Conventional love discourses tend to focus on individual romance, desire, and self‐fulfillment. In contrast, many feminist thinkers have contested love (especially romantic love) as an ideological force, delineated love as a way of knowing or ethical practice, explored love as a form of “social and biomaterial human power,” and theorized love's possibilities for social change, particularly in women of color theoretical‐political traditions (Reference Ferguson, Jónasdóttir, Jónasdóttir and FergusonFerguson and Jónasdóttir 2014, 2–7). Since love and violence have been (erroneously) conflated, pursuing love's “revolutionary possibility… requires identifying and deconstructing historical alliances between love and reason and between benevolence and imperialism” (Reference DavisDavis 2002, 146). Feminist and anti‐racist theorists have thus highlighted love's capacities for eradicating injustice and fostering beloved community (Reference Brosi and hooksBrosi and hooks 2012; Reference JamesJames 2013; Reference Guy‐SheftallGuy-Sheftall 2014). Approaches to love within these traditions have tended to be critical, generative, and materially aware, emphasizing love's pedagogical, creative, and political possibilities while acknowledging the labors needed to sustain such potential across identities, temporalities, and circumstances.

In this vein, and specifically highlighting Black feminists’ diverse thinking on love across genres and beyond the academy, Jennifer Nash recently outlined a late twentieth‐century Black feminist “love‐politics” (Reference NashNash 2011). To further appreciate love's heterogeneous potential for transformative imaginaries and radical politics, we must trace longer histories of Black feminist theorizing on love. Though Anna Julia Cooper (1858–1964), an early Black feminist educator, intellectual, and activist, generally is overlooked in contemporary thinking on love, affect, and social change, her critiques of romantic love and its attendant race‐gender ideologies, her analyses of state practices of white supremacy and capitalist exploitation in love's name, and her theorizing on love's radical possibilities deserve attention.

However, one obstacle to taking up Cooper's ideas stems from an interpretive conundrum she, ironically, pinpointed: Black women often occupy spaces of incomprehension and sanctioned ignorance (Reference CooperCooper 1988, i). Rather than being heard, understood, or valued, their ideas and voices are “muffled” (vii), relegated by “White America” to “terra incognita… a strange dark unexplored waste of human souls” from which “the revelation of personality and the voice of a truth” is impossible (Reference Cooper, Lemert and BhanCooper 1998c, 209). Thus I first discuss discursive violation, specifically “unloving”Footnote ¹ readings of Cooper (Reference GinesGines 2015), and explore how we might turn toward her work more “lovingly.” I then demonstrate how Cooper's ideas remain vital, particularly her astute critique of love's numerous misuses and her intersectional vision of love's transformative political possibilities.

Confronting “Unloving” Readings of Cooper

Today, Cooper generally is recognized as noteworthy, but her work frequently is treated in un‐nuanced ways: in fact, her intellectual labors and activist legacies have sometimes been treated “unlovingly” (Reference GinesGines 2015). Some Black male contemporaries, including colleagues like W. E. B. Du Bois, were dismissive toward Cooper, even as they appropriated her ideas (Reference Washington and Julia CooperWashington 1988; Reference James, Bell, Grosholz and StewartJames 1996; Reference GinesGines 2015; Moody‐Turner Reference Moody‐Turner2015b). Such condescension and arrogation continues in contemporary ideas about Cooper. For instance, she has been read as elitist (Reference Washington and Julia CooperWashington 1988; Reference Baker‐FletcherBaker-Fletcher 1994; Reference GainesGaines 1996; Reference Harley, Harley and Terborg‐PennHarley 1997), even in educational contexts. But taking up such claims wholesale can trade in troubling premises (for example, that Cooper's formal rhetorical style and extensive academic accomplishments seem to reveal a colonized mind): once aired, they seem to justify superficial assessments of her work. Cooper's fight to pursue a classical education (reductively read as Eurocentric), efforts as a high‐school principal to maintain a comprehensive curriculum (a public battle that lost her job [Reference HutchinsonHutchinson 1981; Reference MayMay 2007]), and being among the first Black women to earn a PhD, add up, somehow, to “elitism.” Her life spent combating supremacy, exclusivity, and inequality seems irrelevant, or at least qualified by her extensive cultural capital as an internationally known Black feminist author, educator, and speaker.

My concern lies with questions of power and distortion. What does it mean if critics, even unwittingly, rely on interpretive methods and explanatory frames that violate Cooper's ideas, ignore her contributions, and fail to capture what she has to offer? How is it that Cooper's thirst for an education (not bound by sexist, classist, or racist curricula), intellectual prowess, and fight against narrow Black educational opportunities are likened to elitism? How do such ideas continue to circulate, when many of her contributions clearly complicate or contradict them?

