Overview

Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins (1859–1930), African American novelist, editor, journalist, playwright, historian, and public intellectual, used fiction to explore and intervene in the social, racial, and political challenges of her era. Her particular form of cultural activism was groundbreaking for its time and continues to influence and inspire authors and scholars today. This collection of essays constitutes a new phase in the full historical and literary recovery of her work. JoAnn Pavletich argues that considered from the broadest of perspectives, Hopkins’s life work occupies itself with the critique and creation of epistemologies that control racialized knowledge and experience. Whether in representations of a critical contemporary problem such as lynching, imperialism, or pan-African unity or in representations of African American women’s voices, Hopkins’s texts create new knowledge and new frames for understanding it. The essays in this collection engage this knowledge, articulating nuanced understandings of Hopkins’s era and her innovative writing practices, opening new doors for the next generation of Hopkins scholarship. With contributions from well-established Hopkins scholars such as John Gruesser (editor of The Unruly Voice) and Hanna Wallinger (author of Pauline E. Hopkins: A Literary Biography), the collection also includes important new scholars on Hopkins such as Elizabeth Cali, Edlie Wong, and others.

Full Product Details

9780820363141

Table of Contents

Reviews

Yours for Humanity constitutes an original and important addition to Hopkins studies, a field devoted to one of the most productive and interesting writers of the turn-of-the-twentieth-century United States. Most of its contributions come from top Hopkins scholars and scholars who are about to publish their own book-length studies of Hopkins.--Anna Pochmara author of The Nadir and the Zenith Yours for Humanity will raise new and intriguing issues related to Hopkins, and thus move the critical conversation forward for a new generation of readers. . . . Taken together, these pieces would provide readers with a great range of perspectives, specifically with respect to Hopkins' fiction and her various social and intellectual roles as stenographer, editor, and activist.--Sandra Gunning author of Race, Rape, and Lynching: The Red Record of American Literature, 1890-1912

Author Information

JOANN PAVLETICH is professor emerita at the University of Houston-Downtown. Her most recent publications include “‘...we are going to take that right’: Power and Plagiarism in Pauline Hopkins’s Winona” in the College Language Association Journal and “Pauline Hopkins and the Death of the Tragic Mulatta” in Callaloo: A Journal of African Diaspora Arts and Letters. She lives in Houston, Texas.

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available