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183 notes Introduction 1. Jewell’s unpublished review, dated Jan. 13, 1900, is included in a letter to wellknown black journalist John E. Bruce. Though Jewell’s review is one of the most detailed extant responses to Contending Forces, Hopkins likely never saw or replied to it. As Lois Brown notes, with the exception of Jewell’s review, “all of the reader responses to Contending Forces appear to have been published in the pages of the Colored American Magazine. As a rule, these reviews were not formal critical responses to Hopkins’s work but rather comments included in letters to Hopkins and to her colleagues at the Colored American Magazine” (Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, 278). An accessible transcription of Jewell’s handwritten letter also appears in the appendix of Brown’s Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins. 2. Throughout this study, I use the designations “African American” and “black” interchangeably. I retain the historical terms “colored,” “Negro,” “mulatta,” and “mulatto ” when they appear in primary documents or to indicate intraracial distinctions based on skin color and mixed-race genealogy. 3. Jewell’s “higher plane” status can be deduced from her later tenure in 1904–5 as vice-president of the Boston Literary and Historical Association, which Elizabeth McHenry describes as “a group of relatively successful members of Boston’s black professional class with a keen sense of political purpose” (Forgotten Readers, 166) (hereafter cited in the text). Similarly, Lois Brown identifies Jewell among “well-known Bostonians and active club women” (Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, 410). 4. By “class identification,” I refer to the volitional expression of one’s class. In “Nothing to Declare,” Rita Felski usefully elucidates, “Identifications, in other words, need to be clearly distinguished from identities. Social status, position, and life chances are shaped by multiple factors, but only under certain conditions do some of these factors become willed points of affiliation and public affirmation” (42). I read literature as a medium through which black authors and their readers affirm their self-described social-class affiliations. 5. Charles Shepherdson’s comparative analysis synthesizes Freud’s and Lacan’s psychoanalytic definitions, summarizing anxiety as “a response when the ego is threatened with some danger” (foreword, xx [hereafter cited in the text]). I use the terms “anxiety,” “nervousness,” and “fear” interchangeably, disregarding Freud’s more precise 184 notes to pages 3–5 accounting of fear as a natural defense mechanism and anxiety as a generally maladaptive affect (Shepherdson, foreword, lv). Instead, as I propose, anxiety proves generative , rather than inhibiting, in African American literary formation. 6. Major universities such as the University of Chicago and Columbia University instituted formal sociology departments in 1892 and 1893, respectively (Calhoun, Sociology in America, 1). As Craig Calhoun adds, “Class conflict, and indeed socialism, figured more prominently for early American sociologists than is sometimes thought. But in the United States, the problem of order became to a large extent the problem of integration—how to assimilate immigrants, how to overcome (or at least deal with) racial division” (3–4). 7. Adapted from the title of Chesnutt’s 1931 essay “Post-Bellum—Pre-Harlem,” the phrase has become one of the competing designations for the literary period between 1877 and 1919. In the collection Post-Bellum, Pre-Harlem, editors Barbara McCaskill and Caroline Gebhard provide a concise account of scholars’ long-unsettled ruminations over how to name the period, whether as “the nadir,” “the New Negro Renaissance ,” “the Age of Accommodation,” or otherwise (2). Each title registers “the intensity of competing agendas, visions, and histories” at play during the era and in scholars’ subsequent framing of it (2). 8. By maintaining the terms “middle class” and “better class,” I deliberately defer to the ways that many postbellum African Americans identified themselves, rather than continuing to deny them the classifications that they sought. By contrast, historian Kevin Gaines supplants the use of “black middle class” with “elites,” noting that racial leaders were elite only in comparison to other black Americans, but that in relation to the dominant economic structure, the “material condition of many blacks with these aspirations was often indistinguishable from that of impoverished people of any color” (16). As Gaines explains, mainstream society “relentlessly denied black Americans both the material and ideological markers of bourgeois status” (14). Meanwhile , in Righteous Propagation, Michele Mitchell prefers the term “aspiring classes” to differentiate “African American strivers from contemporaneous middle-class white Americans and to acknowledge the quickening of class stratification within African American communities” (xx). While intending to offer greater taxonomic precision...

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