Colored American Magazine Research Articles

Review

A Black Daughter of the Revolution Frances Smith Foster Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins: Black Daughter of the Revolution. By Lois Brown. Chapel Hill: The University Press of North Carolina, 2008. xiv + 690 pp. I am a daughter of the Revolution, you do not acknowledge black daughters of the Revolution but we are going to take that right. Pauline Hopkins, 1905 (qtd. in Brown 537) Therein lies the tale. If we recognize the name Pauline Hopkins, we know her as editor of the Colored American Magazine and author of Contending Forces, Hagar's Daughters, Winona, and Of One Blood. We would not be surprised, would generally expect, that her biographer would validate Hopkins's reputation for fierce insistence upon national citizenship and racial and gender equality by quoting or alluding to the titles of her best-known works. However, Lois Brown chose to title her densely researched epic Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins: Black Daughter of the Revolution and to build her reconstruction of this "fifth-generation New England writer, feminist, and public intellectual" with a self-definition, at an occasion, and on a site redolent with a legacy of freedom fighting and resistance (16). In so doing, Brown eschews the obvious characterization of a solitary, feisty female in favor of a scion and regional representative, an example and exemplar, a subject and a metaphor. In so doing, Brown manifests a central cause and effect of Hopkins's and other early African American women's lives and letters and becomes herself another "black [daughter] of the Revolution." Hopkins's and Brown's perspectives on and practices of life writing are characteristic of African American women's literature, especially that of the nineteenth century. They use words as weapons, practice art as activism, combine [End Page 433] personal narratives and political prognostications to test the abilities of language as testimony, testimony as witnessing, witnessing as influencing, impacting, and changing. To better understand and appreciate the contribution that Brown makes with her biography, we need to look back and to look around at what has been done in the African American autobiographical tradition and at what we need to do if we are to write honestly and effectively about it. Using writing as fighting is a tactic rife with complex and sometimes conflicting imperatives.1 Art enlisted for a cause must avoid the captivity of propaganda. Aesthetic activism requires and exploits subtle directness and wide-lens focus. It assumes naïve readers but needs readers who are experienced with word weaponry. Titles become forays. Seemingly simple or excessively detailed, they signify more than meets the eye. For example, in 1836, Jarena Lee's autobiography The Life and Religious Experience of Jarena Lee, a coloured lady; giving an account of her call to preach the gospel indicates that Lee intends to record her personal material history but with a focus upon her spiritual development. Designating herself as "a coloured lady" invites comparison with Hopkins's "black daughters" not simply by calling attention to themselves as women of color but by their mufti that displays a status regularly denied women of African descent. Lee is a "lady." Hopkins is a "daughter." Like Hopkins, Lee not only confronts racism but sexism as well. Each writes as an infiltrator in male-dominated fields and claims a share of that territory for themselves and for other women. In 1846, one of Lee's fellow itinerant ministers and occasional traveling companions published Memoirs of the Life, Religious Experience, Ministerial Travels and Labours of Mrs. Zilpha Elaw, An American Female of Color: Together with Some Account of the Great Religious Revivals in America. This title not only reinforces the work of Lee but skirmishes with traditions that assumed women should not write histories. Reading Elaw's Memoirs comparatively with Lee's Life moves the characterization of these individual women as defiant, religious fundamentalists to members of a religious sisterhood, illuminates their literary kinship, and reveals signifying as more than a rhetorical technique in oral African America. Titles tell part of the tale. Some narrators also tended to acknowledge multiple motives. Elizabeth Keckley penned a similar palimpsest, Behind the Scenes; or, Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House, she says...

Race, Faces, and False Fronts: Shakespearean Signifying in the Colored American Magazine

wear the mask that grins and lies, It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,-- This debt we pay to human guile; With torn and bleeding hearts we smile, And mouth with myriad subtleties.--Paul Laurence Dunbar, We Wear the Mask (1896) False face must hide what the heart doth know.--William Shakespeare, Macbeth (c.1603-1607) In 1843, as African American writers engaged in a fiery quest to banish the mask of servility and reveal the humanity beneath, activist Henry Highland Garnet encouraged both free and enslaved blacks to build their solidarity with the rallying cry RESISTANCE! (96). Twelve years earlier, Maria Stewart, America's first black female political writer and lecturer, asked: How long shall the fair daughters of Africa compelled to bury their minds and talents beneath a load of iron pots and kettles? (38). These sentiments, articulated in antebellum America, were echoed later in the century in the literary and professional projects of several writers who would see their work published in the Colored American Magazine (CAM). As described on its frontispiece, CAM was an Illustrated Monthly, devoted to Literature, Science, Music, Art, Religion, Facts, Fiction, and Traditions of the Negro Race that stood at the vanguard of African American social and intellectual achievement at the turn of the century. Contemporary scholars have recognized the importance of CAM, particularly the literary achievements of its first editor, Pauline Hopkins. (1) Within CAM's pages, writers dedicated to the production of a high class monthly (Carter 143) sought to create a literary and political climate for a black renaissance that anticipated the efforts of the now-celebrated Harlem Renaissance (Carby xxxi). Extolling the virtue and character of America's black citizens, CAM demanded that blacks have a chance to prove their right to citizenship through excellence in the arts, politics, and education. Its mission, which focused on replac[ing] the politics of compromise with political demands for changes in social relations, recognized the social, educational, and economic limitations that had been imposed on many newly freed blacks (Carby xxxii), and sought to teach the growing body of free, educated blacks the modes of speech, writing, and behavior that might grant them access to the American Dream. This proved especially tricky, however, given the white backlash against black social and economic advancements during the nadir. violence that ran rampant at this time necessitated a political and literary stance that was direct, yet nonconfrontational, inclusive, yet highbrow. Consequently, Shakespeare emerged as a symbol large enough to satisfy the philosophical goals and social limits of this progressive black periodical at the turn of the twentieth century. Several CAM writers alluded to and signified on Shakespearean texts in their articles, essays, and stories to help substantiate the right of African Americans to assume their place as rightful heirs to American democracy. (2) example, in 1900 CAM published M. E Hunter's For Freedman's Rights, an essay that includes a poem recasting Hamlet's To be, or not to be soliloquy through the lens of black disenfranchisement. Likewise, Bob Cole's The Negro and the Stage, published in 1902, alludes to Shakespeare as a symbol of artistic excellence and references Shakespearean passages that support Cole's quest for nonstereotypical roles for blacks in a theatrical sphere dominated by whites. That same year Pauline Hopkins's novel Hagar's Daughter, serialized in CAM under Hopkins's pseudonym Sarah A. Allen, signified on Macbeth's theme of false face[s] to denounce de facto and de jure segregation. (3) This essay will show how these writers engaged issues of black aesthetics and politics in order to lay claim to full citizenship through their distinctive repetitions and revisions of Shakespeare. …

"Blacks in all Quarters of the Globe": Anti-Imperialism, Insurgent Cosmopolitanism, and International Labor in Pauline Hopkins's Literary Journalism

“‘Blacks in all Quarters of the Globe’: Anti-Imperialism, Insurgent Cosmopolitanism, and International Labor in Pauline Hopkins’s Literary Journalism” traces the genealogy of black radicalism to Hopkins’s early twentieth century writings in the Colored American Magazine . Not only do these fiction and nonfiction works address race relations in the United States, they also engage international politics by imagining a collective anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist project that connects African Americans to Haitians, Native Americans, and Filipinos. Until Booker T. Washington removed her from her editorial post in the magazine in 1904, Hopkins’s insurgent prose challenged U.S. foreign and domestic policies regarding race and economic exploitation. In historical sketches about Toussaint L’Ouverture or famous women such as Harriet Tubman as well as in Winona , an historical novel that features John Brown as a major character, Hopkins presages a proletarian revolution that will bring about her economic and political version of divine justice.

