Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- PART ONE HISTORY, CITIZENSHIP, AND THE AMERICAN WAY
- 1 Race Progress and Exemplary Biography
- 2 Reading Riot
- 3 Rendezvous with Modernism, Fascism – and Democracy
- 4 “If I Were a Negro”
- PART TWO DECOMPOSING UNITIES, DECONSTRUCTING NATIONAL NARRATIVES
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
1 - Race Progress and Exemplary Biography
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 July 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- PART ONE HISTORY, CITIZENSHIP, AND THE AMERICAN WAY
- 1 Race Progress and Exemplary Biography
- 2 Reading Riot
- 3 Rendezvous with Modernism, Fascism – and Democracy
- 4 “If I Were a Negro”
- PART TWO DECOMPOSING UNITIES, DECONSTRUCTING NATIONAL NARRATIVES
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Summary
We know that there are able publications already in the field, but the pang that has set our active world a-borning is the knowledge that the colored man has lost the rights already won because he was persuaded and then bullied into lying down and ceasing his fight for civil liberty. …
– “Editorial and Publishers Announcements” New Era Magazine (February 1916): 60We are sparing neither time nor money to make this Magazine the most authentic historian of the race's progress.
– “Editorial and Publishers Announcements” New Era Magazine (March 1916): 124More than a decade after her severance from Boston's Colored American Magazine (CAM), Pauline Hopkins retained a politically charged philosophy of African-American arts and letters, as evidenced by her pronouncements heralding the publication of New Era Magazine. Colleagues from the Colored American might have been surprised by the stridency of her call to action, but none would have been shocked by its militancy or insistence upon community-based, collective action.
By the time of this final acknowledgment of the collaborative nature and resultant power of the periodical press, Hopkins had resolved the earlier problematic issue of the relationship between the public self and history. For black America the periodical press could not afford to be ephemeral; it had consciously to shape and nurture its nascent history. In her culminating effacement of self as historian, Hopkins ceded authority to the magazine and, by extension, to the African-American periodical press at large.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Writing America BlackRace Rhetoric and the Public Sphere, pp. 3 - 24Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1998