Edlie Wong

ABSTRACT: The   mass   digitization   of   nineteenth-century   periodicals   and keyword-based  searching  algorithms  have  produced  new  ways  of  read-ing  Pauline  E.  Hopkins  in  the  twenty-first  century.  Our  essay  brings  an  experiment  in  digital  stylistics  together  with  traditional  methods  of  authorial analysis to investigate an unexplored facet of Hopkins’s authorship and com-positional  style.  Hopkins  is  well-known  for  her  penchant  for  pseudonyms.  She  contributed  many  unsigned  editorials  to  the  Colored  American  Magazine,  and  it  was  not  unusual  for  issues  to  feature  her  work  alongside  articles  and  fiction  that  she  penned  as  Sarah  A.  Allen  and  J.  Shirley  Shadrach.  Might  Hopkins  have  also  published  under  other,  as  yet  unattributed  pen  names?  This  essay  takes  as  its  case  study  a  writer  identified  as  S.  E.  F.  C.  C.  Hame-doe  or  Hammedoe,  a  purported  Professor  of  “F.G.S.I.,”  who  remains  one  of  the  most  enigmatic  of  regular  Colored  American  Magazine  contributors.

Read “The Hopkins-Hamedoe Identity"

The worldwide mobilizations of Black Lives Matter (BLM) during the COVID-19 pandemic dramatically shifted the discourses of anti-Blackness, race, and racialization in the global public sphere. In the wake of the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets, risking infection to protest systemic racism and mourn the Black men and women killed by police and white vigilantism. These mobilizations insisted on a public reckoning with anti-Blackness as a foundational and structural fact of Black life.

Read "Black Lives Matter, W. E. B. Du Bois’s World Color Line, and the Question of Relation"

American Literary History 32.4 (Winter 2020): 723-754.

Abstract

This essay mines the earliest and most influential of African American literary magazines, the Boston-based Colored American Magazine (CAM) (1900–09), and its southern rival, the Atlanta-based Voice of the Negro (1904–07), to investigate how black writers and activists addressed the links between US race relations, settler colonialism, and empire in the Pacific. Spanning these two periodicals, Pauline Hopkins’s work as an editor and contributor grappled with the question of how to represent, engage, and position Black Americans in a globalizing world that was at once becoming more vast, heterogeneous, and integrated. Race remained a powerful structuring principle, yet it accrued dynamic new meanings in the era of new imperialism. Along the way, the essay investigates an unexplored facet of Hopkins’s authorship and compositional style. It speculates that Hopkins may have published under another as yet unattributed pen name. The enigmatic S. E. F. C. C. Hamedoe was one of the most significant of regular CAM contributors. Before disappearing from print history, Hamedoe published a four-year-long series that mapped the political contours of the emerging Global South, crisscrossing continents and oceans. The extensive connections between Hamedoe’s writings and Hopkins’s final known completed series beg the question of whether they were one and the same.

“An Unexpected Direction: Pauline Hopkins, S.E.F.C.C. Hamedoe, and the ‘Dark Races of the Twentieth Century'"

It also emphasizes the significance of the comparative study of bonded labor to our understanding of “the Atlantic.” It explores forms of historical storytelling across a broad range of cultural materials, from Chinese American activist Wong Chin Foo's 1874 “fugitive coolie” narrative and bilingual Spanish-Chinese labor contracts to the novels of contemporary writers such as Cristina García, Amitav Ghosh, Toni Morrison, and Patricia Powell. What does it mean to place the archives of New World slavery and Asian indenture in conversation or in juxtaposition, especially when this counterpoint does not result in a structure of complementarity?

PHILADELPHIA, the 1840s: a corrupt banker disowns his dissolute son, who then reappears as a hardened smuggler in the contraband slave trade. Another son, hidden from his father since birth and condemned as a former felon, falls in with a ferocious street gang led by his elder brother and his revenge-hungry comrade from Cuba. His adopted sister, a beautiful actress, is kidnapped, and her remorseful black captor becomes her savior as his tavern is engulfed in flames. Vendetta, gang violence, racial tensions, and international intrigue collide in an explosive novella based on the events leading up to an infamous 1849 Philadelphia race riot. The Killers takes the reader on a fast-paced journey from the hallowed halls of academia at Yale College to the dismal solitary cells of Eastern State Penitentiary and through southwest Philadelphia's community of free African Americans. Though the book's violence was ignited by the particulars of Philadelphia life and politics, the flames were fanned by nationwide anxieties about race, labor, immigration, and sexuality that emerged in the young republic.

