Abstract
Pauline E. Hopkins’s 1900 novel, Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South, is unique in the history of African American literature by women writers. Many of the teaching uses of other African American literature are duplicated in the pages of Hopkins’s novel: like Jazz, it addresses the trauma and effects of migration; like Their Eyes Were Watching God, it is fundamentally a romance; like Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, its rhetorical strategies are deeply tied up with the ideology of sentimentalism and questions of how a good woman will behave. In addition to these strengths, the novel also boasts a relentless focus on conflicts within African American communities, particularly competing strategies for racial uplift and the potential divisiveness of that competition. It is a tremendously useful novel which offers educators an opportunity to introduce students to broadly important literary and historical patterns in African American literature by women writers.
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References
Allen, Carol, Black Women Intellectuals: Strategies of Nation, Family, and Neighborhood in the Works of Pauline Hopkins, Jessie Fauset, and Marita Bonner (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998).
Braithwaite, William Stanley, “Negro America’s First Magazine,” in Negro Digest 6 (December 1947): 21–26.
Brooks, Gwendolyn, Afterword, Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South, Pauline E. Hopkins (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978), 403–409.
Brown, Lois Lamphere, “ ‘To Allow No Tragic End’: Defensive Postures in Pauline Hopkins’s Contending Forces,” in Gruesser (1996): 50–70.
Carby, Hazel V., “ ‘On the Threshold of Woman’s Era’: Lynching, Empire, and Sexuality in Black Feminist Theory,” in Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (ed.), “Race,” Writing, and Difference (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 301–316.
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Hopkins, Pauline E., Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South (1900) (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).
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Further reading
Brooks, Daphne, Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850–1910 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006).
Brown, Lois, Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins: Black Daughter of the Revolution (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2008).
Diedrich, Maria, Gates, Henry Louis, and Pedersen, Carl, (eds), Black Imagination and the Middle Passage (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
Du Bois, W. E. B, “The Conservation of Races,” in Eric J. Sundquist (ed.), The Oxford W.E.B. Du Bois Reader (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 38–47.
Dworkin, Ira, Daughter of the Revolution: The Major Nonfiction Works of Pauline E. Hopkins (Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007).
Hopkins, Pauline E., The Magazine Novels of Pauline E. Hopkins (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).
Hopkins, Pauline E., Of One Blood: Or, the Hidden Self (New York: Washington Square Press, 2004).
Mance, Ajuan Maria, Inventing Black Women: African American Women Poets and Self-Representation, 1877–2000 (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 2007).
Sundquist, Eric J., (ed.), The Oxford W.E.B. Du Bois Reader (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).
Wallinger, Hannah, Pauline E. Hopkins: A Literary Biography (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2005).
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© 2010 Joe Sutliff Sanders
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Sanders, J.S. (2010). “This Crisis in the History of the Negro”: Contending Forces at the Nexus of Debate. In: Wisker, G. (eds) Teaching African American Women’s Writing. Teaching the New English. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137086471_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137086471_6
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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