Race-ing Toward Civilization: Sexual Slavery and Nativism in the Novels of Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins and Alice Wellington Rollins

Abstract

The ongoing work of restoring "lost" nineteenth-century women writers to the American literary canon often yields the added benefit of bringing to light experiences of ethnic groups left out of the dominant narrative of American identity. The opportunity to compare ethnic American literatures can provide fascinating new approaches to better-known authors like Pauline Hopkins, whose literary concerns extend beyond the social and domestic needs of her own African American community. Hopkins interrogates the very foundations of equality and democracy as the United States turns into the twentieth century, frequently flirting with nativist discourse as she does so. Conversely, the Schomburg Center for research in Black Culture holds one of the few extant copies of an 1888 work by Alice Rollins entitled Uncle Tom's Tenement ; this critically un-examined and seemingly forgotten novel uses abolitionist language to describe the plight of Irish American women. As an Anglo-American middle-class woman writing about an Irish immigrant minority, Rollins invokes rhetorical strategies comparable to Hopkins's.

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