To assert elitism, critics seem to gloss Cooper's writings and overlook (readily available) details about her life. Compared to many of her scholar/educator/activist peers, Cooper experienced economic precariousness and financial insecurity, as a child and as an adult. She also regularly demonstrated (and acted on the fact) that poverty affects educational access, health and lifespan, and employment. Rejecting Booker T. Washington's conciliatory philosophy, her curriculum efforts focused on Black intellectual, historical, and political contributions, from the elementary to college levels. Cooper practiced inclusive leadership and critical pedagogy, ensuring the success of as many students as possible (in response, as principal she was charged by the D.C. board of education, in efforts to have her fired, with loving her students too much, literally and figuratively). As president of Frelinghuysen (the only college for Black Washingtonians aside from Howard, designed for working adults), she created, in memory of her mother who had no education thanks to slavery, the Hannah Stanley Opportunity School to combat illiteracy.Footnote ²

Given such sustained work by Cooper to persistently contest myriad elitist educational norms, including racist and sexist testing, policies, and politics, claims about her elitism seem somewhat glib. Additionally, I have discussed only some of her educational contributions that contravene or complicate elitism claims. There is far more to say about Cooper's wider work, including searing analyses of “aristocratic pink tea[s]” for “bluestocking” feminists (Reference CooperCooper 1988, 123), or white feminists’ complicity with white supremacy (53–54, 80–87, 100–108). Her dissertation also denounces internalized supremacy among French citizens in the metropole, including the Amis des Noirs, but also among slaveholding gens de couleur in Saint‐Domingue, whose colonized imaginations and yearning for power and capital undercut, at first, slave uprisings and the Haitian Revolution's momentum (Reference CooperCooper 2006; Reference MayMay 2007).

As this condensed discussion of some of Cooper's anti‐elitist contributions illustrates, there is often a significant gap between what critics pronounce and what Cooper actually wrote, spoke about, or did. Why are such assertions readily accepted—is it in part because the secondary literature, not her primary texts, is often relied on? At the Anna Julia Cooper Society's inaugural meeting,Footnote ³ the gathered scholars discussed what it might mean to expect, as with scholarship on any major figure, that those who study, teach, and write about Cooper would meet fundamental scholarly expectations, including immersing themselves in her life's work and attending more fully to her intricate arguments, multifaceted ideas, shifting voice, and complex rhetorical style.

Unfortunately, many analyses of Cooper tend to rely on simplistic approaches to her critical voice, including her mockery of dominant gender ideologies, making it difficult to appreciate her intersectional love‐politics lens. Ironically, some readings skew toward gender expectations and romantic norms Cooper disdained, presenting her rich life as an educator, scholar, and community activist as isolated and lonely. For instance, Charles Lemert focuses on Cooper's “commanding” beauty, her classical looks (like a mixed‐race “cameo” [Reference Lemert, Lemert and BhanLemert 1998, 2]). He then describes her life as primly focused on the domestic (4–7), which seems implausible given that she worked, engaged diverse broader publics, and traveled.

Visions of a “single, widowed” Cooper leading an implicitly unfulfilling, “solitary” life (Reference Lemert, Lemert and BhanLemert 1998, 5, 12–14, 17, 20) are surprising given her many friendships, diverse intellectual and activist activities, and full life as a (single) parent.Footnote ⁴ Observations of physical allure or supposed loneliness without a husband (rather than her freedom to pursue a different yet rewarding life) should not be sprinkled into discussions of Cooper's work: such stereotypes (which she roundly critiqued) distort her groundbreaking ideas and twist her life choices into dominant explanatory frames. Sexist notions of squandered beauty, straitlaced domesticity, and sorry widowhood uphold the ideologies Cooper fought against and mask the diverse pleasures we might speculate she enjoyed and pursued.

Certainly, texts and lives are open to interpretation, and debates about Cooper's voice, particularly her humor and (inter)textual maneuverings, are warranted. However, we cannot ignore how Cooper lived her life (rather unconventionally and on her own terms, within the constraints of her time), even if the biographical imperative that confronts Black women knowers can be problematic (Reference MayMay 2007; Reference GinesGines 2015). We also cannot overlook what she actually said about elitist gender constructs and romantic notions of domesticity (in terms of whiteness and middle‐class mores), gender's unnecessary constraints (relentlessly enforced by religion, economics, education, and the law), and problems with romantic‐love ideology, including inequitable marriages and relationships, women's unpaid second shift, and the impact of race, class, and empire on all gender politics.

Beyond challenging dominant ideas about romantic love and marriage, she called for Black women to immerse themselves in public and political life (and not aspire to white, middle‐class gender norms or be sequestered in a bourgeois domestic bubble) (Reference CooperCooper 1988, 28–32, 121; Reference Cooper, Lemert and Bhan1998d). Using acerbic wit, she often mocked True Womanhood and offered alternative visions for men and women alike. Cooper employed irony to create rhetorical distance between herself and ideas she riffed on or derided. Though some view her as a True Womanhood proponent (Reference Washington and Julia CooperWashington 1988; Reference GainesGaines 1996; Reference West, Miller and Bridwell‐BowlesWest 2005), what of Cooper's extensive use of ironic humor in such discussions, or the ways her arguments shift over time?

Cooper's larger oeuvre tends not to be engaged, and her rhetorical strategies are often read literally, not as performatively speaking to multiple publics: her multifaceted voice and complex subjectivity disappear. Discrepancies, tensions, or variabilities in her analyses are sometimes viewed as vacillation, acquiescence, or confusion, for instance, not as Cooper modulating her voice to negotiate rhetorical and political minefields or using sarcasm to signal dissent. In other words, “Cooper's wry remarks must be… contextualized within an explicitly raced and gendered sphere of black performativity and emergent modernity, as her sly quips… [contest] normative readings of black ontology as lack and of women as inherently inferior to their male counterparts” (Reference MannMann 2013, 160).

