Pauline Hopkins’ Literary Egyptology

Author Pauline Hopkins produced work in a variety of genres: short stories, novels, a musical, a primer of facts. Like other African Americans of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, she engaged with the history of the Nile Valley before the discipline of Egyptology was firmly established in the sphere of higher education in the US. Her serialized novel Of One Blood, published in 1902 and 1903, draws on a variety of sources, such as the English historian George Rawlinson, to tell a fictionalized story set in the contemporary present of the Upper Nile and to address issues related to the ancient past of that region. Her main character, Reuel, embodies links across time—ancient and contemporary—and space—the United States and the Nile River Valley. Through him, she shows the power and relevance of ancient history to contemporary life.

Vitality, Racial Creativity, and Biopolitics

In a materialist vitalism that emerged, nerve force as a physical energy was assumed to give idiosyncratic shape to organisms, races, and species. Borrowing from evolutionary theory and biometrics, Oliver Wendell Holmes suggests in Elsie Venner that the vital force of the average members of a race or species will prevail, while hybrids at the edges of the vital bell curve will expire, a principle that applies as well to literature, which has its own vital curve. William Dean Howells promotes a naturalized realism of the healthy, national (white, middle-class) average. W. E. B. Du Bois and Pauline Hopkins take on the task of establishing the African American race as vigorous and empowered rather than enervated—and of eluding constraining racial definition by oscillating between biological and immaterial conceptions of racial force.

Literary Neurophysiology

Writing about neurophysiology more than a century ago, what were US authors doing? Literary Neurophysiology: Memory, Race, Sex, and Representation in U.S. Writing, 1860–1914 examines their use of literature to experiment with the new materialist psychology, which bore upon their efforts to represent reality and was forging new understandings of race and sexuality. Sometimes they emulated scientific epistemology, allowing their art and conceptions of creativity to be reshaped by it. Sometimes they imaginatively investigated neurophysiological theories, challenging and rewriting scientific explanations of human identity and behavior. By enfolding physiological experimentation into literary inquiries that could account for psychological and social complexities beyond the reach of the laboratory, they used literature as a cognitive medium. Mark Twain, W. D. Howells, and Gertrude Stein come together as they probe the effects on mimesis and creativity of reflex-based automatisms and unconscious meaning-making. Oliver Wendell Holmes explores conceptions of racial nerve force elaborated in population statistics and biopolitics, while W. E. B. Du Bois and Pauline Hopkins contest notions of racial energy used to predict the extinction of African Americans. Holmes explores new definitions of “sexual inversion” as, in divergent ways, Whitman and John Addington Symonds evaluate relations among nerve force, human fecundity, and the supposed grave of nonreproductive sex. Carefully tracing entanglements and conflicts between literary culture and mental science of this period, Knoper reveals unexpected connections among these authors and fresh insights into the science they confronted. Considering their writing as cognitive practice, he provides a new understanding of literary realism.

An Unexpected Direction: Pauline Hopkins, S. E. F. C. C. Hamedoe, and “The Dark Races of the Twentieth Century”

This essay mines the earliest and most influential of African American literary magazines, the Boston-based Colored American Magazine (CAM) (1900–09), and its southern rival, the Atlanta-based Voice of the Negro (1904–07), to investigate how black writers and activists addressed the links between US race relations, settler colonialism, and empire in the Pacific. Spanning these two periodicals, Pauline Hopkins’s work as an editor and contributor grappled with the question of how to represent, engage, and position Black Americans in a globalizing world that was at once becoming more vast, heterogeneous, and integrated. Race remained a powerful structuring principle, yet it accrued dynamic new meanings in the era of new imperialism. Along the way, the essay investigates an unexplored facet of Hopkins’s authorship and compositional style. It speculates that Hopkins may have published under another as yet unattributed pen name. The enigmatic S. E. F. C. C. Hamedoe was one of the most significant of regular CAM contributors. Before disappearing from print history, Hamedoe published a four-year-long series that mapped the political contours of the emerging Global South, crisscrossing continents and oceans. The extensive connections between Hamedoe’s writings and Hopkins’s final known completed series beg the question of whether they were one and the same. The series allowed Hopkins to experiment with various epistemologies of racial and historical knowledge in her efforts to formulate an understanding of Blackness that, like the episodic serial form, was open-ended, accretive, and noncohesive.

Genealogies of Black Modernities

This essay introduces the major themes and concerns of “Genealogies of Black Modernity in the Long Nineteenth Century,” a special issue of American Literary History. How does modernity look when read through Black diasporic literary production in the long nineteenth century, broadly conceived? What new narratives can we create by reading this literature as participating in and producing transatlantic genealogies of literary modernity? How does reading Black literary modernity in the nineteenth century disrupt our understandings of modernity as a conceptual framework both for contemporary scholarship and as an object of nineteenth-century Black intellectual inquiry? This introductory essay defines Black modernities of the long nineteenth century as a set of related, sometimes connected, practices and questions focused on the nature of Black life and culture in an ever-shifting antiblack world. Writers from Phillis Wheatley to Pauline Hopkins—to offer one framing—were invested in chronicling and intervening in the newness of their moment, even as they worked to imagine new possibilities for the future. Our task, then, was to deliberate over what something called modernity meant and means for and in African American literary history through the archive of Black writing and through the terms and forms these writers set forth.

Cultural Transmission and Transgression: Pauline Hopkins

This chapter explores a recurrent feature of Pauline Hopkins's compositional practice—the unacknowledged borrowing from other texts, which is at times verbatim or with minimal reworking, at other times containing more extensive reimagining. Here, the chapter focuses on the geopolitics of this practice than in its morality—or more precisely, in how this practice enters into the geopolitics of Hopkins's work, and in particular into her attitude toward Britain and her relations with Victorian literature. From this perspective, as significant as the anglophilia that informs Hopkins's use of Mary Hartwell Catherwood's The White Islander is the fact that this novel itself is not British: Catherwood was an American writer who spent her life in the Midwest, and The White Islander was published in New York. As this suggests, the archive from which Hopkins draws is not itself exclusively or particularly British. The chapter also shows, however, the Britishness of certain texts, as well as their depiction of Englishness or Britishness, can play a significant role in their selection and treatment by Hopkins.