Abolition Democracy, the City, and Black Feminist Political
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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Santa Barbara Reconstructing Home: Abolition Democracy, the City, and Black Feminist Political Thought Revisited A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Political Science by Jasmine Noelle Yarish Committee in charge: Professor Fernando López-Alves, Chair Professor P.E. Digeser Professor Christopher McAuley Professor Eileen Boris Professor Cedric J. Robinson, in memoriam March 2019 The dissertation of Jasmine Noelle Yarish is approved. _____________________________________________ Eileen Boris, Committee Member _____________________________________________ Christopher McAuley, Member _____________________________________________ P.E. Digeser, Member _____________________________________________ Fernando López-Alves, Chair March 2019 Reconstructing Home: Abolition Democracy, the City, and Black Feminist Political Thought Revisited Copyright © 2019 By Jasmine Noelle Yarish iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS There are a great many people to whom I owe thanks for the successful completion of this project and the overall degree. In the following lines, I want to reference as many as I can, knowing very well that I may forget to hold up specific names. I give thanks to the following members of my family and kin circles. My mom, Krystna, for her strength. My grandmother, Carol, for her wit. My aunts, Penel and Phyllis, for their patience. My partner, Chris, for his adoration. My academic sister, Meg, for her organizational magic. My many friends for their kindness, but specifically Amy, Nadine, Anja-Maria, Mavreen, Tom, and Noelle. I give thanks to my committee for their constructive critiques – of which there were many – but I also take with me many lessons from each of them. Thanks to Eileen Boris for pushing me to be both historically accurate while at the same time encouraging me to take archival risks. Thanks to Christopher McAuley for offering me space to practice my thinking aloud and out loud in a multiplicity of venues, but most importantly in a number of his undergraduate classrooms where I was able to lecture on some of the key texts explored in this project. Thanks to P.E. Digeser for offering up a variety of insights to help me grow into a better writer. I will forever be grateful the “ah-ha moment” that came to me when I was posed with: “You write for writers as opposed to readers. You are giving us only 40% of your thinking on the page, and you need to be giving us more like 60-70%!” Thanks to Fernando López-Alves for his patience, fortitude, support, and willingness to get a cup of tea iv at any moment while listening to both my doubts and joys throughout the process. His stepping into the role of sole chair of this project after our shared sad day on June 5, 2016 modeled a form of bravery in mentorship that I will forever set as my own standard vis-à-vis all future student-mentees. But no one else save Cedric J. Robinson can hold the keystone place in this constellation of texts, methods, and questions which lead to my ongoing consideration of abolition, Reconstruction, and Black feminist thought. Though I was unfortunate to lose him as the key mentor of this project before I could complete my degree, he is present both in the footnotes of these pages and in my constant reflections over the other sources that I scour. The question for this project was formulated as an answer to another question Cedric once put to me. “Why claim the imaginary, the forgery, the myth of whiteness as the foundation for American political thought specifically, and democratic theory more broadly?” I give thanks to the many mentors, colleagues, students, and guides that brought me to and through this project. Amongst mentors, I would not have made it to or through the Ph.D. without the continued support of both my undergraduate advisor Jodi Dean and my master’s thesis advisor Aletta Norval. I would also like to thank Mia Charlene White who served as a temporary committee member after Cedric’s passing, especially for her encouraging me to continue to think about space and fugitivity in relation to democratic theory. As for colleagues, the conversations that I was made available to through the political science departments at both the University of Essex and the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) gave me wonderful, if not at sometimes conflicting, foundations in the field, and for that, I will always be grateful. I dearly appreciate the Black Studies and Global Studies v departments at UCSB who provided the interdisciplinary stimulation in the form of Ph.D. Emphases that I desperately craved since my undergraduate training. I am very grateful to my fellow faculty in the department of political science