Countering “Unloving” Interpretive Practices

“Unloving” interpretive practices are not unique to Cooper: they have long had an impact on Black women's intellectual, creative, and political contributions. If power asymmetries have skewed readings of Black feminist ideas and lives, navigating this problem of distortion, borne of unequal social relations, has also shaped Black feminists’ textual, rhetorical, and political strategies (Reference Christian and AnzaldúaChristian 1990; Reference AlexanderAlexander 1995; Reference MayMay 2009). To adequately appreciate all that a heterogeneous Black feminist love‐politics has to offer, in addition to tracing longer histories, everyday interpretive practices may also need transforming, since Black feminists’ theoretical innovations have often been flattened, distorted, or violated (Reference TomlinsonTomlinson 2013; Reference MayMay 2015).

If “unloving” paradigms have plagued Black feminist thinkers, how can we shift to more “loving”Footnote ⁵ analytical practices that meaningfully engage in interpretive “bias” (Reference Babbitt, Tuana and MorgenBabbitt 2001) toward Cooper's voice and history, and, at the same time, actively turn from conventional expectations or frames that have silenced or distorted? To clarify, “loving” methods do not mean simply celebratory, uncritical readings. But contextual approaches engaging with primary texts (and going beyond Cooper's most well‐known writings) should be more the norm. To turn toward Cooper and meet her ideas and life choices even halfway requires sustained attention to her varied rhetorical strategies, diverse philosophical/theoretical pursuits, and complex educational thinking over time. And to mitigate persistent ignorance about her body of work or lack of attention to her intertextual referents and interdisciplinary frameworks, critical editions of Cooper's writings may be needed. Given the quiet snubs and outright backlash she faced as a scholar and educator, particularly by the 1930s, from the white and Black establishments in Washington, her lesser‐known work also must be attended to, including curricula (Reference BaileyBailey 2004; Reference JohnsonJohnson 2009), plays (Reference NdounouNdounou 2012), letters, poetry, lyrics, personal notes, and ephemera like scrapbooks (Moody‐Turner Reference Moody‐Turner2015a).

Again, “loving” analysis is not about adulatory, empty celebration. Locating Cooper's words within the constraints of her time, examining tensions in her voice, and noting how she walked ideological tightropes does not prevent Helen Jun from contesting Cooper's reliance on Orientalist logics to imagine Black women's liberation (Reference JunJun 2011). One can critique her using Black Orientalism and racial romanticism to affirm a modern Black womanhood and acknowledge how such paradoxes highlight both “ideological maneuvers” and “numerous contradictions, which are neither an index of Cooper's inconsistencies nor her presumed ideological ‘shortcomings’ but indicate the discursive constraints in which black female emancipation could be narrated” (Reference JunJun 2011, 48). Approaching Cooper's voice(s) as contradictory yet not inevitably failed, or as funny, contrary, and critical, not simply as mimetic, confused, or naïve, can better reveal how she navigated multiple audiences, ideologies, and expectations, crafted rhetorical space to foreground the particularities of her experiences, and exposed how dominant gender expectations and a host of culturally celebrated practices are imbued with a politics of domination (Reference AlexanderAlexander 1995; Reference MayMay 2009; Moody‐Turner Reference Moody‐Turner2009b). To reiterate, although these should be baseline scholarly expectations, they seem not to be.

The ways in which asymmetrical power, racist‐sexist discursive frames, and willful ignorance affect the interpretation of Black women's lives and ideas must be confronted. In a persistently racist/sexist culture/academy, taking Black women knowers seriously requires committing to “baseline” expectations: additional interpretive‐political tactics are also necessary to combat and counter institutionalized inequality and bias (such as racist‐sexist norms) in knowledge‐production, historical archives, education and schooling, reading and interpretation, interpersonal relations, and more. Recognizing how pursuing “understanding” across differences in identity and power can distort (that is, not result in comprehension) (Reference Babbitt, Tuana and MorgenBabbitt 2001; Reference DavisDavis 2002; Reference MayMay 2009; Reference TomlinsonTomlinson 2013) is pivotal as is attending to suppressed ideas, subjugated knowledges, historical elisions, and silenced lives (and how silences “speak” or operate).

In turn, this would require entering Cooper's words and worlds differently, approaching marginality not merely as something imposed, but also as a space of struggle and resistance (Reference hookshooks 1990, 152–53). It would also entail presuming Cooper and her contemporaries had the capacity for resistant subjectivity and inhabited complex selves, even if their forms of resistance, voice, or action are not necessarily legible via conventional frames or contemporary understandings (Reference Lugones and KeatingLugones, 2005). Building on insights from Barbara Christian and Susan Babbitt (Reference Christian and AnzaldúaChristian 1990; Reference Babbitt, Tuana and MorgenBabbitt 2001), I contend that more adequate analytic dispositions would cultivate

