Hagar Revisited: Afrofuturism, Pauline Hopkins, and Reclamation in the Colored American Magazine and Beyond

Abstract

Hagar Revisited: Afrofuturism, Pauline Hopkins, and Reclamation in the Colored American Magazine and Beyond Tanya N. Clark (bio) If I found [the Colored American Magazine] more helpful to Christian work among your people I would continue to take it. May I make a comment on the stories, especially those that have been serial. . . ? Without exception they have been of love between the colored and whites. . . . Does that mean that your novelists can imagine no love beautiful and sublime within the range of the colored race, for each other? I have seen beautiful home life and love in families altogether of Negro blood. The stories of these tragic mixed loves will not commend themselves to your white readers and will not elevate the colored readers. . . . —Cornelia A. Condict Colored American Magazine, March 1903 With regard to [the letter from Mrs. Condict] I will say, it is the same old story. One religion for the whites and another for the blacks. My stories are definitely planned to show the obstacles persistently placed in our paths by a dominant race to subjugate us spiritually. Marriage is made illegal between the races and yet the mulattoes increase. Thus the shadow of corruption falls on the blacks and on the whites, without whose aid the mulattoes would not exist. And then the hue and cry goes abroad of the immorality of the Negro and the disgrace that the mulattoes are to this nation. . . . I sing of the wrongs of a race that ignorance of their pitiful condition may be changed to intelligence and must awaken compassion in the hearts of the just. I am glad to receive this criticism for it shows more clearly than ever that white people don’t understand what pleases Negroes. Let the good work go on. Opposition is the life of an enterprise; criticism tells you that you are doing something. —Pauline E. Hopkins Colored American Magazine, March 1903 [End Page 141] Scholars often overlook or misinterpret the significance of the above exchange between the white Colored American Magazine (CAM) subscriber, Cornelia A. Condict, and the magazine’s editor and most prolific contributor, Pauline E. Hopkins. Most critics regard it solely in terms of the role of mixed-race characters and interracial relationships in Hopkins’s novels.1 However, it is more than a commentary on white America’s rejection of interracial themes. This dispute is a public dramatization of the racial and cultural disagreements that often occur between Black and white America. Moreover, it is an unapologetic, political, and afrofuturist declaration of Hopkins’s authorial power to write from her own Black consciousness. In this sense, Hopkins’s response represents Afrofuturism as defined by Alondra Nelson as Black voices with “other stories to tell about culture, technology, and things to come” (9). Reading this exchange through Afrofuturism reveals its value for this examination of the editorial and literary contributions that Hopkins made to CAM. As I will ultimately show, such contributions make the magazine an example of an early speculative text, one that radiates liberating Afrofuturism throughout its pages. Condict opens her letter announcing that she will no longer subscribe to the magazine due to its content, namely the stories about “tragic mixed loves,” (“Editorial” 399) which she views as the writer’s attempt to gain favor with white readers and elevate Black ones. Additionally, she presumes to suggest that the writer tell love stories “within the range of the colored race, for each other” (“Editorial” 399). Last, her frame of reference for this suggestion is her own first-hand knowledge of the existence of such relationships through her job as a superintendent at a Sunday school where she “worked among a greatly mixed people, Indian, Negro, Spanish and Anglo-Saxon” (“Editorial 399). Condict’s subscription to CAM, her job, and her effort to write and engage the author/editor suggest that she was a white ally who sympathized with oppressed Blacks. However, working in tandem with one another, these aspects reveal that Condict is actually a zombie, someone who shambles along, eating people’s brains and spreading “zombie ideas, ideas that should have been killed by contrary evidence,” but instead keep persisting [End Page 142] (Krugman “The...