Introduction to Focus: "This Instant and This Triumph": Women of Color Publishing

Page 4 American Book Review “This Instant and This Triumph”: Women of Color Publishing Introduction to Focus: Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Focus Editor Women of color in the US have been using the printed word as a medium for imagination and protest for more than a century. In the 1800s, novelist Pauline Hopkins was a co-founder of the collective Colored American Magazine, where she published short stories and serial novels that imagined the equality of the races as a rational and achievable future.Antilynching crusader Ida B. Wells co-founded her own newspaper, and when her offices were burned to the ground, she rallied black women and raised the funds to publish pamphlets on lynching and racist mob rule in theAmerican South. In the mid-twentieth century, Chicana feminists in the US invoked the memory of Las Hijas de Cuahtemoc, women who fought in the Mexican Revolution, as they created a network of campus-based newspapers and anthologies through which to theorize the relevance and contours of Chicana feminism. In the early 1980s, a group of women including Barbara Smith, Audre Lorde (from whose “Litany for Survival” the title of this piece comes), and Cherríe Moraga came together to found Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, which published Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology (1983) and kept This Bridge Called My Back: Writing by Radical Women of Color (1983) in print for more than a decade. Though women of color sustained publishing initiatives before and throughout the twentieth century , the very act of what this section calls “Women of Color Publishing” is embattled and almost counter-intuitive. The dominant narratives of state policy and the cherished “great work” of American literature have not characterized women of color as intellectuals or important cultural producers. Instead, women of color have been caricaturized as reproducers of domestic stability in the homes of the literarily relevant, and deviant reproducers of pathological cultures of poverty at worst. And further, as the selfproclaimed “third world feminists” in the US asserted in the 1980s, neither the seeming refuges of feminist publishing or third-world publishing supported the critical voices of women of color. Women of color producing literary texts (or anything else) on their own terms smacks of danger. In the 1970s when eventual Nobel laureate Toni Morrison used her tokenized role within a mainstream publishing house to encourage the work of black women writers such as Alice Walker and Ntozake Shange, their work was met with an intense critical backlash from black male critics who attacked , not the literary merit of Walker’s The Color Purple (1982) or Shange’s For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf (1975), but rather the supposedly “divisive” audacity of the authors in representing and responding to rape and domestic violence against women in their texts. Morrison and other black women writers working in that time period, including Walker, Shange, June Jordan, VèVè Clark, and others, realized that autonomous publishing was the only way to create space for their voices. In a collective called “The Sisterhood,” these women envisioned a publishing company called Kizzy Enterprises that would have operated out of Shange’s house, funded on a profitless basis and through which they intended to keep texts that they deemed crucial in print and available. When Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa brought together writings by radical women of color to protest the abusive tokenization of women of color in the mainstream feminist movement and to create a viable network for women of color, the feminist publisher Persephone Press was not willing or able color presses in this moment reaches beyond the publication of women of color by women of color for women of color; this section features work that ranges from essays, critical analysis, poetry, fiction, interactive art and work authored by multi-racial groups of women, women of color collectives, men of color, and like-minded people of many genders and backgrounds. However, these works are far from generalist, and each creates an intimate relationship that assumes the participation of readers in a shared project of transformation. RedBone Press Lisa Moore founded RedBone Press after successfully publishing the groundbreaking anthology Does...

<i>Daughter of the Revolution: The Major Nonfiction Works of Pauline E. Hopkins</i> (review)

Reviewed by: Daughter of the Revolution: The Major Nonfiction Works of Pauline E. Hopkins Janet Gabler-Hover Daughter of the Revolution: The Major Nonfiction Works of Pauline E. Hopkins. Edited and with an introduction by Ira Dworkin. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2007. 406 pp. $70.00 cloth/$34.95 paper. Ira Dworkin has given us a useful compilation of the prolific prose of late nineteenth-century black literary artist and political activist Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, most often recognized as the author of Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South and for her publications within and relationships with the Colored American Magazine. Successful in its broad circulation and wide-ranging scope but besieged by money troubles, the Colored American Magazine ultimately was destroyed by political forces, Dworkin explains. In his substantive introduction to Hopkins's nonfiction, he provides an unequivocal and transparent account of the political intrigue involved in Booker T. Washington's firing of Hopkins from the periodical. The stealth and determination of Washington's strategies reveal just how politically powerful he thought Hopkins was or might possibly be. According to Dworkin, Washington was driven by his animus for Hopkins's political activism, her cautionary view of his program for industrial education, and her conviction that women should figure more broadly in the workings of society. Once Hopkins was dismissed, the periodical became a tool of Washington's propaganda, and it never recovered its popularity. Some of Hopkins's most overt political convictions can be seen, Dworkin argues, in the neglected prose she wrote for the magazine. By compiling Hopkins's nonfictional prose works, he shows how methodically Hopkins used nonfiction to express such convictions. Dworkin's collation of "Famous Men of the Negro Race" and "Famous Women of the Negro Race," for example, draws our attention to the coherence and thematic continuities within the series. Most of the volume's ten parts are organized around the series, although several are grouped otherwise (such as "Juvenilia" and "The Colored American Magazine Controversy"). [End Page 339] Dworkin points out that his collation lacks the materialist aspects of periodical publication. In particular, he discusses what he convincingly argues is the ideological significance of the visual apparatus in the Colored American Magazine. While Hopkins edited the magazine, it exhibited cover portraits of successful African American women, cameos of Philis Wheatley and Frederick Douglass, and lush borders of elegant flowers and leaves. All disappeared after Hopkins's dismissal. As a concession to the lack of material features in his reprints, Dworkin provides his reader with facsimiles, including a handwritten copy of Hopkins's youthful, award-winning essay on temperance and covers from the Colored American Magazine and the New Era, another periodical to which Hopkins contributed. Dworkin's volume allows readers insight into the rich history of African American culture, since Hopkins's words and references reveal the vital social fabric and extensive network of African American intellectuals, philanthropists, and other notables who have been erased from, or were never made present in, American cultural memory. Central to Dworkin's volume are bounteous identifications of Hopkins's allusions. Taking on the multitude of historical, political, literary, and philosophical sources she references was quite a task, since Hopkins's attributions are often sketchy or nonexistent. Dworkin reveals himself to be an ingenious sleuth and a formidable scholar, providing readers with a vision of the depth and breadth of Hopkins's reading. Scholars will also find ample sources for their continuing work on Hopkins. For example, Dworkin's references show that Hopkins found an organizing principle and guiding argument for her race politics in Thomas Carlyle's On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History. In the volume, Carlyle argues that heroes sculpt great civilizations—Rome, Egypt, or Ethiopia—that fall into oblivion when heroes are killed or oppressed. Hopkins's apparent influences include her documentations of African American heroes. She argues that black American civilization should be judged by these standards, pointing out that white racists have barred most blacks from the simple privileges that constitute self-development and have perpetuated race hatred and race oppression by judging blacks by unfair standards, comparing them to those with many privileges...