Finally, to engage Black feminist intellectual, philosophical, and political contributions more meaningfully, “loving” interpretive approaches must focus also on questions of love and resilience as part of “reason,” intellectual history, and theoretical innovation. Consider Christian's plaintive query, “How else have we managed to survive with such spiritedness the assault on our bodies, social institutions, countries, our very humanity?” (Reference Christian and AnzaldúaChristian 1990, 336). Taking up such a “loving” interpretive orientation is especially fitting here, since much of Cooper's life's work indisputably anticipated Kristie Dotson's call for those committed to Black philosophy, historically and at present, to practice “a steadfast commitment, unwavering trust, and in some contexts, a daring that defies current dominant reason… [and that] demonstrate[s] radical love for black people” (Reference DotsonDotson 2013, 38). As Dotson further suggests, “When centering the theoretical production of black women, which is often taken to be nonexistent, tackling and dismantling process‐based invisibility is absolutely necessary.” This not only requires “interpretive strategies that do justice to black [women's] theoretical production,” but also that refuse to separate love and reason (Reference DotsonDotson 2013, 39–40).

Cooper's Place in a Black Feminist Love‐Politics

As Nash discusses, a multifaceted Black feminist “love‐politics” emerged in the late twentieth century, one “marked by a broad activist conception of love” (Reference NashNash 2011, 4), by a devotion to self‐love in the face of relentless inequality and systemic violation, and by “producing new forms of political communities as a kind of affective politics” (3). She pinpoints ideas by various groups, including the Combahee River Collective's assertion, “Our politics evolve from a healthy love for ourselves, our sisters and our community” (Reference SmithCombahee River Collective 1983, 267). Nash also accounts for writers who explored love's possibilities, including Alice Walker's womanist who “Loves the Spirit…. Loves struggle. Loves the Folk. Loves herself. Regardless” (Reference WalkerWalker 1983, xi–xii); bell hooks’ examining the interface between love and pedagogy (Reference hookshooks 1994) and love's role in transformative politics (Reference hookshooks 2000); and June Jordan's 1978 query, in the call‐and‐response tradition, “Where is the love?” (Reference JordanJordan 1995). (Equally notable, I would argue, is Jordan's loving declaration, “Nobody mean more to me than you,” in memory of Reggie Jordan, brother of her student Willie Jordan, killed by police [Reference JordanJordan 1988]).

The end of the twentieth century saw a flourishing Black feminist love‐politics, but this praxis has a longer history,Footnote ⁶ as I have begun to illustrate with Cooper. As an educator, writer, and activist, she developed (and insisted others practice) an intersectional Black feminist love‐politics. Cooper expressed a clear yearning for freedom and redefined love as a political practice connected to the pursuit of a sovereign mind, heart, and body. In unmasking dominance insidiously enacted in love's name, she analyzed romantic love, marriage, and gendered care‐work in the domestic sphere. She also linked private and public realms and domestic and national politics, showing how intimate relations connect to macropolitical structures. Cooper revealed how nationalist pride/love often depends on violence and mob rule: likewise, an ardent quest for capitalist profits (gained via exploitation) is often conflated with freedom. In short, she showed how various “loving” practices, including the state's declaration (and celebration) of democratic ideals and principles, often involve extensive abuse of power, including slavery, conquest, and imperialism.

In addition to critiquing love's misuses and distortions, Cooper extolled the personal and political possibilities of different forms of love rooted in nonhierarchical cooperation and an intersectional understanding of subjectivity, power, and social change. Such loving, she suggested, has the potential to transform interpersonal relations and foster broad collaborative action to eradicate inequality, locally and globally (Reference MayMay 2009; Moody‐Turner Reference Moody‐Turner2009a). Not unlike Chela Sandoval's “emancipation of the imagination” (Reference SandovalSandoval 2000, 184), using love as a “hermeneutic” of social change (140), Cooper issued a clarion call for linking self‐realization and social justice. We must question prevailing logics and inhabit radical resistance by thinking/feeling against the grain. Declaring African Americans should “let nothing in [us] starve” (Reference CooperCooper 1988, 257), she made clear that structural subjection, internalized oppression, and colonized imaginations have no part in the love‐politics she conjured.

Romantic Love Gone Awry

Romantic love has indeed gone wrong, Cooper suggested, but it is not necessarily inherently oppressive: romance and its attendant norms have been constructed as damaging, unequal relations requiring women's self‐abnegation. However, because conventional ideas about love are socially sanctioned, celebrated, and structured, they exert an ideological force, occluding alternative ideas about love, including the reciprocal, politicized love Cooper envisioned as part of a transformative, intersectional gender‐race politics.

Rather than blame women for succumbing to romantic fantasies encouraging self‐annihilation in the name of fulfillment, Cooper used structural analysis to pinpoint love's wider ideological uses in systems of inequality and exploitation. She suggested asymmetrical power relations embedded in conventional masculine and feminine gender roles, idealized by the romance plot, are not biological dictates but constructs enforced by philosophical norms, legal mandates, and economic relations (for example, Reference CooperCooper 1988, 250, 292–93; Reference Cooper, Lemert and Bhan1998b, 291–92; Reference Cooper, Lemert and Bhan1998c, 210).

