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DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY FACULTY KUDOS
The British Journal for History of Philosophy awarded its newly established Beaney
Prize—its annual prize for the best contribution to widening the canon it publishes—to
𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐃𝐒𝐄𝐘 𝐒𝐓𝐄𝐖𝐀𝐑𝐓, Assistant Professor for her paper “’Count it all joy’: black women’s
interventions in the abolitionist tradition.”
𝐀𝐁𝐒𝐓𝐑𝐀𝐂𝐓
In her introduction to Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Angela Davis notes that the abolitionist tradition often harboured a “gendered framework” that defined “black freedom” in terms of the “suppression of black womanhood”. As such, Davis charges us with the task of “develop[ing] a framework that foregrounds both the complexities of gendered violence under slavery and possible gendered strategies for freedom”. In this paper, I engage in this task in two ways. First, I analyse key gendered aspects of the abolitionist tradition that erase black women’s agency. One important implication of my argument is that the abolitionist tradition prioritizes physical resistance in how we define ‘black freedom’ and in narratives of black life. Second, I argue that black women have intervened in this tradition by broadening our sense of agency and extending the landscape of liberation. My primary example will be hoodoo practices that emphasize divine submission rather than resistance in the works of black women abolitionists, such as in Scenes of the Life of Harriet Tubman and The Memoir of Old Elizabeth, a Coloured Woman.
The winner of the Beaney Prize receives £1,000. The prize was established in 2021
in honour of Mike Beaney, Editor of the journal from 2011 to 2021.”
Full Details at: https://dailynous.com/2022/04/25/bjhp-prizes-2021-2022/