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. …
Harriet Jacobs and the Recirculation of Print Culture
Following a brief introductory paragraph, William Wells Brown reprints two advertisements in the opening to the third chapter of Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States (1853). The advertisements are said to be from newspapers “published in the vicinity” of Natchez, where the character Currer is living, and they attest to the brutality of slaveholders and slavecatchers in the area by showing, as Brown states, “how they catch their negroes” (96). Visually set off from the narrative prose, these advertisements conform to familiar typographic conventions, which include listing the names of the subscribers and the dates of publication at the end of each block of text (see fig. 1). Brown’s novel is littered with reprinted texts such as these—texts that frequently trouble the boundary between the documentary and the literary. Later in this third chapter, there is a long, reprinted account of a lynching sourced from the Natchez Free Trader and another reprinted account that describes the discovery of a runaway slave den in a Southern swamp (98-99). Even while these newspaper items document the historical reality of violence perpetrated against runaway slaves, the chapter ends with Brown precariously asserting that Currer—the fictional character mentioned at the start of the chapter— was present at the lynching described in the first newspaper account. This conclusion presents a jumble of documentary, fictional, reprinted, and original texts all within the space of a page, and Brown’s claim that his fictional character was a witness to a historical event destabilizes the relationship between the reprinted texts and the fictional prose. In the case of Clotel, it seems impossible to decide whether the reprinted texts are an apparatus that serves the fiction or whether the fiction is simply an occasion for the interlacing of diverse source materials. Indeed, this question has been a subject of scholarly debate since the mid-twentieth century; early critics of the novel described the now canonical 1853 edition as a “loosely structured skeleton of a plot” (Heermance 164) by a “limited and pedestrian writer” (Davis xii) while later critics praised the same text as “a stunning example of literary pastiche” (Levine 7) that exhibits Brown’s “brilliant experimentation with literary form” (Fabi xxv). Whether these reprinted texts
Turkish Political Culture and Civil Society : an Unsettling Coupling?
This paper attempts to analyze Turkish politics in the post-1980 period with a special reference to the relationship among the state elites, political elites and societal actors and its impact on the constitution of civil society in Turkey. After the 1980 military intervention, the political and economic realms of Turkey witnessed a relative degree of liberalization through Uzal's neo-liberal policies. The January 24 economic decisions paved the way for economic liberalization as well as letting new economic and societal actors emerge. These new economic actors were different from the prevailing economic actors which used to enjoy having a considerable amount of opportunity spaces in the economic sphere. Together with the Uzal governments, Islamic segments started to become powerful in both political and economic realms. This paper analyses the chief traits of Turkish politics and economics and their impact upon civil society aftermath the 1980 coup in general, and the relationship and/or interaction among the state elites, political elites and societal actors in particular. The engagements of newly-emerging societal and economic actors into Turkish political scene and the challenge of these actors against the so-called 'Kemalist-Republican' elites are also illustrated in the paper. Moreover, state-Islam interaction, politics-Islam interaction as well as Kemalism-newly-emerging societal and economic actors interaction will be studied with a special emphasis to the post-1980 period. The major argument of the paper is that, in Turkey, both civil society issues and political issues reveal outcomes which are primarily shaped by the nature of the relationship between state elites and political elites in general and by Turkish political culture in particular.