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. …
Dependent States: The Child's Part In Nineteenth-century American Culture
Because childhood is not only culturally but also legally and biologically understood as a period of dependency, it has been easy to dismiss children as historical actors. By putting children at the center of our thinking about American history, Karen Sanchez-Eppler recognizes the important part childhood played in nineteenth-century American culture and what this involvement entailed for children themselves. Dependent States examines the ties between children's literacy training and the growing cultural prestige of the novel; the way children functioned rhetorically in reform literature to enforce social norms; the way the risks of death to children shored up emotional power in the home; how Sunday schools socialized children into racial, religious, and national identities, and how class identity was produced, not only in terms of work, but also in the way children played. For Sanchez-Eppler, nineteenth-century childhoods were nothing less than vehicles for national reform. Dependent on adults for their care, children did not conform to the ideals of enfranchisement and agency that we usually associate with historical actors. Yet through meticulously researched examples, Sanchez-Eppler reveals that children participated in the making of social meaning. Her focus on childhood as a dependent state thus offers a rewarding corrective to our notions of autonomous individualism and a new perspective on American culture itself.
THE RELIGIOUS SITES DURING THE CHINESE CULTURAL REVOLUTION, 1966-1976
This study presents a thought-provoking picture of statistical data regarding the growth patterns of the religious sites for five main Chinese religions during the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976. Applying comparative and quantitative lenses, this paper addresses the diE™erent growth rates of religious sites during the four diE™erent periods from 1949 to 2004 to test the relative growth pace of religious sites during the Cultural Revolution. To understand the patterns of growing religious sites from 1966 to 1976, this study also compares the diE™erent growth rates of religious sites between the first phase (1966 to 1970) and the second phase (1971-1976) of the Cultural Revolution. Furthermore, it provides detailed information concerning the year of building new religious sites for all five major religions that hold more than 2,500 new religious sites during the Cultural Revolution. In addition, the study shows the top five provinces which built the most new religious sites while denoting their respective rural and urban locations in an eE™ort to demonstrate their geographical expansion during the period. Finally, this study addresses the growth rates of the national population and per capita GDP as compared to the growth of the religious sites during the period of national disaster (1966-1976).