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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Laura Gillman
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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.

Type
Articles
Information
Hypatia , Volume 29 , Issue 1: Special Issue: Interstices: Inheriting Women of Color Feminist Philosophy , Winter 2014 , pp. 164 - 181
Copyright
Copyright © 2014 by Hypatia, Inc.

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