Furnace Blasts for the Tuskegee Wizard: Revisiting Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, Booker T. Washington and the Colored American Magazine

Furnace Blasts for the Tuskegee Wizard:Revisiting Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, Booker T. Washington and the Colored American Magazine Alisha R. Knight (bio) Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins (1859–1930), author of Contending Forces (1900), was the most prolific black woman writer of her time. Her work with the Colored American Magazine had no small part in earning her this distinction, for she published three serialized novels and several short stories and editorial pieces in the magazine. She abruptly stopped editing and contributing to the magazine in 1904, however. Some literary historians have assumed she left because Booker T. Washington purchased the journal and replaced her with one of his allies, and they dismiss the end of her tenure there as merely a casualty of the Tuskegee Machine. Hopkins's contemporary, W.E.B. Du Bois, theorized, with little elaboration, that Hopkins "was not conciliatory enough" toward white readers.1 In his 1947 version of the publication's history, William Stanley Braithwaite, who worked directly with Hopkins as one of the Colored American Magazine's literary critics, chose not to comment on how readers responded to Hopkins's political ideas. Instead, he characterized Hopkins as a "temperamental editor" whose desire for "an independence of action in making selections, and a dignity in soliciting manuscripts of the best" caused "friction" in the magazine's work environment.2 Indeed, considering his first-hand experiences with the magazine, Braithwaite's account is surprisingly devoid of details pertaining to the challenges Hopkins faced as she maneuvered the periodical publication process. As a result, scholars continue to speculate why she left and under what circumstances.3 By revisiting the case, I will show how Hopkins's defiant nature (which has either been misread or overlooked) and her radical ideology about the role of literature in the early twentieth-century racial uplift movement constitute a subversive subtext in the [End Page 41] articles she wrote and the editorial decisions she made for the Colored American Magazine. Hopkins was more antagonistic towards Booker T. Washington and his supporters than previously believed. Unlike former approaches, which do not utilize primary sources, especially Hopkins's own voice, my analysis examines her private and public writings to solve the mystery of the disappearing journal editor.4 From 1900 to 1904, Hopkins was a dedicated contributor to the Colored American Magazine, and she rose to the rank of literary editor in May 1903. Hopkins was also a member of the Colored Co-operative Publishing Company, the firm that published the magazine and her first novel, Contending Forces. In 1904 Hopkins helped found the Colored American League and worked to raise subscriptions and funding for the periodical. Despite Hopkins and the League's efforts to sustain the periodical, it was sold to Fred R. Moore in the spring of 1904. At the time, Moore was known to be one of Washington's allies who received various degrees of assistance from him. It was Washington who actually orchestrated the purchase of the magazine and moved it from Boston to New York.5 When the magazine was moved to New York, Hopkins was demoted from editor to assistant editor, and Moore was installed at the head of the publication. The November 1904 Publishers' Announcements states that Hopkins left the magazine because of poor health.6 The magazine's explanation for her departure is highly questionable, since her work appeared in a rival publication a month later. When Hopkins left the magazine in 1904, she attempted to continue her writing career by contributing the series "The Dark Races of the Twentieth Century" and the article "The New York Subway" to the Voice of the Negro. Later, in 1905, she established her own publishing venture, Pauline E. Hopkins and Company, and published A Primer of Facts Pertaining to the Early Greatness of the African Race and the Possibility of Restoration by Its Descendants, with Epilogue. In 1916 she attempted to start another magazine, New Era, which unfortunately lasted only two issues. After this magazine failed, Hopkins retreated from public life and resumed her work as a stenographer at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It appears that by the time Hopkins died on August 13, 1930, her important work as an...

Blue Pencils & Hidden Hands: Women Editing Periodicals, 1830-1910 (review)

Reviewed by: Blue Pencils & Hidden Hands: Women Editing Periodicals, 1830–1910 Juliette Berning Schaefer (bio) Sharon M. Harris , ed., Blue Pencils & Hidden Hands: Women Editing Periodicals, 1830–1910 (Boston: Northeastern UP, 2004), pp. xxxvi+279, $45.00 cloth. In Blue Pencils & Hidden Hands, editor Sharon M. Harris includes twelve essays that examine American women editors during the period from 1830 until 1910, as well as representative selections from the original periodicals. She groups the essays into three main parts, depending on the subjects' role in editing periodicals: "Apprenticeship," "Editing as Impetus," and "Career Editors." In the foreword, Ellen Gruber Garvey states that "new research on women editing periodicals is allowing us to examine and reexamine questions about magazines as a genre: about their creation, about the communities surrounding them, about how women, who might have been excluded from other kinds of careers, created and ran them" (xxii). Harris states in her introduction that "[p]erhaps the most important aspect of studying women editors and the periodicals they produced is understanding how women wielded the editorial pen to influence public opinion" (xxxv). In Part I, "Apprenticeship," Harris includes essays that address young schoolgirls who published a school paper and editors of special issues. Lucille M. Schultz writes about The Jabberwock, a student-run school paper, and argues that it "provided a site where a girl might experience herself as a writer in a public forum of students, faculty, and friends of the school" (7). In the next essay, Ann Mauger Colbert discusses women's editions of newspapers from 1894–1896. Colbert states that "[w]hatever the rationale for publishers' permission, the women used their foray into publishing to form firm links of communication and marketing with other women's groups around the country" (23). In Part II, the longest section of Blue Pencils & Hidden Hands, "Editing [End Page 83] as Impetus," Harris includes essays about "women for whom editing was an impetus to other kinds of literary or activist endeavors" (xxvi). Jennifer Blanchard argues that Ann S. Stephen's "rhetoric of modesty, femininity, and local loyalties" in the Portland Magazine is "steeped in nineteenth-century ideals of gender and class" (46, 44). Linda Frost describes Miriam Frank Leslie's "Ladies' Conversazione," a column that invited female readers to engage in a "free exchange" with the editor, as an outlet for "the domestically isolated reader" (60, 63). Carolyn Karcher describes Frances Wright's mission in the Free Enquirer as an attempt to "raise the level of the American press" by adopting "an aggressively masculine voice" (85, 80). Katharine Rodier describes the life and work of lecturer and activist Lucy Stone who used the The Woman's Journal, "a weekly newspaper dedicated to women's issues," to "help create a public record of her remarks" (99, 100). Jacqueline Fear-Segal asserts that Marianna Burgess created an anonymous persona who interjected "comments and opinions all through the paper," the Carlisle Indian School's publication The Indian Helper, to "control, intimidate, and manipulate the children" who read it (124, 126). Hanna Wallinger discusses Pauline E. Hopkins's work on the Colored American Magazine, where she "chan-nel[ed] ... her literary activities" which were replete with her main political concerns, gender and race (148). In the final essay in this part, James H. Cox explains that "we can understand [Gertrude] Bonnin's work as editor [of The American Indian Magazine] most clearly by focusing on her role within the context of continuing and emerging Native intellectual traditions in the era in which assimilation was federal policy" (174). In Part III, Harris includes essays about "women for whom editing was their primary work" (xxvi). Steven Fink discusses antebellum periodical editors such as Sarah Josepha Hale, Caroline Kirkland, and Ann Stephen, as "engaged in the business of periodical publication" in their relationship with the owners/publishers, with contributors, and with readers (208). In the next essay, Paula Bernat Bennett argues that Mary Louise Booth "exploited" Harper's Bazar from its inception "as a cover for her advocacy of social and, in particular, gender reform" (226). In the final essay, Gary Scharnhorst discusses Kate Field and her "campaigns for progressive causes" in her Kate Field's Washington. This volume...

