customary but “conspicuously masculine genealogy of [. . .] critical consciousness” (Sharpley-Whiting 12) erases their contributions.

Cooper first began traveling across the Atlantic to Paris in 1900,³ engaged in several years of summer studies at La Guilde Internationale de Paris from 1911–1914, and then embarked on her Sorbonne thesis in 1924 after having completed several years of doctoral study at Columbia University in New York.⁴ Of course, it is not Cooper’s merely being in London or Paris that should be “counted” in the genealogy of Diaspora epistemologies, but her carefully researched dissertation. In fact, in a December 1927 letter to Alain Locke,⁵ Jane Nardal credits Cooper’s thesis on France and Haiti as having helped to raise her own race awareness. Nardal had attended Cooper’s oral defense at the Sorbonne, and, she writes, since that time, “My curiosity, my interest, already captured by other things Nègre, began to awaken” (qtd. in Edwards 126–27).⁶

In her thesis, Cooper analyzes the dialectical nature of the Haitian and French revolutions: she contends that these political uprisings arose out of a complex transatlantic consciousness, and not merely out of French intellectual innovation or political upheaval. As in her earlier scholarship, Cooper develops narrative strategies that allow her to push for a more dimensional and inclusive understanding of history and of humanity. Highlighting many fundamental tensions between France’s revolutionary ideals and actual practices, Cooper suggests that accounts of the Enlightenment and the Age of Revolution⁷ must be grounded in a transatlantic framework, emphasizes how capitalism emerged in concert with colonialism as a racially exploitive economic system, and highlights how history must attend to its marginal spaces and silenced stories.

By accenting a two-way, interactive relationship between France and Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) (L’Attitude 66),⁸ Cooper rejects the trite stereotype that colonialism and slavery entailed a unidirectional power dynamic...