The law, for instance, has had a hand in keeping women economically and psychologically dependent by defining married women as property. Cooper mocked American “jurisprudence formulating as an axiom the absurdity that man and wife are one, and that one the man—that the married woman may not hold or bequeath her own property save as subject to her husband's direction” (Reference CooperCooper 1988, 58). Although women have been pressed to become a “domestic statue” (122), “help‐meet” (68), and men's “mirror,” Cooper scorned the idea that women should become “mere toys,” their value defined as “relative” and measured by “pleasure‐giving” talents (65). Rather than having access to basic literacy and a robust education, women have been schooled in one verb, amo, “I love.” Why? Because, allegedly, “that is already the ground and limit of their intuitive furnishing” (48).

Rejecting “being swallowed up into some little man” as a life goal (Reference CooperCooper 1988, 70), Cooper underscored women's intellectual and political desires and highlighted how structural forces, not nature, impede women. The “one‐sided masculine definition of womanhood” suggests a woman has “no God‐given destiny, no soul with unquenchable longings and inexhaustible possibilities—no work of her own to do and give to the world—no absolute and inherent value, no duty to self” (65). Instead of venerating dependency and helplessness (66), there should be meaningful “stimulus to female development” (75).

Impeded by misogynist and racist ideologies, and hindered by institutionalized inequalities, including lack of access to education, fair wages, and meaningful work, Black women face compounding hindrances because all such obstacles are gendered and raced. Cooper thus called on Black men to support a rigorous education for all: “Let our girls feel that we expect more from them than that they merely look pretty and appear well in society. Teach them that… the world needs and is already asking for their trained, efficient forces” (Reference CooperCooper 1988, 78). Self‐actualization, Black women's in particular, cannot be achieved solely in the domestic sphere or only by means of service to others: “no woman can possibly put herself or her sex outside any of the interests that affect humanity” (143).

Cooper argued that a comprehensive education would offer Black women opportunities for self‐realization and lay the ground for new partnerships wherein Black men and women loved and worked “shoulder to shoulder” (Reference CooperCooper 1899, n.p.), not in subordination or “sexual jealousy” (Reference CooperCooper 1988, 68). A woman's “horizon is extended” through education (69), which allows for economic, intellectual, and psychological independence and more choice in life pursuits, romantic or otherwise. Women would be “less dependent on the marriage relation for physical support” and better able to “tug at the great questions of the world” (75). Cooper directed Black men to divest from patriarchy: they should no longer expect “that women may stand on pedestals or live in doll houses, (if they happen to have them) but… must not furrow their brows with thought” (75). Simultaneously, she called on Black women to pursue their yearnings and love themselves as much as they cared for others and fostered the wider community.

In addition to tackling misogynist ideologies, Cooper contested countless racist stereotypes (Reference CooperCooper 1988, 186, 203–08, 222–23), all “a revelation of the white man” (216), that schooled wider publics in white supremacy by portraying African Americans as a “nightmare vision” (222) and Black women as emblematic of ignorance and repulsiveness (203–208). But representing African Americans as “angels of light or as goody‐goody Sunday‐school developments” (206), she argued, is a wholly inadequate counter‐strategy. Rather than simply invert white imaginaries, original, diverse Black cultural works are needed (225). Emphasizing, “No man can prophesy with another's parable” (176), Cooper demanded a new Black literary tradition and, later, decried Jim Crow education and racist standardized testing (Reference Cooper, Lemert and BhanCooper 1998a) as hegemonic tools used to stymie creativity and artistic growth. For creativity, resistant subjectivity, and wider cultural and political movements to blossom, freedom of mind, body, and spirit is crucial (Reference CooperCooper 1988, 223). For Cooper, a well‐rounded education was central to this larger pursuit.

Just as Cooper spurned the idea that girls and women should be educated to become men's playthings, or to care only for others but to sacrifice themselves, she rejected racist educational systems in which an entire people were “educated” for servitude and second‐class citizenship (Reference Cooper, Lemert and BhanCooper 1998a; Reference Cooper, Lemert and Bhan1998c; Reference Cooper, Lemert and Bhan1998e). She called for access to free, comprehensive education as part of the reparations due Black communities (Reference CooperCooper 1988, 193) and later argued that Black students must be taught overtly about abuses of power, “fitted to make headway in the face of prejudice and proscription the most bitter, the most intense, the most unrelenting the world has ever seen” (Reference Cooper, Lemert and BhanCooper 1998e, 250–51).

Too often, however, Black youth, and particularly Black girls, are inadequately supported in school. Cooper recalled her own educational experiences, where she found the “atmosphere, the standards, the requirements… [did] not afford any special stimuli to female development…. I constantly felt (as I suppose many an ambitious girl has felt) a thumping from within unanswered by any beckoning from without” (Cooper 1998, 75–76). Cooper thirsted for a freedom of mind, heart, and body not yet fully attainable—but that she had sensed, since childhood, should be possible. Part of how she expressed recognition of this potential was via deeply embodied prose: a “spiritual and intellectual longing is physically palpable” in her writing (Reference AlexanderAlexander 1995, 353), as her unanswered “thumping within” and “soul with unquenchable longings” illustrate.

