The Anna Julia Cooper Award
The Anna Julia Cooper Award
“We owe it to the world to give out at least as much as we have taken in, but if we aim to be accounted a positive value we must leave it a little richer than we found it.”
- Anna Julia Cooper, A Voice from the South (1892)
The Anna Julia Cooper Award is for best paper presented by a beginning scholar at the previous year’s Caribbean Philosophical Association International Conference. Information on past awardees can be found below:
The Anna Julia Cooper Award for Best Paper presented by a Beginning Scholar - CPA 2025 Annual Conference
“Toward a Theory of Decolonial Politics: Contributions from Latin America”
by Elva Orozco Mendoza
Elva Orozco Mendoza is a political theorist with interests in Latin American feminist thought, coloniality-decoloniality studies, and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies. Her research interests are extreme gender violence, critical approaches to state sovereignty, maternal protests and action, and protest politics in the Americas. She teaches courses in the Department of Political Science and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Connecticut. Elva’s book The Maternal Contract: A Subaltern Response to Extreme Violence in the Americas is forthcoming in Oxford University Press’s Studies in Subaltern Latino/a Politics Series.
As a member of the Award’s Committee reflects:
Dr. Mendoza sketched an alternative vision of Latin American decolonial theory, centered on theory by Latin American women. Taken on its own, that would be a worthy feat. There is an unfortunate degree to which an implicit “epistemic apartheid” leads to cleaving between “Latin American decolonial thought” on the one hand and “Latin American feminism” on the other hand, where the decolonial aspects of the latter are given less attention than they are due. This paper would have been an important contribution had it just done that. However, Dr. Mendoza went much further, articulating a key theoretical point that this reorientation prompts: rooting the account in women’s decolonial theory calls into question the notion that Latin American decolonial theory has, at least in recent decades, been overwhelmingly idealist and out of touch with materiality. Dr. Mendoza’s alternative canon suggests that the notion that decolonial theory is overly concerned with the epistemic (and perhaps aesthetic) is in error, and that it is the relation between ideality and materiality that forms the core of Latin American decolonial theory (at least, if the women engaged by Dr. Mendoza are taken seriously.)
The Anna Julia Cooper Award Previous Recipients
2023
Tara Jones, Coordinator of the African diasporic Cultural Resource Center and Academic Achievement Counselor, University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB), for her paper: “‘I Get Out! Pan African Traditions of Educational Fugitivity”.
Work presented at the CPA 21st annual conference online, June 2023.
2016
Victor Hugo Pacheco Chavez, Adjunct Instructor in Social Theory and Marxist Studies, National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), for his paper: “‘La colonialidad del poder: impronta, desarrollo y reformulación de un concepto”.
Work presented at the CPA 13th annual conference in Storrs, Connecticut, June 2016.
2015
Seulghee Lee, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow of English, Williams College, for his paper: “‘It Has Been a Lifeline’: Audre Lorde’s Technologies of the Flesh”.
Work presented at the CPA 12th annual conference in Riviera Maya, Quintana Roo, Mexico, June 2015.
Mia Angélica Sosa-Provencio, Assistant Professor of Secondary Education, University of New Mexico College of Education, for her paper: “La Revolucionista and Her Mexicana/Mestiza Critical Feminist Ethic of Care: Resisting and Healing the Wounds of Domination through a Subversive, Concealed Revolución”.
Work presented at the CPA 12th annual conference in Riviera Maya, Quintana Roo, Mexico, June 2015.
2014
Jina Fast, PhD Candidate in Philosophy, Temple University, for her paper: “The Ambiguities of Privilege and Identity in the Work of Simone de Beauvoir”.
Work presented at the CPA 11th annual conference in St. Louis, Missouri, June 2014.