Traumatic Communities and the Problem of the Past in the Utopian Narratives of Pauline Hopkins and Sutton E. Griggs
The project often centered around rehabilitating or publicizing the wartime contributions of African Americans in the US military. According to C. K. Doreski, CAM's biographies emphasized not just the "great deeds" of individuals, but also "the potential of a larger collective fo...
Saved in:
| Published in: | Studies in the novel 2021-01, Vol.53 (3), p.250-265 |
|---|---|
| Main Author: | |
| Format: | Article |
| Language: | eng |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | Get full text |
| Tags: |
Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
|
| Summary: | The project often centered around rehabilitating or publicizing the wartime contributions of African Americans in the US military. According to C. K. Doreski, CAM's biographies emphasized not just the "great deeds" of individuals, but also "the potential of a larger collective force, the 'citizen' always moving toward that constituent whole of 'citizenry'" (79). Because of the political reality for African American communities in the early twentieth century, Pauline Hopkins's Of One Blood (1902–03) and Sutton E. Griggs's Imperium in Imperio (1899) break the common mold of utopian fiction, focusing as much on the past as on the future, and revealing the ways that collective trauma can resonate through the present, making the future unthinkable. Fredric Jameson argues in his 1984 essay "Progress Versus Utopia" that science fiction registers its fantasies of the future by bracketing the possibility of progress, ending the teleology of human advancement either in "an atomic explosion that destroys the universe, or the static image of some future totalitarian world-state" (148). |
|---|---|
| ISSN: | 0039-3827 1934-1512 1934-1512 |