Jesse’s Reviews > Contending Forces > Status Update
Jesse
is on page 50 of 211
I ran into a cognitive speedbump because Hopkins is purposefully evasive in directly connecting the Smith family to the escaped Jesse Montfort, I assume as a way to thematically underline his attempted break from his past. It’s doubly confusing when his… grandchildren??? are presented with what appears to be the Montfort last name, but I assume that this is, like, their second middle name.
— Nov 22, 2024 07:53AM
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Jesse
is on page 150 of 211
The American Colored League hearing is where the aim of this novel became apparent to me and why there has been such an emphasis on mixed race heritage and miscegenation. Hopkins sees these people as bearing the psychosexual trauma of being the living legacy of decades of slavery and sexual violence.
— Nov 22, 2024 05:20PM
Jesse
is on page 104 of 211
Part of what is nice about this book is how it places in fiction so much of the problems plaguing African Americans in the northern United States that, yeah, I vaguely remember from history books, but which hits a bit different in this fictionalized account. Hopkins also tries to shine a light on the complex sectional politics and notions of “blackness” that lead to the self-destruction of Pan-Africa.
— Nov 22, 2024 12:54PM
Jesse
is on page 50 of 211
This covers a lot of ground, from how the English were abolishing slavery to how race relations were managed in the Bahamas to how someone like Charles Montfort could expect to be treated in the south. The answer, based on rules that Hopkins outlines about miscegenation and fomenting dissatisfaction among the slaves and other weird slavery-era Southernisms, is you can expect to die.
— Nov 20, 2024 08:40PM
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Nov 22, 2024 08:05AM
When I looked this up to clarify what I was trying to figure out I read some very harsh criticism of Pauline Hopkins’s novels and I wasn’t entirely sure what the critic was getting at until I read page 53. If anything goes to show how insidious the American culture of racism was around the turn of the century then it might as well be Hopkins in her prose suggesting that the interracial sexual intercourse under slavery was responsible for improving the genetic stock of African Americans, furthering their capacity for “racial uplift”. Now that I think back to the early aside where whites punish a fellow white man for wanting to marry a black woman, I doubt whether there is a trace of irony in Hopkins’s argument.
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