At the Foot of the Racial Mountain: Pauline Hopkins's Literary Exodus in Peculiar Sam, or The Underground Railroad

[...]he believed that African American art and culture were subsumed in the American mainstream. In "Reinventing Slavery, Family, and Nation in Peculiar Sam" (2019), Marvin McAllister refers to both W. E. B. Du Bois's and David Blight's historical visions from Black Reconstructio...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The Mississippi quarterly Vol. 74; no. 4; pp. 423 - 440
Main Author: Taylor, Rod
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: Mississippi State Johns Hopkins University Press 2021
Subjects:
African American literature
African Americans
American literature
Black history
Dialects
Families & family life
Hopkins, Pauline E (Pauline Elizabeth)
Popular culture
Slavery
United States > US
ISSN:0026-637X, 2689-517X, 2689-517X
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:[...]he believed that African American art and culture were subsumed in the American mainstream. In "Reinventing Slavery, Family, and Nation in Peculiar Sam" (2019), Marvin McAllister refers to both W. E. B. Du Bois's and David Blight's historical visions from Black Reconstruction (1935) and Race and Reunion (2001), respectively, to express how Hopkins "advanc[ed] progressive African-American modernity as a model for a nation in the process of rebuilding" to liberate her enslaved characters (394). According to James V. Hatch in his introduction to The Roots of African American Drama (1991), Hopkins wrote Peculiar Sam "for her family's troupe, the Hopkins' Colored Troubadours; she employed the current minstrel dialect as well as song and dance to engage her audience in the serious subject of emancipation" (31). Considering the experimental work Hopkins did with her dramatic endeavors, I suggest that we center the focus on what she did to reform the popular, yet reductive, minstrel productions of the late nineteenth century and celebrate her effort in working against the grain of popular culture rather than focus on the value judgements of Peculiar Sam based on the dichotomy of high and low art forms.
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ISSN:0026-637X
2689-517X
2689-517X
DOI:10.1353/mss.2021.0017