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, 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.

"The Case Was Very Black Against" Her: Pauline Hopkins and the Politics of Racial Ambiguity at the Colored American Magazine

When Pauline Hopkins's short story, "Talma Gordon," appeared in the October 1900 issue of the Colored American Magazine, it ran opposite a photograph of a young smiling African-American boy balancing an American flag across one arm with the other arm raised in a salute (Figure 1). By linking the black child and the American flag, this picture, entitled "The Young Colored American," attempts to align U.S. interests with those of the black community and reflects the magazine's aim to recover the role of African Americans in American history. The figure of the child evokes both a sense of optimism and an historical link to America's infancy. Likewise, the photograph of the "Young Colored American" echoes the revisionist themes of "Talma Gordon," a story which calls into question the hagiography of the American elite and instead celebrates the figure of a mixed-race woman who has been scorned by her white father, a scion of New England society. In this story, Hopkins reflects the Colored American Magazine's mission to "perpetuat[e] . . . a history of the negro race" and re-write the triumphal narratives of traditional American history.1 As I will argue, however, the interweaving of gender and racial politics in the narrative structure of this story both reflects and complicates the politics of the journal itself. Throughout her literary career, Pauline Hopkins (1859–1930) deliberately incorporated politics into her work and claimed a voice for African Americans, particularly African-American women. Rather than publishing in the mainstream literary journals such as Harper's and the Atlantic that dominated the American cultural scene at the turn of the twentieth century, Hopkins wrote for periodicals specifically targeted to the black community, such as the Colored American Magazine. What sets her fiction and journalism apart from that of her female contemporaries—both black and white—is her blunt depiction [End Page 52] of brutality and violence and the explicit link that she draws between violence and social, political, and racial oppression. Her work, Hazel Carby asserts, aimed to re-awaken the "political agitation and resistance of the early anti-slavery movement."2 At the same time, however, her commitment to "racial uplift" appears compromised by the prevalence of light-skinned heroines throughout her work and the consistency with which she argues for romantic reconciliation between black and white characters. This article addresses the apparent contradictions in Hopkins's work by situating her writing within the context of the Colored American Magazine, a journal that mediated between its identity as a "race magazine" and a pragmatic editorial policy of appealing to white, middle-class audiences for economic, social, and political support. Hopkins's short fiction in the Colored American Magazine has received little critical attention, in spite of the fact that stories such as "Talma Gordon" both illuminate and complicate her ideology of racial uplift, as well as the magazine's relation to its audience. I argue that Hopkins negotiates the minefield of early twentieth-century gender and racial politics by drawing on a multiply-embedded narrative structure that both distances the reader from the threat of imminent social upheaval and uncovers a stark vision of the violence suffered by black women. In "Talma Gordon," a tale revolving around racial dispossession and its accompanying potential for violence, Hopkins utilizes a story-within-a-story technique to recount the brutal murder of a white man who has turned against his own daughters after learning that their mother was part black. By creating layers of frame-tales to be stripped away by the reader, the narrative structure explicitly reveals three aspects of social history: first, the historical reality of violence against black women in the United States; second, the extent to which white, upper middle...

Not So Fast, Dick and Jane: Reimagining Childhood and Nation in The Bluest Eye

In The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison challenges America's complacent belief in its benevolent self-image through representations of children who experience race, class, and gender oppressions. She is not the first African American author to use images of childhood to undermine cherished conceptions of national identity. In his 1845 slave narrative, Frederick Douglass condemns American democracy and Christianity through detailed accounts of his own childhood as a slave. Similarly, Pauline Hopkins confronts the ideal of an all-white American nation by placing the image of a black baby next to an American flag on the cover of her October 1900 issue of The Colored American Magazine. Morrison, however, centralizes childhood more deeply than her predecessors. Anticipating the currently emerging field in childhood studies, Morrison puts the concept of childhood itself under scrutiny. In The Bluest Eye, a child provides the primary voice through which the reader hears, the primary lens through which the reader sees, and the object of the reader's gaze. My interest in the novel's children centers on Morrison's treatment of their supposed innocence. In her critical work, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Morrison comments on of that typically define Americanness in literature. She asks, What are Americans always so insistently of?. (44-45). I contend that, in The Bluest Eye, Morrison first explored this question, and the implications of its answer, long before she explicitly asked it. This article first emphasizes the connection between thematics of childhood innocence in American culture and an ideology of national innocence. Next, I argue that Morrison's allusions to the Dick and Jane Basic Readers highlight images of childhood that promote superficial and ahistorical conceptions of the United States. I show how Morrison contrasts these images with child-characters painted as intimate extensions of long familial, socio-economic, and national histories that contradict the ideal. From public education I turn to popular culture. Through Morrison's references to Shirley Temple, I examine images of children as both producers and consumers of commodities that are themselves ironically charged with the ideology of childhood innocence. Finally, I analyze Morrison's allusion to John M. Stahl's film, Imitation of Life (1934), to better understand the symbolic significance of both Pecola's body and Claudia's consciousness. Throughout these analyses, I argue that Morrison shows us the counterhegemonic potential of reimagining childhood in the context of history. She portrays children as victims, activists, recorders, and even oppressors--all as a way of demythologizing the innocent past. Almost a century after Pauline Hopkins's child-image challenged the southern opposition to Reconstruction, Morrison confronts another tense political climate, publishing her first novel during the transition between a waning Civil Rights Movement and the backlash that emerged against it. Morrison faced the repercussions of civil rights legislation in their infancy, but the nation's anxiety about questions of race, class, and gender equity continued to evolve, creating the neo-conservative paranoia regarding reverse discrimination and immigration that continues today. By the 1990s, the growth of such conservatism ushers in what Henry Giroux calls organized forgetting, a phenomenon where Americans look nostalgically back to a mythic pre-Civil Rights Era (Channel 77). Claiming that children often serve as signposts for America's self-image, Giroux finds evidence of such nostalgia in 1970s Hollywood. He explains that 1970s films such as The Last Picture Show and American Graffiti resurrected white, suburban, middle-class youth in the nostalgic image of Andy Hardy and Frankie Avalon (Channel 35, 42). In this mythically past, domestic unrest evaporates while post-war prosperity thrives, despite such tragic realities as the lynching of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till in 1955. …

