Jasmine Noelle Yarish
Dr. Jasmine Noelle Yarish is an assistant professor in the department of political science at University of the District of Columbia (UDC). Her expertise is in the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and democratic theory. Her research aims to extend the idea of abolition democracy theorized by W.E.B. Du Bois to include the political and intellectual contributions made by Black women to the era from which Du Bois developed it - the Reconstruction era (1860-1880). Her archival commitments to revisiting that early period of contemporary political thought, the primary democratization period in American political development, and the unique case of Philadelphia in rethinking the significance of Reconstruction for the discipline of political science place Dr. Noelle Yarish's scholarship as part and parcel of the growing literature on the "Third Reconstruction."
Supervisors: Fernando Lopez-Alves, Cedric J. Robinson, P.E. Digeser, Eileen Boris, and Chris McAuley
Supervisors: Fernando Lopez-Alves, Cedric J. Robinson, P.E. Digeser, Eileen Boris, and Chris McAuley
less
InterestsView All (11)
Uploads
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 the political concept of fugitivity that spurned the democratic movement for the abolition of slavery retains theoretical significance beyond the antebellum period. Having a history in Black political thought, fugitivity is a paradigm through which people in their everyday practices escape the capitalist impulse to confine, detain, and commodify their existence as both capital and labor. Black women as political thinkers complicate the spatialized reality and romantic idea of “home” that underpinned both the hunting and freeing of fugitives in
the years leading up to the U.S. Civil War. Their work raises the following question: what does democracy mean when the nation is built from and by those deemed “homeless”?
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 the political concept of fugitivity that spurned the democratic movement for the abolition of slavery retains theoretical significance beyond the antebellum period. Having a history in Black political thought, fugitivity is a paradigm through which people in their everyday practices escape the capitalist impulse to confine, detain, and commodify their existence as both capital and labor. Black women as political thinkers complicate the spatialized reality and romantic idea of “home” that underpinned both the hunting and freeing of fugitives in
the years leading up to the U.S. Civil War. Their work raises the following question: what does democracy mean when the nation is built from and by those deemed “homeless”?