Readers can feel the sheer desire infusing Cooper's words and driving her work. She affectively and effectively underscored misogyny's destructiveness, disguised as romance or love, and simultaneously foregrounded what it meant to live in a hate‐filled, racist world marked by “negrophobia” at every turn (Reference CooperCooper 1988, 285). In elucidating the harms caused by conflating white supremacy with democracy, or when contesting conventional notions of masculinity and femininity, romantic love, and domesticity (which confuse love and care with submission and coercion), Cooper showed how such ideals are not “natural,” though they do help naturalize inequality and hierarchy, justify broader economic and physical exploitation, and rationalize a culture of violence, whether in the form of mob rule, imperial conquest, or sexual violence against women, Black women in particular.

All practices and principles tied to dominance must be dismantled, she argued, including “hammering down some of those hideous handicaps which hamper whole sections of a community through the inequalities of environment, or the greed of the great” (Reference Cooper, Lemert and BhanCooper 1998f, 217). Additionally, survival, though essential, was not the ultimate goal of Cooper's educational vision or love‐politics, as she believed “in allowing every longing of the human soul to attain its utmost reach” (Reference CooperCooper 1988, 259). Although starvation and systemic poverty must be stamped out, and society restructured on equitable terms, “there is [also] the hunger of the eye for beauty, the hunger of the ear for concords, the hungering of the mind for development and growth, [and] the hungering of the soul for communion and love” (257). Cooper redefined love from a mawkish, destructive, race‐gender ideology to a multifaceted, liberatory desire. All must be able to “feed” more than physical hunger: existential, creative, and political yearnings need nourishing and our educational, economic, philosophical, legal, and interpersonal practices must be radically transformed to achieve this.

Practicing Supremacy in Love's Name

In addition to naming logics of domination embedded in conventions of love and gender, and showing how romantic love has served as an ideological tool of women's oppression, Cooper astutely crossed public/private divides and bridged micro‐ and macro‐political scales when analyzing the domestic sphere, gender, race, and love. She contested gendered and raced hierarchies more broadly and linked normative masculinity and femininity directly with white supremacy, xenophobia, and imperial rule. Using her “right” to speak to women's concerns and issues, Cooper expanded the scope of her arguments to take on the state's complicity in injustice, inequality, and violence. She first challenged romantic notions of domesticity and feminine care to expose how being female brings no inherent capacity for (loving) compassion. She then tied “True Womanhood” ideals of (white, middle‐class) femininity (and masculinity) and domesticity (and chivalry) directly to state‐condoned white supremacy, historically and contemporaneously.

Beyond mocking the idea that the home should be a space to house “lisping, clinging, tenderly helpless, and beautifully dependent creatures” (Reference CooperCooper 1988, 66), Cooper carefully demonstrated how women's social reproductive labor has no inherent virtue. Devotion can mask animosity, feed brutality, and buttress structural inequality. To illustrate, she created a character, “Miladi,” “Queen” of the drawing room (88–89). In her own family, and in the allegorical family of the nation, Miladi bows to white patriarchy to maintain class and race privilege (81). Miladi's gendered “love” and “care,” enacted in the domestic sphere, are labors of dominance repackaged as emblems of freedom and democracy.

By teaching others to follow white patriarchal power, Miladi plays a pivotal role in imparting racist hatred in the name of familial harmony and devoted motherhood (Reference CooperCooper 1988, 87–88). Under the aegis of chivalry (and protecting white womanhood/the nation), white men engage in lynching (Reference Cooper, Lemert and BhanCooper 1998c, 210–11) and sexually terrorize Black women, who have no meaningful shelter from such horrors (Reference CooperCooper 1988, 21, 35, 111; Reference Cooper, Lemert and Bhan1998d, 202). Cooper took on the chivalrous South, “Angry Saxon” superiority, and the US state by highlighting mob violence used to destroy Black communities and pinpointing how “Ku Klux beatings with re‐enslaving black codes became the sorry substitute for the overseer's lash and the auction block” (Reference Cooper, Lemert and BhanCooper 1998c, 210). Simultaneously, she contested patriarchal victim‐blaming and insisted that “Negro sentiment cannot remain callous” about “wronged sisters” (Reference CooperCooper 1988, 32); Cooper demanded that Black men adopt a liberated gender consciousness as central to race liberation.

Emphasizing how the “the Negro was transplanted to this continent in order to produce chattels and beasts of burden for a nation ‘conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal’” (Reference Cooper, Lemert and BhanCooper 1998c, 206–07),Footnote ⁷ Cooper also examined (and excoriated) the Constitution. She delineated how the founding fathers, “jugglers with reason and conscience,” avowed “sublime altruism” and humanist love, while “forcing [slaves] with lash and gun to unrequited toil, making it a penal offense to teach them to read the Word of God.” Turning back to Black women's lived experience as pivotal to unlocking American history, she underscores how the country's founders also condoned the systematic violation of Black women, “pocketing the guilty increase, the price of their own blood in unholy dollars and cents” (207).

Slavery as the basis of global capitalism, then, was another focus of Cooper's critique. Refusing to accept exploitation and hierarchy as “natural,” whether in romantic or economic relationships, Cooper pivoted from domestic issues of gender, marriage, law, and property to racialized capitalist labor relations, directly challenging “political economists [who declare]… that the only possible adjustment between laborers and capitalists is that of selfishness and rapacity—that each must get all he can and keep all that he gets” (Reference CooperCooper 1988, 58). Exposing the extreme violence needed to maintain myths of a beneficent white nation and of capitalism's wonders, Cooper highlighted how several “loving” ideals are cloaked forms of exploitation with a long history, in the US and beyond.

