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.
"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
"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."
