Anancyism and the Dialectics of an Africana Feminist Ethnophilosophy: Sandra Jackson‐Opoku's The River Where Blood Is Born. (2014)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Gillman, Laura
• Is Part Of: Hypatia. Volume 29:Number 1(2014:Spring)
• Page Start: 164
• Page End: 181
• Publication Date: 2014
• Subjects: Feminist theory -- Periodicals; Feminism -- United States -- Periodicals; Femininity (Philosophy) -- Periodicals; 305.4201
• DOI: 10.1111/hypa.12054
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0887-5367

Abstract

Abstract : Although intersectionality has been widely disseminated across the disciplines as a tool to center women of color's developed perspectives on social reality, it has been notably absent in the scholarship of feminist philosophy and philosophy of race. I first examine the causes and processes of the exclusions of women of color feminist thought more generally, and of intersectionality in particular. Then, focusing attention on Black feminisms, I read Sandra Jackson‐Opoku's 1997 novel, The River Where Blood Is Born, with and against Paget Henry's Africana ethnophilosophy. I model an interdisciplinary, intersectional approach to Henry's ethnophilosophy, broadening its philosophical scope by historicizing the liminality that characterizes the realities of many diasporic Black women. I also develop an interpretation of the female protagonists to suggest how many Black women within different historical contexts develop practices to recover African symbolic and discursive registers as a means to claim their subjectivities. Additionally, I challenge Henry's teleological explanation for an increasingly secular Africana philosophical identity.