Title: Paradoxes of Resistance: Maria Stewart and the Politics of the Public Sphere
Abstract: In her brief public career (1831-1833), black feminist abolitionist Maria Stewart advanced a multi-genre, multi-strategy political manifesto advocating for the complete liberation of the descendants of Africa in America. Yet Stewart’s body of work deploys several seemingly opposed theoretical and practical trajectories: insurrectionism and moral suasion, separatism and integration, nationalism and respectability politics. In this talk, I attend to the question of how to read Stewart without abstracting away from apparent contradictions in her political project. I resist the urge to treat these tensions as inconsistencies in her thinking. Rather, I argue these tensions serve as astute mappings of Stewart’s own efforts to navigate epistemic challenges that arise at the intersections of philosophical theorizing, political resistance, and public mobilization of heterogeneous audiences.