In her dissertation, for instance, she noted how France's love of profit undermined humanism in the Age of Revolution. Though democracy and brotherly equality ostensibly flourished, humanism's true promise was undercut by a love of profit, slavery's exploitation and dehumanization, a notion of democracy that was racially bifurcated, and egalitarian philosophies that hinged on human hierarchy (Reference CooperCooper 2006; Reference MayMay 2007). As Cooper observed, commerce with Saint‐Domingue represented nearly two‐thirds of France's total trade (Reference CooperCooper 2006, 66): “the colonists, the rich merchants, [simply] had too much to gain from the shameful traffic in slaves to be willing even to consider the possibility of suppressing slavery” (37). Protecting a spurious racial hierarchy and safeguarding French financial interests gleaned from conquest superseded goals of freedom and political equality. France's emergent democracy depended on acute self‐interest, cruelty, and exploitation: despite proclaiming liberty, brotherhood, and equality, it promoted the tripartite values of violence, exploitation, and human expendability.

Here and elsewhere, Cooper astutely underscored how those with emancipatory, even revolutionary intentions can reinforce hierarchy and inequity. Turning from historical considerations to her contemporaries, she illustrated how laboring on behalf of feminism or Black liberation cannot guarantee a free mind. Those who should be her allies frequently participated in a politics of hate under the guise of advocacy or partnership. Rather than uphold domination in the name of liberation, and thoroughly anticipating intersectionality theory (Reference GinesGines 2011; Reference MayMay 2015), Cooper called for acknowledging simultaneous privilege and oppression and for dismantling all forms of inequality simultaneously, as they interlink and are mutually reinforcing.

Specifically, Cooper demanded that white feminists renounce white domination and Black men abandon patriarchy: holding onto privilege and securing rights only for some just reproduces hierarchy. Insisting feminists contest US expansionism and imperialism, she asserted:

It is time to recognize that these different examples from across Cooper's oeuvre amply demonstrate how her politicized reflections on love's abuses and misuses, and love's untapped transformative possibilities, personally and politically, anticipate contemporary analyses and hold continued relevance. As one example, consider Audre Lorde's insights: “The principal horror of any system which defines the good in terms of profit rather than in terms of human need, or which defines human need to the exclusion of the psychic and emotional components of that need—the principal horror of such a system is that it robs our work of its erotic value” (Reference LordeLorde 1984, 55). Although Cooper avoided discussing anything overtly erotic, she consistently expressed a deep desire for justice and for a free mind, body, and heart: she alluded to many unfulfilled desires and, simultaneously, focused on exploitation's ongoing atrocities. In her deeply conveyed yearnings, conjurings of horror, and allusions to domination's harms, Cooper anticipated the spirit of contemporary Black feminist thinking on love. This is not to deny the importance of Lorde's reclaiming erotic power, ecstasy, and lesbian pleasure, but, rather, to urge that we consider how earlier writers like Cooper, in pointing to unfulfilled yearnings and confronting horror head‐on, lay the ground for a twentieth‐century Black feminist love‐politics.Footnote ⁸

Cooper's Reciprocal, Intersectional Black Feminist Love‐Politics

Cooper developed ideas about loving collaboration and solidarity that fracture simplistic, distorting binaries between “public and private spheres, art and activism, and self and other” (Reference Moody‐TurnerMoody-Turner 2014, n.p.). Rather than approach love narrowly, relevant only to romance or marriage, Cooper proposed that both self‐love and loving other persons can operate as political and ethical orientations, forms of moral reasoning that can shape the struggle to liberate all persons, not just some (Reference CooperCooper 1988, 100). She presented this politicized form of love as a pursuit, not as a given or as passively received: it entails an internal journey (identifying and answering one's deepest yearnings), interpersonal efforts to relate equitably across differences, and collective labors to achieve inclusive political aims and strategies.

Cooper insisted, “Keep true to your own ideals. Be not ashamed of what is homely and your own. Speak out and speak honestly. Be true to yourself” (Reference CooperCooper 1988, 226). Being “true” does not require denigrating or destroying others—love cannot pivot on conquest. She asserted, “Men will here learn that a race, as a family, may be true to itself without seeking to exterminate all others” (168). Importantly, she underscored the need to decolonize our imaginations, for “All prejudices, whether of race, sect, or sex, class pride, and caste distinctions are the belittling inheritance and badge of snobs and prigs” (118).

