Rethinking Pauline Hopkins

Rethinking Pauline Hopkins: Plagiarism, Appropriation, and African American Cultural Production Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/alh/article/30/4/e3/5099108 by guest on 29 September 2021 Introduction, pp. e4–e8 By Richard Yarborough The Practice of Plagiarism in a Changing Context pp. e9–e13 By JoAnn Pavletich Black Livingstone: Pauline Hopkins, Of One Blood, and the Archives of Colonialism, pp. e14–e20 By Ira Dworkin Appropriating Tropes of Womanhood and Literary Passing in Pauline Hopkins’s Hagar’s Daughter, pp. e21–e27 By Lauren Dembowitz Introduction Richard Yarborough* Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/alh/article/30/4/e3/5099108 by guest on 29 September 2021 I recall first encountering Pauline Hopkins in graduate school in the mid-1970s. Conducting research on her work entailed tolerat- ing the eyestrain brought on by microfilm and barely legible photo- copies of the Colored American Magazine. I also vividly remember the appearance of the 1978 reprint edition of her novel Contending Forces (1900) in Southern Illinois University Press’s Lost American Fiction series. I experienced both gratification at the long-overdue attention the novel was garnering and also no little distress upon reading Gwendolyn Brooks’s afterword to the text. While acknowl- edging our “inevitable indebtedness” to Hopkins, Brooks renders this brutal judgment: “Often doth the brainwashed slave revere the modes and idolatries of the master. And Pauline Hopkins consis- tently proves herself a continuing slave, despite little bursts of righ- teous heat, throughout Contending Forces” (409, 404–405). This view of the novel as a limited, compromised achievement reflects the all-too-common lack at the time of a nuanced, informed engagement with much post-Reconstruction African American literature broadly and with that produced by African American women in particular. Although the most dramatic shift in scholarly treatments of Hopkins occurs in the 1980s with the work of, among others, Claudia Tate, Hazel Carby, and Jane Campbell, I would be remiss not to call attention to the commentary on Hopkins by Ann Allen Shockley, whose indispensable 1972 essay “Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins: A Biographical Excursion into Obscurity” can be over- looked in retrospective constructions of the evolving body of scholarship on the author. Dorothy B. Porter’s 1982 entry on Hopkins for the Dictionary of American Negro Biography merits notice in this *Richard Yarborough is Professor of English and African American Studies at UCLA. His work focuses on race, representation, and American culture. He is the as- sociate general editor of the Heath Anthology of American Literature. American Literary History, vol. 30, no. 4, e3–e30 doi:10.1093/alh/ajy014 Advance Access publication October 17, 2018 VC The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected] American Literary History e5 regard as well. (The absolutely invaluable contributions rendered by Shockley at Fisk University and Porter at Howard University in building crucial black literature archives should be legendary.) With the release in 1988 of Contending Forces and TheMagazineNovels in the Oxford/Schomburg Black Women Writers series (with intro- ductions by Richard Yarborough and Hazel Carby, respectively), it became possible to teach Hopkins’s fiction using affordable, easily available reprints. Not surprisingly, since then we have witnessed Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/alh/article/30/4/e3/5099108 by guest on 29 September 2021 the rapidly growing recognition of Hopkins’s undeniable impor- tance. The inclusion of her writing in major anthologies has been but one sign of her shifting status within the American and African American literary canons. There has also been a steady stream of scholarship on Hopkins herself, including biographies by Hanna Wallinger and Lois Brown. Clear as well has been the burgeoning role that developments in such fields as queer theory and Black Diaspora studies have played in catalyzing fresh critical perspectives on Hopkins’s work. Just as our theoretical tools for analyzing Hopkins’s writing have become more diverse, we have seen the emergence of innova- tive archival methods that open up fascinating new areas for research. The digitization of older texts and our resultant ability to do exhaustive word searches have allowed us to tease out, in the spe- cific case of Hopkins, the myriad canonical and noncanonical sources from which she appropriated material to incorporate into her fiction. It is difficult to overstate the extraordinary value of this scholarship for our understanding both of Hopkins’s approach to writing and of compositional strategies adopted by late nineteenth- century authors generally. In gauging the significance of this groundbreaking new research, one first needs to acknowledge the discomfort that these dis- coveries may cause, for all our academic objectivity. Although the following essays provide thoughtfully and complexly mounted anal- yses of Hopkins’s appropriative practice, the question “Is this or is this