"Everything We Hoped She'd Be": Contending Forces in Hopkins Scholarship

Pauline Hopkins's emergence in American and African American literary scholarship has been quite a success story. Rescued from obscurity with a biographical article by Ann Allen Shockley in 1972 and with the reissuing of her novels by the Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers series in 1988, Hopkins now enjoys a measure of academic popularity, evidenced by a 1996 collection of scholarly essays devoted to her work and by the growing number of hits under her name in the MLA Bibliography. Indeed, at a recent conference on American women writers, some of us quipped that it might have been a Pauline Hopkins conference, so ubiquitous was her critical presence. Recently I ran a Pauline Hopkins search on Amazon.com. I was curious as to whether a publisher had reissued any of her three novels originally serialized in The Colored American Magazine and reprinted in one volume in the Schomburg collection. Having worked on Hopkins for some years, I felt confident that I knew all her work; I wasn't expecting any surprises. But I was surprised to find A Love Supreme by Pauline Hopkins--a book completely unknown to me--available from The X Press, along with two of the magazine novels, now published separately. As it turns out, A Love Supreme is the X Press's new title for Hopkins's first novel, Contending Forces. The cover of this edition features a photograph of a sultry, dark-skinned woman gazing up at the viewer positioned above her. The back cover touts the novel as a political fiction and, perhaps appealing to a modern audience's notion of political, attempts to hide the book's use of the tragic mulatta convention, a convention that has troubled literary scholars. But even more startling is The X Press's reprinting of her last serialized novel, Of One Blood. Now just One Blood, the cover sports a man visibly of African decent (unlike the novel's protagonist, who passes as white for the majority of the novel). His head shaven and his chest bare, he carries what appears to be an African artifact--possibly a spear. The back cover's sexy and aggressive description bears almost no resemblance to the novel's character or plot: Medical student Reuel Briggs doesn't give a damn about being black and cares less for African history. When he arrives in Ethiopia on an archeological trip, his only interest is to raid as much of the country's lost treasures as possible so that he can make big bucks on his return to the States. (1) Anyone familiar with this novel would be surprised at the tone used here to describe a protagonist who is subdued, even depressed, until falling in love and who, inspired by that love to make his fortune, goes on the archeological trip as the team's doctor, where he engages in numerous philosophical discussions about Ethiopia as the true source of civilization. Initially, I was taken aback at this reworking of Hopkins. These reprints attempt to lift Hopkins out of the post-Reconstruction milieu in which she lived and wrote and set her down in an era of radical race activism reminiscent of the nineteen sixties. They flatten out her complexity and try to fit her into a comfortable pattern of race activism that will, presumably, sell to modern readers. But upon reflection I began to wonder whether her recent scholarly recuperation lends itself to--even calls into being--such a revision of her oeuvre. Hopkins has been recovered as a radical race activist, and scholarship clings to and celebrates accounts of her radical politics in spite of evidence complicating these accounts. The defining feature of her activism is her firing from the editorship at The Colored American because of her radical politics, an event that has become almost a commonplace in Hopkins scholarship. (2) This explanation for Hopkins's leaving The Colored American certainly makes for a satisfying narrative for scholars who wish to see her as a radical race activist, and I do not seek to dismiss this profile out of hand. …

Cosmopolitanism in Georgia Douglas Johnson's Anti-Lynching Literature

In December 1874, African Methodist Episcopal Church changed design on front page of its major publication, Christian Recorder. new banner featured an image of continent of Africa, apparently emphasizing American church members' sense of connection to Africa. While caption Ethiopia Shall Soon Stretch Out Her Hands to God (1) possibly reflected church's missionary ideals rather than a sense of Pan-African identity, it initiates a series of literary and journalistic moves that ushered continent of Africa into national imagination without invoking its status as dark continent. (2) In an era when dominant cultural references to Africa would ingrain (in minds of white Americans), fixed notions of savagery, heathens, and evil, several African American writers sought to disrupt discourse of primitivism, civilization, and racial supremacy by embracing an imagined African past in various ways. (3) significance of symbol at center of Christian Recorder banner more reflects black Americans' status as participants in building of a modern republic than their accurate ideas about geographical space that was Africa itself. In a letter to Recorder's editor dated March 22, 1877, B. A. Imes argued that the notion that a people just out of bondage, with all results of its degradation clinging to them, should better their condition by migrating to its shore is preposterous. Like most middle-class African Americans, Imes demanded that America be transformed to accommodate blacks: The genius of its own institutions our birthright and unrequited toil, entitle us to a home. Nineteenth-century black intellectuals argued that Africa had much to offer US, and perhaps too much to offer its African American citizens. In work of prolific author and activist Frances Harper, for example, references to African ancestry most frequently fall under category of a phrase that does not overtly reject discourses of African cultural inferiority. Harper, like her activist sister of next generation Ida B. Wells, subtly clarifies and inverts meaning of to illustrate that after white Americans cursed Africans with slavery, they cursed them further with racial terrorism in form of lynching. Pauline Hopkins, novelist and editor of Colored American Magazine, argues for cultural syncretism and recognition of African contributions to modern culture and civilization; neither she nor Harper advocated black nationalism in its back-to-Africa incarnation. Their white-looking black heroines, usually octoroons with one-eighth black and seven-eighths white blood, symbolize an African cultural presence in American body politic. Saidiya Hartman has observed that development of a racist social structure in early 1900s revolves largely around demarcation of black body as alien and dangerous to patriarchal order that would govern an increasingly imperialist and masculinist United States national identity. Hartman suggests that the placement and proximity of blacks among, amidst, and within greater body of Americans and in perception of a discernible 'us' encroached upon by black intruders identified 'Negro problem' with question of social, thereby involving matters of intimacy, association, and (165). intimacy and need implied in interracial relationship that spawned so-called octoroon children also signified an interdependence between US and African cultures. Practitioners of progressive philosophy, such as Jane Addams, envisioned a cosmopolitan civilization. Eric Kaufman enumerates four goals of progressive cosmopolitanism: (1) to oppose Anglo-conformist modes of assimilation, (2) to celebrate cultural diversity of United States, (3) to endorse inter-ethnic contact and hybridity, and simultaneously (4) to eschew maintenance of diverse ethnic communities (1089). …

"Generic" Multiculturalism: Hybrid Texts, Cultural Contexts

onsider Pauline Hopkins's short story Talma Gordon (1900), first published in the Colored American Magazine. Like many Hopkins's writings, Talma Gordon takes up the issue the tragic mulatto and the larger theme miscegenation. In this text, however, she frames these social issues in the form detective fiction, the locked-room mystery structure that Edgar Allan Poe inaugurated with Murders in the Rue Morgue. The story opens at the Canterbury Club Boston, a private club composed wealthy, well-connected white men who gather monthly to discuss questions of vital importance to the life the Republic, such as that evening's topic, Expansion: Its Effect upon the Future Development the Anglo-Saxon throughout the World (4). The speaker, Dr. William Thornton, argues that despite the efforts to thwart intermarriage among races, it is inevitable, even between the white Boston Brahmins and the far-off tribes dark-skinned peoples (5). If are not ready to receive and assimilate the new material which will be brought to mingle with our pure Anglo-Saxon stream, Thornton warns, we should call a halt in our expansion policy (5). Arguing that man is powerless to combat both fate and the laws the Omnipotent, Thornton avers that

