Death-Defying Testimony: Women's Private Lives and the Politics of Public Documents
Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins succeeded as a playwright, acclaimed vocalist, enterprising journalist, feisty public intellectual, ambitious activist, eloquent patriot, and stalwart club woman from the 1870s through 1915. (1) A fifth-generation New Englander born in 1859 in Portland, Maine, Hopkins was the only child of Sarah Allen Northup of Boston and Benjamin Northup of Providence, a couple whose marriage united powerful political and religious dynasties and blended tumultuous histories of freedom and enslavement. Hopkins's writing life began with an award-winning school essay on the evils of intemperance and ended with the most economical of writing occupations at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she was a stenographer. Her writing life and the lives she documents shape my approach to private writing and biography. In writing Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins: Black Daughter of the Revolution, I was compelled to document and assess the public and private lives she generated, sustained, and revised. I had time and reason to grapple with the archival and intellectual issues that emerge as a result of scholarly biography projects. We know projects like these often proceed as extended--sometimes seemingly never-ending--considerations of the politics of private writing, biography, and the archive. A SOJOURNER IN THE ARCHIVE As a literary historian, I have been a sojourner in the archive--one whose research plans do not always first yield the foundational organizing details of birth date, parentage, marriage, occupation, and church affiliations. I am in search of lives developed in the shadow of imagined democracy or sustained despite involuntary proximity to the blistering core of an America that accommodated and perpetuated enslavement. The free-born, self-emancipated, or enslaved individuals I encounter in the archives negotiated peculiar, highly racialized, and deeply sexualized institutions that co-opted their labor, bodies, identities, relationships, offspring, and communities. Nineteenth-century people of color contended with racial and social realities and hierarchies that depended on and were strengthened by wholly permeable and vulnerable spheres--so much so that racialized notions of the private frequently are critiques of a volatile public sphere and of bodies that were always already available for public consumption. Biography projects about these individuals become considerations of the pursuits, acquisitions, fictions, and shifting valuations of privacy. This is a rigorous dance indeed, for biographer and subject alike, and there are breathless and breathtaking stakes at hand. As an earnest graduate student in the early 1990s, I went to Fisk University to see the Pauline Hopkins Papers. The very first question the archivist put to me was rhetorical at best: "You're here for a week? I don't know why you think you need all that time. It's only one box." Yet what was in the box, and the other items that emerged over the course of that week as I proved myself an earnest and worthy scholar-in-training, revealed two questions: First, what must we do in the face of sparse and provocative private writing when it has no linear foot breadth or documented provenance and raises more questions than it answers? Second, how do we grapple with the seeming silences--these rhetorical ruptures and biographical caesuras--that all too often define the early African American canon and history? I ask these questions even as I assert that our expectations of racialized private writing cannot be modest or anchored in disappointment and loss. We must have a practice of intellectual and archival optimism, and certainly the invaluable archival recovery and insistent intellectual work of many scholars--Carla Peterson, Frances Foster, Karen Sanchez-Eppler, Gabrielle Foreman, Jeanne Pfaelzer, Karen Kilcup, Sharon Harris, and others--explains why. My decades-plus project on Hopkins and her world disciplined me and even rode me ragged at times as I embarked on wide-ranging physical and intellectual journeys, trekked to obscure and well-known archives, ventured into graveyards, stepped into municipal storage spaces, took up residence in countless airless microfilm rooms, and made forced, voluntary, and serendipitous marches across acres of library stacks. …
“A Cool and Deliberate Sort of Madness”: Production, Reproduction, and the Provisional Recovery of Progressive-Era Women’s Narratives
Drawing on works by feminist and archival studies scholars such as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Ann Laura Stoler, and Carla Kaplan, this essay explores a provisional approach to reading multiple recovered narratives by and about women. The project takes as its starting point three related narratives from the early twentieth-century United States: first, the trial account of nurse and immigrant Sarah Koten, who murdered her employer, Dr. Martin Auspitz; second, a play based on Koten by radical labor activist Rose Pastor Stokes; and third, accounts of copycat crimes involving women who likened themselves to Koten. This essay spotlights the unsettled relationship between these narratives of self-defensive struggle with the broader aim of elaborating a set of interpretive practices that attend more diligently to the politics of renarration. In doing so, it calls for an approach to recovery that looks for connections between narratives but resists synthesis, and for a method that is attentive to identification but also notes identification’s profound limits.
PLEASURE, POWER, AND THE PURSUIT OF COMMUNISM: SOVIET YOUTH AND STATE-SPONSORED POPULAR CULTURE DURING THE EARLY COLD WAR, 1945-1968
art, with certain students accused of “showing political immaturity, failing to understand the Party’s positions on art.” This episode constituted part of a broader crackdown on abstract art by the Khrushchev administration from late 1962, precipitated the the Soviet leader’s derision of such art forms in December 1962 at the Manege exhibit. Such instances demonstrate the limitations of the top-level promotion of youth grassroots initiative, as the Khrushchev leadership reigned in youth autonomy when it threatened to go beyond the boundaries of the permissible. The dates cited above have particular resonance, since both 1957-58 and 1962-63 represent two periods when those at the top of the Party hierarchy moved away from pursuing a more pluralistic, tolerant policy course, due to anxiety inspired by both sharpening Cold War hostilities and domestic developments. In these periods, official rhetoric censured what it labeled as 639 TsAOPIM, f. 635, op. 13, d. 546, ll. 56-57. This is likely related to criticism of the Party associated with the fallout from the Secret Speech and the Hungary invasion. For more, see Polly Jones, “From the Secret Speech to the Burial of Stalin: Real and Ideal Responses to De-Stalinization,” in Jones ed., The Dilemmas, 41-63. 640 TsAOPIM, f. 6083, op. 1, d. 52, ll. 166-67. 641 Susan E. Reid, “In the Name of the People: The Manege Affair Revisited,” Kritika 6.4 (Fall 2005): 673716. 642 On these anxieties, see Dobson, Khrushchev’s Cold Summer, 156-88.