PI: Jasmine Yarish, Assistant Professor, University of the District of Columbia
Grant Amount: $2,500
Project Abstract: By returning to the intellectual contributions of six Black women to the unfolding of the first Reconstruction era in and beyond the city of Philadelphia between 1850 and 1880, this project aims to extend W.E.B. Du Bois’s theory of abolition democracy. They include Grace Mapps Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Harriet Tubman, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Fanny Jackson Coppin, and Gertrude Bustill Mossell. The centrality of both free, enslaved, and formerly enslaved Black women in mobilizing abolitionist projects highlights that the failure of emancipation to usher in a more perfect union hinged on the domestic, municipal, and state enforcement of a political discourse centered on separate spheres (i.e., public/private divide). Attending to how these Black women negotiated the global trends of enclosure, industrialization, and urbanization, I find that the political concept of fugitivity that spurned the abolition of slavery retains theoretical and practical significance beyond the antebellum period as it complicates the liberal idea of “home” based in private property and facilitates the imagination of alternative institutions to secure the basic tenants of democracy – freedom, equality, and solidarity – through investments in the commons.