scholarly journals “Why Sit Ye Here and Die”? Counterhegemonic Histories of the Black Female Intellectual in Nineteenth-Century America

2020 ◽  
Vol 54 (5) ◽  
pp. 1005-1031
Author(s):  
REBECCA J. FRASER ◽  
MARTYN GRIFFIN
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Black Female ◽  
National Association ◽  
Women's Clubs ◽  
Antonio Gramsci ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
Working Lives ◽  
Maria Stewart

This paper examines the work and lives of black female activist intellectuals in the years before the formation of the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs (NACWC) in 1896. Looking deeper at arguments originally made by Maria Stewart concerning the denial of black women's ambitions and limiting potential in their working lives, the analysis employs the work of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, in particular his notion of the intellectual, to help reflect on the centrality of these black women in the development of an early counterhegemonic movement.

Reforming Tocqueville

1988 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 283-295
Author(s):  
Ronald Walters
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Striking Feature ◽  
Antonio Gramsci ◽  
Historical Source ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
Antebellum Period ◽  
Clifford Geertz ◽  
American Society ◽  
Prevailing View

“Tocqueville,” wrote Lynn L. Marshall and Seymour Drescher in 1968, “enjoys such vogue among current American historians of the [antebellum] period that a proposal to analyze his usefulness as an historical source seems perhaps an entirely unnecessary exercise.” Few would make such a claim in the 1980s. Even as Marshall and Drescher wrote, a continuing stream of social historians had begun the process of transforming the prevailing view of nineteenth-century America. Many of these scholars-now ranging in age from early ’30 to early ’50s--could hardly have escaped Tocqueville and Tocquevillians in their undergraduate and graduate years. Yet they gained their new understanding of American society largely without or in opposition to him. While critics properly point to the “absent Marx” as a striking feature of American historiography, the recent near absence of Tocqueville is equally striking, particularly among historians who write about the nineteenth-century America whose analyst and theorist he was. Tocqueville’s stock fell as that of twentiethcentury thinkers like Clifford Geertz, Antonio Gramsci, and E.P. Thompson rose.

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