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"Pauline Hopkins"
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Pauline Hopkins and the American Dream
Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins was perhaps the most prolific black female writer of her time. Between 1900 and 1904, writing mainly for Colored American Magazine, she published four novels, at least seven short stories, and numerous articles that often addressed the injustices and challenges facing African Americans in post-Civil War America. In Pauline Hopkins and the American Dream, Alisha Knight provides the first full-length critical analysis of Hopkins's work.
Scholars have frequently situated Hopkins within the domestic, sentimental tradition of nineteenth-century women's writing, with some critics observing that aspects of her writing, particularly its emphasis on the self-made man, seem out of place within the domestic tradition. Knight argues that Hopkins used this often-dismissed theme to critique American society's ingrained racism and sexism. In her \"Famous Men\" and \"Famous Women\" series for Colored American Magazine, she constructed her own version of the success narrative by offering models of African American self-made men and women. Meanwhile, in her fiction, she depicted heroes who fail to achieve success or must leave the United States to do so.
Hopkins risked and eventually lost her position at Colored American Magazine by challenging black male leaders, liberal white philanthropists, and white racists-and by conceiving a revolutionary treatment of the American Dream that placed her far ahead of her time. Hopkins is finally getting her due, and this clear-eyed analysis of her work will be a revelation to literary scholars, historians of African American history, and students of women's studies.
Alisha Knight is an associate professor of English and American Studies at Washington College. Her published articles include \"Furnace Blasts for the Tuskegee Wizard: Revisiting Pauline E. Hopkins, Booker T. Washington, and the Colored American Magazine,\" which appeared in American Periodicals.
eBook
Stenographic Authorship: Pauline E. Hopkins and Literary Infrastructures
Stenography, or the practice of shorthand writing systems, is viewed dismissively as rote transcription work, the opposite of literary creativity. However, Black writers and activists like Pauline Hopkins and Charles Chesnutt worked as stenographers to support themselves even as they engaged in the labor of writing. Expertise in shorthand offered the promise of upward mobility in the Jim Crow era for Black Americans. Despite being categorized as automatic work, stenography was also seen as a kind of authorial labor. With a focus on Hopkins and her fiction, this essay examines stenography's role in literary labor and Black activism to call attention to the unglamorous clerical infrastructure that supported the work of institutions, such as the government, legal system, and press.
Journal Article
Bodies in dissent : spectacular performances of race and freedom, 1850-1910
In Bodies in Dissent Daphne A. Brooks argues that from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth, black transatlantic activists, actors, singers, and other entertainers frequently transformed the alienating conditions of social and political marginalization into modes of self-actualization through performance. Brooks considers the work of African American, Anglo, and racially ambiguous performers in a range of popular entertainment, including racial melodrama, spectacular theatre, moving panorama exhibitions, Pan-Africanist musicals, Victorian magic shows, religious and secular song, spiritualism, and dance. She describes how these entertainers experimented with different ways of presenting their bodies in public—through dress, movement, and theatrical technologies—to defamiliarize the spectacle of \"blackness\" in the transatlantic imaginary.
Brooks pieces together reviews, letters, playbills, fiction, and biography in order to reconstruct not only the contexts of African American performance but also the reception of the stagings of \"bodily insurgency\" which she examines. Throughout the book, she juxtaposes unlikely texts and entertainers in order to illuminate the complicated transatlantic cultural landscape in which black performers intervened. She places Adah Isaacs Menken, a star of spectacular theatre, next to Sojourner Truth, showing how both used similar strategies of physical gesture to complicate one-dimensional notions of race and gender. She also considers Henry Box Brown's public re-enactments of his escape from slavery, the Pan-Africanist discourse of Bert Williams's and George Walker's musical In Dahomey (1902–04), and the relationship between gender politics, performance, and New Negro activism in the fiction of the novelist and playwright Pauline Hopkins and the postbellum stage work of the cakewalk dancer and choreographer Aida Overton Walker. Highlighting the integral connections between performance and the construction of racial identities, Brooks provides a nuanced understanding of the vitality, complexity, and influence of black performance in the United States and throughout the black Atlantic.
eBook
Pauline E. Hopkins : a literary biography
Virtually unknown for the better part of the twentieth century, Pauline E. Hopkins (1859-1930) is one of the most interesting rediscoveries of recent African American literary history. This is the first study devoted exclusively to Hopkins's life and her influential career as an editor, political writer, social critic, pioneering playwright, biographer, and fiction writer. Hanna Wallinger's discoveries break much new ground, especially regarding Hopkins's relationship with such notable men and women as Booker T. Washington and Anna Julia Cooper, her position in Boston's black women's club movement, her work with the Boston-based Colored American Magazine, and her concepts of race, gender, and class.