Penned by fiery novelist, labor activist, and reformer George Lippard (1822-1854) and first serialized in 1849, The Killers was the work of a wildly popular writer who outsold Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne in his lifetime. Long out of print, the novella now appears in an edition supplemented with a brief biography of the author, an untangling of the book's complex textual history, and excerpts from related contemporaneous publications. Editors Matt Cohen and Edlie L. Wong set the scene of an antebellum Philadelphia rife with racial and class divisions, implicated in the international slave trade, and immersed in Cuban annexation schemes to frame this compact and compelling tale.

Serving up in a short form the same heady mix of sensational narrative, local color, and impassioned politics found in Lippard's sprawling The Quaker City, or The Monks of Monks Hall, The Killers is here brought back to lurid life.

It aired on CNN, FoxNews, AMC, and CNBC and also on local broadcast stations in states with key gubernatorial and senate races, including Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. A few major networks, including ABC, A&E, and the History Channel, declined to air the advertisement, claiming it to be too controversial. It ran again in January and March 2011 and in the month before the 2012 presidential election. Since its original broadcast, “Chinese Professor” has become the subject of much heated debate, praise, and parody.

Williams’s once-popular autobiography chronicling his experiences as a fugitive slave and California gold miner knits together stories from the Underground Railroad with firsthand observations on Chinese labor migration and Indian resettlement in the West. This essay reads Williams’s narrative alongside the key legal and political contexts that gave its narrative shape (and to which Williams addressed his text), including California Governor John Bigler’s anti-coolieism campaign (1852), the California Supreme Court ruling in People v. Hall (1854), and the widely publicized Modoc War (1872–73). It builds upon the analytics for articulating racial difference honed in US race and ethnic studies to help illuminate Williams’s literary efforts to formulate an early politics of comparative racialization.

It explores material that has been largely left out of the antislavery story: the cases brought by abolitionists to free slaves who had traveled with their masters into free territory. Wong's essay reconstructs the records of these cases from popular literature, newsprint, and legal pamphlets to explore what recent literary and historical scholarship has largely overlooked. Harriet and John S. Jacobs, Maria Weston Chapman, Sojourner Truth, and Ellis Gray Loring appear alongside a number of largely unknown slave attendants in an essay that explores the complex ways legal discourses circulating in newsprint constituted the agency and subjectivity of slaves who petitioned Northern courts for freedom (in counterdistinction from the criminal will of the fugitive).

Atlantic scholarship – most notably Paul Gilroy's Black Atlantic – has looked to the chronotope of the seafaring ship in its efforts to chart the cosmopolitan contours of the nineteenth century. For Gilroy, the ship gives figurative expression to a cultural and political remapping of modern racial formations that transcends the “boundaries and integrity of modern nation states” (4). Ships call to mind both the Middle Passage and the mercantile routes that joined the Americas with Europe, Africa, and the plantation zones of the Caribbean. For Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, black maritime circulation thus constituted one aspect of the “many-headed hydra” that unsettled the political sovereignty of European nation-states in the Atlantic world (31).

Professor Edlie L. Wong contends that slavery and its logic of property had a profound effect on the notion of travel and freedom in the Atlantic World. British and American slaveholders traveled with the assumption that their right to free mobility extended to their enslaved servants. But slaves are rarely mentioned in travel accounts of the time that romanticized mobility as a unique expression of individual freedom and autonomy.Recuperating the untold narratives of slaves who accompanied their masters on trips to free territories, Professor Wong argues that these journeys between free and enslaved territories challenge the cultural logic of slavery and freedom and offer an alternative view of history to the already established genres of abolitionist and fugitive slave narratives. A volume in the new series America and the Long 19th Century.

Neither Fugitive nor Free draws on the freedom suit as recorded in the press and court documents to offer a critically and historically engaged understanding of the freedom celebrated in the literary and cultural histories of transatlantic abolitionism. Freedom suits involved those enslaved valets, nurses, and maids who accompanied slaveholders onto free soil. Once brought into a free jurisdiction, these attendants became informally free, even if they were taken back to a slave jurisdiction—at least according to abolitionists and the enslaved themselves. In order to secure their freedom formally, slave attendants or others on their behalf had to bring suit in a court of law.

Published on behalf of African American Review (St. Louis University)

Prince's representation of her “captivity” in England poses crucial questions as to whether she can simultaneously claim to be a free and West Indian subject. In thus situating Prince's narrative, a more complex and multifaceted discussion of gender, home, freedom, and agency emerges from her struggles to assert her autonomy from her master and return to Antigua as a free woman.

The first academic organization dedicated to nineteenth-century American literary studies, C19 was co-founded by CALS faculty members Hester Blum, Chris Castiglia, and Sean Goudie, who currently serve on the C19 Advisory Board.

President: 2020-2022