Reification and Resistance: The Rhetoric of Black Womanhood at the Columbian Exposition, 1893

Abstract

This essay examines the “exhibition” of three African-American women at the World's Congress of Representative Women in 1893: Fannie Barrier Williams, Anna Julia Cooper, and Frances Jackson Coppin. When their cultural moment at the World's Congress is read in the context of the surrounding exhibition, then their rhetoric ultimately and simultaneously reifies and redeems their status as “exhibits.”