Drawing on recently discovered letters, Wallinger sheds new light on the relationship between Hopkins and Booker T. Washington, particularly the acrimony surrounding Hopkins's departure from the Colored American Magazine. She discusses Hopkins's pseudonymous writings in addition to those written under the known alias Sarah A. Allen. Wallinger interprets Hopkins's play Peculiar Sam , her now famous novels ( Contending Forces , Hagar's Daughter , Winona , and Of One Blood ), and the short stories, which have so far received little critical attention. This study also contains the little-known but important text A Primer of Facts . Republished here for the first time, it establishes Hopkins as an early advocate of black nationalism and one of the few women writers who joined this discourse.
Hopkins, writes Wallinger, 'was on the scene when race consciousness was being defined.' This important new study reveals her role at the center of crucial debates about the cultural politics of magazine editing, radical activism, and the early feminist movement.
eBook
“The Vast Scheme of Compensation and Retribution”: Science, History, and Morality in Furnace Blasts and Of One Blood
This article uses the short-lived essay series Furnace Blasts, published pseudonymously by Pauline Hopkins in 1903, as a lens for reading Of One Blood, or The Hidden Self . I contend that Of One Blood and the two essays that constitute Furnace Blasts share a set of distinct scientific, historical, and political concerns whose interrelation has not been fully analyzed. I address critical perceptions that Of One Blood ’s experimental elements are best understood as narrative commentary on racial scientific and other identity discourses of the era. Furnace Blasts and Of One Blood , I argue, work together to theorize what protagonist Reuel Briggs calls a “vast scheme of compensation and retribution” that connects the psychic complexity of individual subjectivity, the vicissitudes of world history, and the blurred lines between theology and science in an idiosyncratic manner that, while interested in racial politics, is irreducible to it. With Furnace Blasts as an intertext, I provide new interpretations of the moral dimension of scientific and psychological research in the novel, of the function of ancient Ethiopia as an instructive historical example for contemporary racial politics, and of the narrative moments in which the novel attempts to ground its spectacular elements in the realities of turn-of-the-century American life.
Journal Article
Imagining State and Federal Law in Pauline E. Hopkins's Contending Forces
Interestingly, this is the logic adopted in the landmark 1995 case in which the state of Florida awarded $150,000 to each of nine survivors of a 1923 race riot in Rosewood, Florida, in which local law enforcement officials stood by while the town was destroyed, Uves were lost, and emotional damage was inflicted and in which those officials later failed to investigate or prosecute the rioters. More than seventy years later, although it was clear that no cause of action at law could be sustained against the state, the state nevertheless exercised its equitable power, expUcidy accepting the moral obligation to remedy the wrongs, paying damages to elderly survivors and establishing an educational fund for their descendants.21 In Contending Forces, when state authorities condone racist violence against individuals, the federal government, many years later, accepts a moral, equitable obligation to compensate descendants of victims who experienced brutal \"outrages.\"
Journal Article
Pauline E. Hopkins and the Black Feminist Editorial Imperative to Remember
[...]this letter demonstrates the ousted editor's formidable rhetorical power as well as her inestimable comprehension of US race relations and imperialism as corollaries to white patriarchal supremacy after Reconstruction. [...]each of these elements in the letter reinforces Hopkins's last sentence. [...]most persons who think, talk, write, and publish about the manifold dangers of Black women's embodied experience trigger thoughts of Sandra Bland in me, because I am a Black cisgender queer woman living in central Texas. Since 2007,1 have lived two hours west of the boulevard near the HBCU Prairie View University on which Texas Department of Public Safety trooper Brian T. Encinia pulled Bland over for driving as a Black woman on 10 July 2015 (Montgomery, \"New Details\"). [...]the recovery of both Hopkins's letter to Trotter, no less than the recovery of her entire oeuvre, and that of Bland's video (along with her extant social media narratives)6 forms an essential, intrinsically valuable intertextual project.7 In Hopkins's particular case, a second resurgence of Hopkins studies has arisen; it is building on a late-twentieth-century intergenerational genealogy that includes formidable Black feminist literary historians and critics like Hazel Carby, Barbara Christian, Frances Smith Foster, Paula Giddings, Carla Peterson, Ann Allen Shockley, Claudia Tate, Cheryl Wall, and Mary Helen Washington.
Journal Article
AI, Ai, and I
This essay argues that teaching ChatGPT and other generative AI technologies in writing-intensive courses should not merely attempt to offer students guidance on responsible use of this transformative technology. Instead, the essay outlines a Marxist approach for teaching AI as a phase in the expropriation of labor. It then turns to pedagogical strategies for contextualizing a novel by Pauline Hopkins, as well as the recent controversy around it, that can put AI into historical perspective. The Afrofuturist novel, the essay shows, can demonstrate ways that labor expropriation, as well as the definition of plagiarism as theft of propertym have been racialized.
Journal Article