Race for Citizenship: Black Orientalism and Asian Uplift from Pre-Emancipation to Neoliberal America

“When and Where I Enter . . .”: Orientalism in Anna Julia Cooper’s Narratives of Modern Black Womanhood

 l l 2 “When and Where I Enter . . .” Orientalism in Anna Julia Cooper’s Narratives of Modern Black Womanhood In Oriental countries woman has been uniformly devoted to a life of ignorance, infamy, and complete stagnation. The Chinese shoe of to-day does not more entirely dwarf, cramp, and destroy her physical powers, than have the customs, laws, and social instincts, which from remotest ages have governed our Sister of the East, enervated and blighted her mental and moral life. —Anna Julia Cooper, The Voice of Anna Julia Cooper Anna Julia Cooper’s essay “Womanhood: A Vital Element in the Regeneration and Progress of a Race” was originally delivered as a speech in 1886 to a congregation of black ministers in Washington, D.C.1 Cooper is perhaps best known for the black feminist formulation that has become central to paradigms in ethnic studies and women’s studies: “Only the BLACK WOMAN can say, ‘when and where I enter . . . then and there the whole Negro race enters with me.’”2 In the late nineteenth century, Cooper’s arguments and critical discourse positioned black women’s education and development as fundamental to the possibilities of black historical progress. More than a century later, her work is widely read and circulated, and Cooper has been recognized as one of the earliest black feminist intellectuals who linked the “race and woman” question. Significantly, Cooper’s renowned essay opens with an Orientalist narrative of China and Turkey as immobile sites of women’s degradation and  x Orientalism in Anna Julia Cooper’s Narratives backward social development. The Western world’s fascination with the “barbaric” patriarchal practice of Chinese foot-binding has been one of the most enduring and powerful legacies of Orientalist discourse and has survived well into the present. These narratives of the subjugated Oriental woman, however, bear a complex ideological relation to Cooper’s struggles to address the horrific conditions of black women’s subordination in late nineteenth-century America. Anna Julia Cooper’s writings negotiate black women’s multiple displacements from the racial and gendered terrain of citizenship. A Voice from the South (1892), a collection of Cooper’s polemical essays, explicitly challenges the ideologies of both the patriarchal discourses of black citizenship and the racism of the white women’s movement.3 Like many other black female intellectuals of the nineteenth century, Cooper turned primarily to Christian ideologies to reconstitute black women as ethical subjects and to reconcile the “underdevelopment” of black women with discourses of modern progress. The assimilation of black women into American modernity demands a narrative of development that Cooper provides by advocating for the education of black women in her attempt to construct a disembodied and “enlightened” black female subjectivity. Cooper’s text creates an ideologically complex paradigm of modern black womanhood, often deploying Orientalism in an attempt to negotiate particular racial and gender ideologies of modern progress. Orientalism is a particularly useful discourse for Cooper, as she seeks to centralize black women’s conditions while negotiating the racial imperative to offer black men “unconditional support in pursuit of [their] manhood rights.”4 Hence, black Orientalism discursively attempts to assimilate black female difference into the institutions and temporality of American modernity yet also generates new contradictions that undermine Orientalism as a discourse of Western civilization. After citizenship had been formally granted to African American men in 1870, only to be systematically denied following the demise of Radical Reconstruction, the dominant discourse of nineteenth-century black politics sought to reconstitute black men’s political authority as full citizens . Prominent black male intellectuals such as Martin Delany, Booker T. Washington, and W. E. B. Du Bois struggled to produce various paradigms of black citizenship that could reconcile the brutal history of black racialization with ideologies of emancipation and progress. These black nationalist discourses were also deeply imbricated with gendered ideologies of racial uplift. According to Kevin Gaines, ideologies of domestic- Orientalism in Anna Julia Cooper’s Narratives x  ity were constitutive of nineteenth-century discourses of racial uplift: “Oppression kept African Americans from fulfilling the majority society’s normative gender conventions, and racist discourses portrayed society’s denial of the authoritative moral status of the patriarchal family as a racial stigma, a lack of morality. . . . For educated blacks, the family and patriarchal gender relations became crucial signifiers of respectability.”5 Under the daily horrors of “living Jim Crow,” which attempted to subvert the social, economic, and...