Pauline E. Hopkins’s Untimely Democracy

This chapter reveals how Pauline E. Hopkins transforms the boundary between slavery and freedom into the source of a paradoxical political hope—indeed, as the best chance for realizing democracy. Announcing in Contending Forces that problems such as rape and lynching constitute “duplications” of the past of bondage, Hopkins calls for a neo-abolitionist crusade. For Thomas Jefferson or W. E. B. Du Bois, such a declaration would signal democracy’s arrested development. In the recursive narrative structures and scenes of temporal arrest that characterize her fictional and journalistic oeuvre, however, Hopkins constructs a critical resource for the campaign to redress democracy’s failings. Interrogating the limits of liberal agency, she redefines scenes of slavery’s recurrence as a starting point for a politics that might realize progress because it engenders an uncertainty about what has changed. From her democratic vista, progress results not by breaking with the past but by embracing its persistence.