Philosophy and African American Studies Graduate Student Kevin Cedeño-Pacheco to be published in the British Journal for the History of Philosophy

“Kevin Cedeño-Pacheco’s article “Race and the ‘Right to Growth’: Embodiment and Education in the Work of Anna Julia Cooper” will be published in the British Journal for the History of Philosophy in a special issue on 19th Century women philosophers.

Abstract: One of the distinctive features of Anna Julia Cooper’s political philosophy and philosophy of education is the frequency with which she uses corporeal and organicist imagery to support her analyses of and arguments against racist and sexist oppression. This paper draws on the work of Black feminist scholars to develop a philosophical analysis of Cooper’s use of corporeal and organicist rhetoric across some of her published and unpublished works on politics and education. Part I reviews three exemplary passages from her most known and studied work, A Voice from the South, to show the important overlap in the ways Cooper formulates her arguments and insights. Part II provides a similar analysis of several writings preserved in her scrapbook from the 1930s. By closely tracing the themes of vitality and education in Cooper’s racial and gender politics, this paper aims to reveal some of the implicit insights and criticisms that might go unseen or under-theorized were it not for sustained analysis.