Daughter of the Revolution: The Major Nonfiction Works of Pauline E. Hopkins (review)

Ira Dworkin has given us a useful compilation of the prolific prose of late nineteenth-century black literary artist and political activist Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, most often recognized as the author of Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South and for her publications within and relationships with the Colored American Magazine. Successful in its broad circulation and wide-ranging scope but besieged by money troubles, the Colored American Magazine ultimately was destroyed by political forces, Dworkin explains. In his substantive introduction to Hopkins's nonfiction, he provides an unequivocal and transparent account of the political intrigue involved in Booker T. Washington's firing of Hopkins from the periodical. The stealth and determination of Washington's strategies reveal just how politically powerful he thought Hopkins was or might possibly be. According to Dworkin, Washington was driven by his animus for Hopkins's political activism, her cautionary view of his program for industrial education, and her conviction that women should figure more broadly in the workings of society. Once Hopkins was dismissed, the periodical became a tool of Washington's propaganda, and it never recovered its popularity.

Some of Hopkins's most overt political convictions can be seen, Dworkin argues, in the neglected prose she wrote for the magazine. By compiling Hopkins's nonfictional prose works, he shows how methodically Hopkins used nonfiction to express such convictions. Dworkin's collation of "Famous Men of the Negro Race" and "Famous Women of the Negro Race," for example, draws our attention to the coherence and thematic continuities within the series. Most of the volume's ten parts are organized around the series, although several are grouped otherwise (such as "Juvenilia" and "The Colored American Magazine Controversy").

Dworkin points out that his collation lacks the materialist aspects of periodical publication. In particular, he discusses what he convincingly argues is the ideological significance of the visual apparatus in the Colored American Magazine. While Hopkins edited the magazine, it exhibited cover portraits of successful African American women, cameos of Philis Wheatley and Frederick Douglass, and lush borders of elegant flowers and leaves. All disappeared after Hopkins's dismissal. As a concession to the lack of material features in his reprints, Dworkin provides his reader with facsimiles, including a handwritten copy of Hopkins's youthful, award-winning essay on temperance and covers from the Colored American Magazine and the New Era, another periodical to which Hopkins contributed.

Dworkin's volume allows readers insight into the rich history of African American culture, since Hopkins's words and references reveal the vital social fabric and extensive network of African American intellectuals, philanthropists, and other notables who have been erased from, or were never made present in, American cultural memory. Central to Dworkin's volume are bounteous identifications of Hopkins's allusions. Taking on the multitude of historical, political, literary, and philosophical sources she references was quite a task, since Hopkins's attributions are often sketchy or nonexistent. Dworkin reveals himself to be an ingenious sleuth and a formidable scholar, providing readers with a vision of the depth and breadth of Hopkins's reading. Scholars will also find ample sources for their continuing work on Hopkins.

For example, Dworkin's references show that Hopkins found an organizing principle and guiding argument for her race politics in Thomas Carlyle's On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History. In the volume, Carlyle argues that heroes sculpt great civilizations—Rome, Egypt, or Ethiopia—that fall into oblivion when heroes are killed or oppressed. Hopkins's apparent influences include her documentations of African American heroes. She argues that black American civilization should be judged by these standards, pointing out that white racists have barred most blacks from the simple privileges that constitute self-development and have perpetuated race hatred and race oppression by judging blacks by unfair standards, comparing them to those with many privileges...