Pauline Hopkins's "Of One Blood", Africa, and the "Darwinist Trap"

An adventurous novel intermingling [literary] traditions such as historical romance, realism, allegory, fantasy, science fiction, and mystery (Horvitz 246), and also first African American novel featuring an African setting and African characters (Gruesser 77), Pauline Hopkins's Of One Blood attempts to counter turn-of-the century racism by looking toward Africa and its with pride. Directed at an African American reading audience--the novel was serialized in Colored American Magazine from November 1902 to November 1903--and pointing to splendors of ancient African civilizations, novel is designed to provide African-Americans with a usable, livable past (Gruesser 75), a meant to support development of a healthy self-image, support struggle for equal rights, and lead to recognition in an environment hostile to or oblivious of and uninterested in accomplishments of Africans and their descendants. By delineating an impressive ancient Meroe, historical center of an ancient Kushite (or Nubian) Of One Blood reverses mainstream racist visions of Africa as representing, to quote Hegel and also to cite nineteenth-century European historians' widespread assessment, the unhistorical and underdeveloped spirit, still involved in conditions of mere nature (qtd. in Magubane 24). But in doing so, Of One Blood runs into a number of problems, most ideologically dangerous of which is what could be named Darwinist trap: Making worth of a people dependent on technological and cultural accomplishments means following same quasi-Darwinian logic that served nineteenth- and twentieth-century imperialists to justify their ventures. Darwinist trap, or temptation to make material, technological accomplishments standard by which any people should be measured, allows technology and pseudo-scientific racism to come together as a world view: In middle of nineteenth century, steamers started carrying European cannons deep into interior of Asia and Africa. With that a new epoch in history of imperialism was introduced. This became a new epoch in history of racism. Too many Europeans interpreted military superiority as intellectual and even biological superiority. (Lindqvist 47) Wealth and technological progress served both as means and rationalization of imperialism Europeans and their descendants aggressively pursued in Africa and Asia, as well as within their own territories. In Descent of Man, Charles Darwin reasons that without accumulation of capital arts [meaning chiefly mechanical arts--i.e., technology] could not progress; and it is chiefly through their power that civilised have extended, and are now everywhere extending their range, so as to take place of lower races (135). But as this quote exemplifies, technology, or which in nineteenth-century usage virtually always means Western civilization, did, in Darwin's view, not merely entitle imperialists to territories, but even justified, implicitly, extermination of those unable militarily to resist it. As Darwin claims, The grade of their civilisation seems to be a most important element in success of competing .... It is a ... curious fact ... that savages did not formerly waste away before classical nations, as they do now before modern civilised nations (183). In Exterminate All Brutes, an impressive essay on pervasiveness of such justifications for genocide, Sven Lindqvist traces such sentiments, or at least their expression in natural sciences, back to Robert Knox, who, in his 1850 work Races of Man, announced that he felt disposed to think that there must be a physical and[,] consequently, a psychological inferiority in darker generally (qtd. in Lindqvist 125). Knox did not remain a lone voice for long. …

Not Black and/or White: Reading Racial Difference in Heliodorus's Ethiopica and Pauline Hopkins's Of One Blood

the ancient Greek novel Ethiopica, written by Heliodorus sometime in the fourth century A.D., a portrait of the mythical Andromeda figures prominently: When the Ethiopian princess Charicleia is born resembling the white-skinned Andromeda of the portrait, rather than her black parents, the queen, fearful that her husband will think her an adulteress, gives up her infant daughter and tells everyone that she has died. [1] The reader's response to this cover-up is complicated by knowing that Andromeda was herself an Ethiopian princess, and so she, too, should have been black. How are we to interpret her whiteness here? One explanation is that the Andromeda myth has two divergent settings--Asiatic and African. [2] Thus, the conflicting representations of Andromeda in ancient art and literature--is she black or white?--derive from competing claims about her origin; in a sense, she is both black and white. Charicleia, in turn, is herself defined in terms of apparent oppositions--black/white, princess/slave, siste r/wife, woman/goddess, Greek/Ethiopian--her identity a riddle which it is the work of the plot to (re)solve. Werner Sollors has suggested that Greek tragedy's themes of obscure origins and interfamilial strife influenced the interracial literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (244). I want to extend this observation to argue that Heliodorus's account of Charicleia's multiplicity and the interpretive anxiety that it generates both for her fellow characters and for readers finds eloquent resonance in the African-American feminist novel, notably in the fictional representation of the mulatta/o. Embodying difference, the mulatta's visible whiteness destabilized categories of white and black by emphasizing that racial barriers were indeed artificially constructed and imposed (Brooks 124). After all, observes Elaine Ginsberg, when 'race' is no longer visible, it is no longer intelligible: if 'white' can be 'black,' what is white? (16). a culture obsessed with being able to tell one race from another, the mulatta was a source of anxiety, particularly if she chose not to tell, and to (tres)p ass as white. Sollors warns, however, against accepting unquestioningly the fictional stereotype of the Tragic Mulatto, for by thus devaluing much nineteenth-century interracial literature we may also be supporting essentialism, or advocating as 'normal' a view of the world that divides people first of all into 'black' and 'white'--and hence ridicules intermediary categories as 'unreal' (242). Furthermore, this liminality may be double-edged, a source of empowerment as well as disempowerment: In its interrogation of the essentialism that is the foundation of identity politics, passing has the potential to create a space for creative self-determination and agency: the opportunity to construct new identities, to experiment with multiple subject positions, and to cross social and economic boundaries that exclude or oppress (Ginsberg 16). One African-American feminist writer who insistently probed questions of inheritance and heritage through fictional depictions of mixed race characters, intermarriage, and passing was Pauline Hopkins (Carby 162). A remarkable woman whose talents included theatre and music as well as literature, Hopkins carried on a literary career which took place almost entirely within her brief tenure (1900-1904) at The Colored American Magazine. her capacity as editor and writer, she published four novels, as well as numerous short stories and essays. Hopkins's agitationist politics proved, however, too provocative (Gabler-Hover 237). While officially leaving her job for health reasons, she was effectively fired, contends Elizabeth Ammons, because certain of her literary practices, such as the portrayal of racially mixed marriages, were too radical for white readers and, even more instrumental, because [of] her refusal to endorse Booker T. Washington's accommodationist policies, in the wake of his supporter s' takeover of the magazine (Ammons 85). …

To Be Continued: Double Identity, Multiplicity and Antigenealogy as Narrative Strategies in Pauline Hopkins' Magazine Fiction