Cooper also discussed how “Heart Talent” (Reference Cooper, Lemert and BhanCooper 1998b, 297) and “heart power” (Reference CooperCooper 1988, 131) could be wellsprings of collective resistance and “loving service” to humanity (197). “Loving service” does not mean charity or servitude, but self‐realization via collective labors for social change, that is, “service for the common good” (see Reference JohnsonJohnson 2009)—in many ways presaging Reference KingMartin Luther King's 1968 exhortation to “develop a kind of dangerous unselfishness” and “give ourselves to this struggle until the end” (Reference KingKing 1968). In prose marked by “an avowed embrace of difference, pluralism, and conflict” (Reference MannMann 2013, 123), including an embrace of “radically opposing or racially different elements” (Reference CooperCooper 1988, 151), Cooper called for dialogical forms of thought and action in “touch” with humanity. In part, this entails engaging (intersubjectively, not paternalistically) those “less favored” while pouring “the oil of human kindness and love on… troubled waters” (287). By “touching,” she also meant finding ways to come together to eradicate injustice by drawing on a loving political orientation that does not flatten differences. Cooper suggested philosophical and political work must practice “reciprocity” (165) rather than collude with segregation, objectification, or dehumanization.

By reciprocity Cooper did not mean tolerance: a provisional (and often assimilative) embrace of difference, a qualified form of love that coercively maintains power and does not contest dehumanization or violence. Instead, she presented mutual, intersubjective love as a collective political pursuit, while also acknowledging this pursuit was fraught with structural barriers and ideological disincentives. Furthermore, several types of “love,” whether individual or structural, personal or political, romantic or revolutionary, can buttress dominance. In other words, even when the aims might be liberatory, politicized, and loving, Cooper recognized that, as with conventional love, radical love can reproduce the status quo and further racist/sexist/xenophobic harm and interpersonal as well as collective violence.

The urgent need to account for simultaneous privilege and oppression, as part of an intersectional political vision that fosters, rather than undermines, transformative liberation struggles, is why Cooper denounces patriarchal responses to white supremacy that build up Black manhood by relying on misogyny and excoriates white‐supremacist responses to patriarchy that afford some white women access to power in the name of gender “equality,” but that, in the end, maintain racist inequality and exploitation. She directly appealed to feminists to abjure forms of femininity or feminism steeped in white domination and urged African Americans to turn from dominant logics and wholeheartedly love themselves and affirm one another. She called for resisting objectification of self and other, shedding internalized “subjection” (Reference CooperCooper 1988, 102) while recognizing our capacity to be complicit in systems of oppression.

At the heart of Cooper's Black feminist love‐politics is a contestation of multiple forms of animus and violence, historically and at present, whether in denouncing the unspeakable crimes and violations committed against Black women by white men (Reference Cooper, Lemert and BhanCooper 1998d), excoriating hatred disguised as tending the nation (Reference CooperCooper 1988, 81–89, 100), condemning avarice and exploitation in the name of “free” markets (51, 130), or calling attention to “Angry Saxons” (Reference Cooper, Lemert and BhanCooper 1998a) and the uncontrolled, violent “resentment and rage” of the “master class,” exempted by the Supreme Court (Reference Cooper, Lemert and BhanCooper 1998c, 210). Dismantling enduring rage and omnipresent violence requires a radical restructuring of public life and social institutions, but also a radical commitment to an intersectional, globally aware, transformative love‐politics.

As in Cooper's time, racist, sexist, imperialist violence pervades contemporary life. We must continue, as she did, to recognize how love can be rethought, approached as “a balm and a pedagogy—an instructional approach to equitable relationality—that can be employed to counteract the force of lovelessness… [that results] in the subjugation of various bodies throughout the world.” Consider, for instance, “state‐sanctioned violence, settler colonialism, bloated prison industries, rape culture, genocide, xenophobia, and so much else. And yet,… love in the time of racism is a radical act that can lead to broader political/social formations and solidarities” (Reference Moore and CasperMoore and Casper 2014).

It is in this spirit that Cooper insisted human relations should never entail subservience or supremacy, but solidarity and intersubjective accountability. She invites us to engage in a deeply embodied loving perception and to practice an intersectional politics as antidotes to dehumanization, violation, and exploitation. In her view, any notion of liberation, personhood, knowledge, or action that normalizes subordination, overtly or indirectly, is unacceptable. Cooper also revealed the shortcomings of xenophobic reactions to cultural difference in the name of loving the (white) nation and, on a more global scale, contested a capitalist love of profit, use of imperial force, and reliance on slavery in democracy's name. Unfortunately, much scholarship on the Black Atlantic, the history of Black education, and theorizing love, affect, and Black feminisms, fails to note Cooper's insights on these matters.

As Cooper's work illustrates, an intersectional Black feminist love‐politics, with rich historical contours and radical possibilities, blossomed in the nineteenth century. To better understand love's potential to alter imaginaries, change social relations, and spark transformative politics, we must trace longer histories of Black feminist theorizing on (and practices of) love. Similar to their late‐twentieth‐century counterparts, Cooper and her contemporaries aimed to revolutionize an “unloving” world, interpersonally, affectively, intellectually, spiritually, structurally, materially, and politically.

Cooper's forceful critiques of love, call to distinguish between loving and unloving relations (interpersonally and politically, interpretively and structurally), and alternative ideas about love's potential to contest inequality are consistent with, and foundational to, current discussions about why we must dare to love differently and fiercely in a time of violent lovelessness. Cooper envisioned an early Black feminist love‐politics, one with potential to awaken and foster compassionate solidarities. Her ideas about transforming gender relations, contesting racism, challenging imperialism, seeking decolonized selves, and pursuing coalitions as a loving political orientation should be more widely recognized.