at Hobart and William Smith Colleges (HWS) where I served as a visiting assistant professor (VAP) in the final stages of the project. I am also grateful to the students in my upper division course in American Democratic Theory held during the fall semester of 2018 and for my fellow VAP buddy – Ricky Price. As for guides, I am forever indebted to the wonderful staff at the Library Company of Philadelphia and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. For those who straddle the mentor/colleague/guide distinction, I want to thank those who Erica Edwards calls “Cedric People” in her contribution to Futures of Black Radicalism (Johnson & Lubin, eds. 2017) and my colleagues with Abolition: An Insurgent Journal of Politics. Amongst the first group, I am forever grateful for the wisdom shared by and with Tiffany Willoughby-Herard, HLT Quan, Brian Lovato, Greg Burris, Damien Sojoyner, Jasmine Syedullah, Lisa Beard, and Elizabeth Robinson as well as the inclusion into their scholarly kinship. Amongst the second group, I am deeply honored to count myself as a colleague of this interdisciplinary and activist organization. I will never forget how conversations specifically with Andrew Dilts, Eli Meyerhoff, Sean Parson, Althea Sircar, Kevin Bruyneel, Charmaine Chua, George Ciccariello-Maher, and Scz that started as a result of the memorialization of another loss in the field of political science – that of Joel Olson, transitioned into a series of mini-conferences hosted at the Western Political Science Association’s annual meetings, and grew into an independent conference held in October vi 2017 in Minneapolis/St. Paul. Our physical and digital meetings have inspired so many thoughts in and through this project. vii VITA OF JASMINE NOELLE YARISH December 2018 EDUCATION Bachelor of Arts in Political Science & French and Francophone Studies, William Smith College at Hobart & William Smith Colleges, Geneva, NY, May 2007 (summa cum laude) Master of Arts in Political Theory, University of Essex, Colchester, U.K., November 2008 (with distinction) Doctor of Philosophy in Political Science, University of California, Santa Barbara, December 2018 PROFESSIONAL EMPLOYMENT 2009-2016: Teaching Assistant, Departments of Political Science, Sociology, and Chicana/o Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara Fall 2012: Graduate Teaching Associate, Department of French and Italian, University of California, Santa Barbara Winter & Summer 2015: Graduate Teaching Associate, Department of Political Science, University of California, Santa Barbara 2018-2019: Visiting Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Geneva, NY PUBLICATIONS Yarish, Jasmine Noelle. 2018. “#IfIDieInPoliceCustody: Neo-Abolitionism, New Social Media, and Queering the Politics of Respectability.” National Political Science Review 19, no. 2 (Special Issue): 50-67. Yarish, Jasmine Noelle. 2019. “From ‘Empty Lands’ to ‘Empty Signifiers’: Nativism, Race, Gender, and Populist Nationalism.” In Populist Nationalism in Comparative Perspective: Europe and the Americas, edited by Diane E. Johnson & Fernando López-Alves, 153-169. New York: Routledge (2019). AWARDS Graduate Student Association Excellence in Teaching Award for Social Sciences, University of California, Santa Barbara, 2015 Department of Political Science scholarship, University of California, Santa Barbara, 2014 Bosch Foundation Archival Seminar for Young Historians Fellow, German Historical Institute, Washington, D.C., Summer 2011 FIELDS OF STUDY Major Field: Political Theory Ph.D. Emphases: Black Studies and Global Studies viii ABSTRACT Reconstructing Home: Abolition Democracy, the City, and Black Feminist Political Thought Revisited by Jasmine Noelle Yarish This study extends W.E.B. Du Bois’s theory of abolition democracy by exploring the political thought of Black women in and around the city of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania between 1850 and 1880. As the historical site of the nation’s founding, the U.S. abolitionist movement, and the largest concentration of Blacks in the United States at the end of the 19th century, Philadelphia is central to the American democratic imaginary, yet Black women’s contributions to the city, the nation, and that imaginary, even by those exploring black political thought, remain largely unexplored. By returning to how Sarah Mapps Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Harriet Tubman, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Fanny Jackson Coppin, and Gertrude Bustill Mossell negotiated and transgressed the newly drawn boundaries of the expanding city, the “splendid failure of Reconstruction” that Du Bois documented in Black Reconstruction takes on gendered and urban dimensions. Attending to these Black women as they adapted to global trends of enclosure, industrialization, and urbanization, I find that