To Be Continued: Double Identity, Multiplicity and Antigenealogy as Narrative Strategies in Pauline Hopkins’ Magazine Fiction Augusta Rohrbach* (bio) Pauline Hopkins published three serialized novels in Colored American Magazine in as many years. 1 During this period, and even before, she was at work on a developing theory of racial inheritance and its effect on identity. The switch from the sentimental novelistic format of her earlier Contending Forces to serial fiction suited the aims of her theory of identity. 2 In fact, Hopkins’ use of the serial format creates opposition to white notions of racial supremacy embedded in the novel form. In a radical way, Hopkins’ use of genre rebukes conventional notions of racial inheritance and identity by turning the argument away from monolithic (and hegemonic) conceptions of race promoted by generic conventions of the novel. 3 The detailed nature of her plots demands that the historical events that Hopkins limns be read closely: their complexity mirrors the nature of the story this writer wants to tell about American identity. Hopkins’ move to serialized fiction evidences her belief in the manifold of nature, experience, and culture. Her complicated plots—plots sometimes too elaborate to be considered anything other than a series of episodes—duplicate the complexities of identity and experience for Hopkins. Far from being the failure that Hazel Carby and other critics have seen Hopkins’ serialized fiction to be, these works can be considered a culmination of her career as a thinker and a writer. In these works, Hopkins tried to resolve a form/content tension between her philosophy of experience and aesthetic theory; her use of serial fiction, with its emphasis on the episodic and yet continuous unfolding of plot, duplicates her developing sense of history. Hopkins’ magazine fiction posits her construction of identity, race and culture based on a theory of multiplicity and what the philosopher Gilles Deleuze and pyschoanalyst Felix Guattari have called an “antigenealogy” (10–11, 21). As the term itself suggests, an antigenealogy is not simply an inversion of existing hierarchies. Rather an antigenealogy resists the organizing principles that shape the stable paradigms ordering human culture. Through the principle of the antigenealogy, Deleuze and Guattari are able to envision a model of human experience that remains dynamic, chaotic and multiple. The term will be useful for understanding the ways in which Hopkins’ serial fiction works against stable concepts of history, self and race, and why the serial format functioned as a literary vehicle that supports her philosophical theory of identity expression. While critics cannot agree as to the success of Hopkins’ project—especially in terms of the value of her racial theories—my aim here [End Page 483] is to understand the ways in which this novelist used genre to further her racial theories. 4 From plot structure to narrative style and character development, Hopkins’ serial fiction compels readers to account for details. Readers must read closely or be lost hopelessly in plot; thus the incidental and the episodic become an epistemology. 5 Ultimately, Hopkins will turn to a kind of literary “sampling,” as the contemporary rap artist has, in order to enact these strategies of representation. Consistent with her larger project, which included debunking distinctions between the races entirely and thereby introducing a new theory of the subject, Hopkins’ serialized novels demystify the taboo of miscegenation through an exploration of the prohibition against incest. The novels make use of the Oedipal riddle of identity—incest—to interrogate it as a familial and cultural paradigm of experience. Incest is the direct opposite of inter-racial sexual relations; the novels use incest as a narrative mechanism that sets up a comparison between the most extreme case of endogamy and the exogamic practice of race mixing. Through this analogy of oppositions, which together comprise “the two most powerful inducements to horror and collective vengeance” (Levi-Strauss 10), the novels unseat traditional interpretations of inherited traits figured by the ancestral past and racial identity. Taken together, Hopkins’ three serialized novels formulate three conceptual stages that accomplish this task incrementally; each novel comes closer to articulating a radicalizing theory of racial identity. Hagar’s Daughter begins this process by positing a theory of identity that relies on an...

Hysteria and Trauma in Pauline Hopkins' Of One Blood; or, the Hidden Self

Though the medical and psychological literature contemporaneous with Pauline Hopkins might lead one to suspect that only white, middle-class women were vulnerable to the medical diagnosis of hysteria, Hopkins, in her novel Of One Blood; Or, the Hidden Self (serialized in the Colored American Magazine between 1902 and 1903), deliberately represents Dianthe as suffering from hysteria to emphasize that this is not the case.(1) She attributes to Dianthe several of hysteria's classic conversion or somatic symptoms, including trances, amnesia, fainting spells, lethargy, passivity, and dissociative states of consciousness, in order to investigate the politics of this illness. Although I will briefly discuss Of One Blood as an text, my primary foci are the ways in which Hopkins racializes the turn-of-the-century discourse on hysteria by considering its relevance to African American women and girls victimized by sexual trauma during and after slavery. She interprets the behaviors and symptomatology of hysteria as expressions of the very specific trauma inherent in the political and familial histories of black women: rape and incest perpetrated by white men. As an hysteric, Dianthe represents - or, more precisely, her body represents - the site of the convergence of violence, racism, and misogyny. Most obviously, she is sexually coerced by Aubrey, but also her light skin color testifies to miscegenation resulting from two additional rapes - those of her mother and grandmother by their white master, Aubrey Livingston's father. Hopkins imbues the intriguing ideas of the new psychology at the turn of the century with significance for black women by making use of these nascent theories in her exploration of racially motivated sexual sadism, by which I mean slavery's eroticization of cruelty. Incorporating Freud's controversial psychoanalytic views on hysteria which, simply put, consider repressed sexual trauma its source, Hopkins calls attention to the confluence of intrapsychic and political forces that results in sexual and political domination, specifically Aubrey's oppression of Dianthe. And, from what I can determine, Of One Blood is the first, possibly the only, text by a black woman at the beginning of the twentieth century to do so. In her chapter in The Bonds of Love entitled Master and Slave, contemporary psychoanalyst Jessica Benjamin argues that within the fantasy of erotic domination lies his wish for independence and his wish for For complex reasons based on early disturbances in the infant-mother relationship, the child cannot satisfy his ordinary and expected desire for differentiation - an identity separate from that of the mother - inter-subjectively through mutual recognition. Hence, his wish to be independent is perverted into his need to be dominant. Influenced by Hegel, Benjamin defines a dialectic of control like this: If I completely control the other, then the other ceases to exist, and if the other completely controls me, then I cease to exist (53). In this paradigm, in which dependence becomes synonymous with submission and annihilation, and existence itself is at stake, domination is eroticized when the master forcibly takes control of the slave's body. Benjamin asserts that the master's sadistic pleasure consists not in direct enjoyment of [the slave's] pain, but in the knowledge of [his] power over her - the fact that [his] power is visible, that it is manifested by outward signs, that it leaves marks (57).(2) If, from a psychoanalytic perspective, we view Aubrey - representative of white, Western patriarchy - as an oppressor who quite literally appropriates the identity/body of Dianthe in order to assert his own self, then we must simultaneously understand that, without culturally sanctioned, institutionalized racism, this psychodynamic, compelling as it is, could not have been so blatantly and publicly promulgated. Benjamin's ideas regarding the literal or figurative master/slave relationship and Dianthe's hysterical symptoms - particularly her somatic disorders, dissociative trances, and passivity - an be linked with the literary concept of the text as described by Claire Kahane. …

"Kin' o' Rough Jestice Fer a Parson": Pauline Hopkins's Winona and the Politics of Reconstructing History

