Feminism and Epistemic Injustice

This chapter offers an account of central issues and themes in feminist philosophical work on injustice that is distinctly epistemic. The first part of the chapter focuses on the contributions that classic feminist theorists have made to the conceptualization of issues of epistemic injustice long before such name was available, focusing especially on the writings of feminists of color from the seventeenth century onward (Sojourner Truth, Maria Stewart, Gloria Anzaldúa, Audre Lorde, etc.). The second half of the chapter focuses on the contributions to recent discussions of epistemic injustice by contemporary feminist scholars, especially Lorraine Code, Kristie Dotson, and Miranda Fricker. The chapter highlights the ways in which the feminist paradigms of intersectionality and standpoint theory have shaped analyses of epistemic injustice and epistemic resistance against injustice, elaborating the key notions of epistemic agency, epistemic responsibility and epistemic advocacy.

Maria Stewart: A Black Voice for Abolition

This article argues that Maria Stewart is an underappreciated abolitionist, and a worthy exponent of the Black views of the 1830s. Her work is compared with that of David Walker, Charlotte Forten, and Anna Julia Cooper. A focal point of much of her work is her exhortation to the high moral ground—she remains concerned, throughout her career, about the temptations faced by many during the nineteenth century that might lead them to a non-Christian path. As is the case with Charlotte Forten, who frequently moved for more formal education, Stewart worked ceaselessly to impel Black Americans to a worthy and virtuous life.

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

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 Looking deeper at arguments originally made by Maria Stewart concerning the denial of black women's ambitions and limiting potential in their working lives, the analysis employs the work of the Italian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.

Voices of Thunder

This chapter accounts for the centrality of nineteenth-century black oral culture to the development of the essay as a distinct African American literary genre. The author illustrates how the sermons and orations of nineteenth-century men and women such as David Walker, Maria Stewart, Henry Highland Garnet, Frances Harper, and Fredrick Douglass laid the foundation for the African American essay. It is shown how these authors combined accounts of their personal experience with traditions of oral performance. Because the line between the spoken and written word was blurred by nineteenth-century conventions, these authors blended various rhetorical and performance strategies to shape the art of the essay. In doing so, these writers became “voices of thunder.”The essayists discussed in this chapter used biblical references and appropriated democratic discourse to advance anti-slavery agendas. They appropriated the rhetoric of the founding documents of the American republic and remade them into the rhetoric of counterrevolution. Their works emphasized the material realities of life in America for blacks, both enslaved and free. Their expressions of freedom, and the rhetorical strategies they modelled informed the work of their literary descendants.

Early African American Print Culture

Not until the end of the 20th century did scholars begin to look at early African American print culture in the depth it deserves. A story painfully intertwined with the transatlantic slave system and racism, early black print engagement combined, from its beginnings, responses to white aggression and a powerful set of individual and communal desires to read about, record, and, via print, share truths of black life in the United States. Some of the first creators of black print in the United States, from the authors of the earliest slave narratives to poet Phillis Wheatley, had to think through questions of individual and communal identity vis-à-vis emerging American socio-political structures and find ways to ensure control over their own voices in a white-dominated culture that tried to exclude, use, or abuse those voices. But early black print culture is not simply the story of a single genre like the slave narrative or of exceptional individuals like Wheatley. Rather, it is also the story of organizational print tied to churches, conventions, and activist groups. It is as well the story of a diverse range of modes, from the rich pamphleteering tradition (perhaps most excitingly expressed by David Walker) to early black periodicals like those edited by Samuel Cornish and Philip Bell. Especially after 1830, it also became the story of a range of black women (from Maria Stewart and Jarena Lee to Frances Ellen Watkins Harper), of African Americans across the North (and occasionally in the midst of the slave South), and of an increasing number of formats, genres, and approaches. And it became a story of how black activists might interact (in print and beyond) with white antislavery activists, recognizing both shared and different goals and philosophies as they attempted to fight not only for emancipation but for broader civil rights.