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Chris Finley
Ethnic Studies/Sociology

Shari Huhndorf, Mentor

Anna Julia Cooper and Zitkala-Sa: Using the Institution of Education to Create New Gendered and Racialized Possibilities for Women of Color

Most comparative cultural studies scholarship looks at the ways non-whites formulate their racial identities compared to white mainstream society instead of acknowledging the way women of color have contributed to the construction of their own racial, gendered, and sexual identities. This project looks at the writings of two women of color during the end of Reconstruction and the end of the so-called Indian wars. By comparing Anna Julia Cooper's formative A Voice from the South (1892) and Zitkala-Sa's autobiographical American Indian Stories (1900), this project explores how those women of color used institutions of education in their attempts to escape the gender and racial constructions of their historical contexts. Their efforts gave them voices to expose the genocidal U.S. colonial histories of the enslavement of African Americans and the displacement and dispossession of Native Americans.