It was a terrible struggle between the two great forces - Right and Wrong. Drunken with vile passions, the Rangers fought madly but in vain against the almost supernatural prowess of their op[p]onents; like the old Spartans who braided their hair and advanced with songs and dancing to meet the enemy, the anti-slavery men advanced singing hymns and praising God. (Winona 412) Such diametric oppositions between good and evil as the one cited above would seem to forecast clear-cut resolutions, but Pauline Hopkins's Winona (1902) is an unresolved novel, affirming means of resistance against racist oppression which range from spiritual transcendence to organized violence. Serialized from May to October 1902 in the Colored American Magazine, Winona is set in the besieged Kansas of 1856, where anti-slavery forces, led by John Brown, and pro-slavery forces vie for control of the State. As Hazel Carby has argued, such an historical setting allows Hopkins to justify the need in 1902 for the kind of organized resistance to racist violence led by the anti-slavery leader John Brown in 1856 (Reconstructing 154). Yet Hopkins also recognizes and appears to condone other seemingly contradictory forms of resistance. Indeed, while Hopkins foregrounds the need for organized resistance, she also sanctions escape, endurance, spiritual transcendence, and personal vengeance as possible responses to racist oppression. Moreover, Hopkins employs an apparent double standard for what constitutes justifiable retaliation to racist violence for white and African-American characters. Not the least of the important questions which this narrative provokes is why Hopkins chose to displace contemporary political debates onto such an historical framework. Why does Hopkins re-envision Brown's controversial ordering of the executions of five pro-slavery men at the Pottawatomie River, rather than Brown's martyrdom at Harper's Ferry? Why is Judah, the most militant black hero in fiction to date, chastised when he tries to enact his seemingly justifiable revenge against his former slave owner and torturer, while John Brown's executions are hailed as an act of God? Why is Hopkins's novel named after Winona, who is only one of several major characters in the narrative and participates only peripherally in the dramatic action? These questions underscore the complexities of Hopkins's position as an African-American woman writer and editor for the nationally circulated Colored American Magazine, one-third of whose readership was white.(1) Creating agency for herself and African-American readers while encouraging white readers to agitate would seem to require contradictory rhetorical strategies. Even though Winona allows space for proponents of diverse political views in order to emphasize common goals, it demonstrates Hopkins's growing frustration with Booker T. Washington's accommodationism. In his Atlanta Compromise speech (1895) and his autobiography Up From Slavery (1901), Washington espoused a doctrine of self-help, moral virtue, industrial education, and social segregation as a means to race progress. Likely inspired by the work of anti-Bookerites such as William Monroe Trotter and Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Hopkins rejects much of Washington's platform and refigures his uplift ideal by calling for more vehement public protests against the escalating mob violence endorsed by Jim Crow culture.(2) Her stance may well have contributed to eventual removal from the magazine. After the magazine was sold in 1903 and moved to New York, editorial control shifted to Booker T. Washington supporters John C. Freund and Fred R. Moore. Hopkins was ousted in 1904, reportedly because her attitude was not conciliatory enough. As a white friend said: 'If you are going to take up the wrongs of your race then you must depend for support absolutely upon your race. For the colored man to-day to attempt to stand up to fight would be like a canary bird facing a bulldog, and an angry one at that' (Colored 33). …

Pauline Hopkins and the Occult: African-American Revisions of Nineteenth-Century Sciences

Pauline Hopkins's by-now almost canonical magazine novel of 1902-3 Of One Blood: Or, The Hidden Self combines science of occult-which opening pages describe as theories of supernatural phenomena or mysticism associated with great field of new discoveries in psychology-with another occult science, that of archaeology, and specifically Egyptology, to reveal in both fields overt and implicit racializing that shaped so many late nineteenth-century EuroAmerican discourses (442). These two sciences are both based on notions of excavation, mysticism, and occulted wisdom, and both contribute significantly to scholarly and popular discourse on mind and race. The novel thereby identifies and engages a striking range of positions and debates, interand intraracial, within nineteenth century's ubiquitous race question (584): political issues of black leadership, black nationalism, PanAfricanism, African-origins-of-western-civilization thesis and latter's implications for theories of identity and race purity. Of One Blood was serialized in Colored American Magazine during 1902-3. This monthly magazine, as an editorial statement-possibly written by Hopkins herself-announced, was devoted to development of Afro-American art and literature and to publishing writing that would develop the bonds of racial brotherhood not only through fiction and poetry but also in the arena of historical, social, and economic literature (Editorial 60). Hopkins's own writing for journal thus included, in addition to four novels and several short stories, two long-running biographical series (Famous Men of Negro Race and Famous Women of Negro Race) and numerous

"The Morning Cometh": African-American Periodicals, Education, and the Black Middle Class, 1900-1930

It is not known whether J. Max Barber, editor and guiding spirit of the Voice of the Negro, ever read Shall the Wheels of Race Agitation Be Stopped? an article written by John Mitchell, Jr., and published in the Colored American Magazine in September 1902. By repeatedly answering his own rhetorical question, Mitchell, the well-known and well-regarded editor of the Richmond Planet, a black weekly newspaper, sought to emphasize the dual responsibility of African-Americans to maintain an abiding vigilance against both the perils of racism and discrimination and against efforts to silence their protests. watchman must wait upon the wall until the night of oppression shall have passed, Mitchell declared. have never lost faith in my people. They have been hampered by poverty and blinded by ignorance, but - the day is now breaking . . . the morning cometh.(1) This last phrase, Morning Cometh, was the title of Barber's editorial in the inaugural issue of the Voice of the Negro in January 1904. In a brief, self-congratulatory essay, Barber wrote that, To the casual observer there is nothing new in the launching of a Negro magazine; but to the philosopher of history, to him who is a reader of the signs of the times it means much. It means that culture is taking a deep hold upon our people. It is an indication that our people are becoming an educated, a reading people, and that is a thing of which to be proud. He added, . . . we hail with delight the opportunity to help run a magazine which shall stand as the vanguard of a higher culture and a new literature. . . . We want to make it a force of race elevation. We want it to be more than a mere magazine. We expect to make of it current and sociological history so accurately given and so vividly portrayed that it will become a kind of documentation for the coming generations. . . . The morning cometh.(2) The intent of this study is to take advantage of Barber's foresight: to survey and to explicate the major educational issues and themes not only in the Voice of the Negro but also in eight other black monthly periodicals published between 1900 and 1930. Together, these nine monthly magazines provide the primary data for an examination of African-American intellectual and social history, presenting a chorus of voices, which, in discussing and interpreting the issues of the day, make up a rich - yet, unfortunately seldom acknowledged - heritage of penetrating analysis and thoughtful discussion. But it is important to be clear about the nature of these voices. As I will discuss, the argument which drives this study is that, upon examination, the opinions projected by these periodicals were articulated largely by the numerically small, but socially influential African-American middle-class and professional group who were coming into their own around the turn of the century. Through migration, urbanization, and subsequent occupational differentiation, the years 1890-1920 saw the development of new African American enclaves and new social and economic leadership groups in black communities throughout the nation. In particular, resulting from the creation of mass urban markets and the availability of new job opportunities, the economic base supporting the black class structure shifted and a new black middle class and professional group arose, supplanting the Old Settlers especially in Northern urban communities. This new middle class and professional group was distinct from the older African-American upper class in several ways, most notably in terms of their racial philosophies and orientation toward the black community. Among other attributes, they were decidedly race conscious, and forcefully advocated themes of self-help, character-building, social uplift, and race patronage and solidarity.(3) The journals reviewed form a subset of the black press in the United States, and like black newspapers, were established to demonstrate the race's capabilities and to disseminate the African-American point of view. …