not plagiarism?” will not likely go away, especially given the in- creasing pedagogical challenges that many of us confront in teach- ing students how to utilize sources in a transparent and responsible fashion. The literary politics of such questions can hardly be more fraught, with roots extending at least as far back as Thomas Jefferson’s condescending dismissal of Phillis Wheatley in Notes on the State of Virginia and his broader contention that blacks are inca- pable of true creativity. One calls to mind the ongoing discussions regarding the veracity of Olaudah Equiano’s narrative in the wake of research that suggests that he may not, in fact, have been born in Africa and that a sizable portion of his autobiography was derived from outside sources. Complicating our responses to such new e6 Rethinking Pauline Hopkins information is the extent to which the significance of black authors can sometimes be linked to their effectiveness as potent counters to racist claims of black inferiority. In the case of Hopkins, I would suggest that at minimum we are now confronted with the need to revise our sense of exactly what kind of writer she is and of exactly how she went about practicing her craft. The evaluation of Hopkins’s widespread, uncited appropriations may well never at- tain scholarly consensus and surely should be conducted with an Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/alh/article/30/4/e3/5099108 by guest on 29 September 2021 awareness of late nineteenth-century editorial practices, an area in which much research needs to be done. However, we must con- tinue to engage the topic, and JoAnn Pavletich’s historical contex- tualization can serve as a productive springboard for such engagement. It appears that the newly discovered appropriations in Hopkins’s fiction fall into two broad categories. First, there are the unacknowledged borrowings from a range of published texts (in often quite small chunks) that bear relatively little thematic significance. The three essays that follow do not spend much time examining such instances—and understandably so, given the limita- tions of space. However, it is worth keeping in mind that a number of Hopkins’s appropriations are not, in fact, directly related to her political agenda. Second, there are borrowings that reflect Hopkins’s complex use of published materials to counter negative representa- tions of African Americans generally and, as these essays convinc- ingly argue, of black women and of Africa itself more specifically. Especially helpful is the extent to which these three scholars— Pavletich, Ira Dworkin, and Lauren Dembowitz—emphasize Hopkins’s adept and subversive reworking of the racially charged conventions of popular literary forms of her day—including travel narratives, sentimental romances, mysteries, and passing melodra- mas. Indeed, it is now clear that the bulk of her fiction is fueled by an abiding revisionist impulse as she seeks to mobilize mainstream [T]he bulk of her literary modes to contest the racist ideology informing the very gen- ﬁction is fueled by an res in which she is operating. abiding revisionist impulse as she seeks In considering Hopkins’s novels in light of the eye-opening to mobilize insights offered by Pavletich, Dworkin, and Dembowitz, I find my- mainstream literary self awestruck by certain aspects of her creative enterprise. One can- modes to contest the not seriously come to terms with the vast array of source texts from racist ideology which Hopkins took material without being mightily impressed with informing the very the absolutely extraordinary range of her reading. Furthermore, one genres in which she is operating. is stunned not simply by just how literate she was (in every sense of the term) but also by her genius at recall. Then one has to wonder at the logistics of her writing process itself. After reading Dembowitz’s essay, for instance, we must ask what caused Hopkins to draw so much material from Fanny Driscoll’s “Two Women” (originally American Literary History e7 published in 1884) as she was composing Hagar’s Daughter (1902). Did she begin writing this novel in the mid-1880s? Had she saved the issue of Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly that car- ried Driscoll’s tale? Had she clipped the story upon first reading it and filed it away? Or did she come across the magazine at some point after it had initially appeared? In her recent CLA Journal article on Hopkins’s Winona (1902), Pavletich identifies sources for the novel that were published in 1840, 1860, 1864, Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/alh/article/30/4/e3/5099108 by guest on 29 September 2021 1887, and 1890. And a key text that Dworkin discusses—John Coombs’s book on Dr. Livingstone—appeared in 1857. What boggles the mind is the extent to which Hopkins’s approach depended, in part, upon her ability not simply to remember spe- cific details of the texts from which she borrowed but to weave these plot turns, snippets of description, and passages of dialogue into coherent narratives informed by her racially progressive goals.

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