Index – The Digital Colored American Magazine links you to a digital version of the original.
Recommended by Professor Ros Ballaster
Pauline Hopkins, an East coast woman in America of African origin, by trade a stenographer, wrote serialised sensation fiction in the first few years of the nineteenth century that looked back to the period of slavery and its legacy in the United States in the Colored American Magazine, a progressive medium for black Americans in Boston and later New York. Hopkins' tales converted an old form, the romance (in which a lost adult discovers his or her true origins), into a modern one that speaks to the recent history of civil war and abolition of slavery in North America using the new forms of publication and dissemination found in the periodical press. ‘Hagar’s Daughter’ published serially in twelve parts under the name of Sarah Allen between March 1901 and March 1903 is a drama of post-slavery, an intergenerational story in which white slave traders are the villains who exploit the ‘hidden’ racial identity of female heroines to shatter their love affair and families. The story hinges on the discovery of a lost child. Vivid characters populate it: a white Southern slaveholder who redeems his sins as a father by acting as a detective and agent for the restoration of his mixed race child to her mother and to happiness; a feisty black house servant named Venus who disguises herself as a young male detective named Billy to discover the villainous conspiracy designed to deny the heroine her birthright and her happy union with the white man who loves her. ‘Hagar’s Daughter’ brings the conventions of the dime novel and the sensation fiction to the issue of a mixed racial future for America. Its very hybridity between genres, styles and temporalities (the 1860s South to the 1900s North) speaks to a vision of that hybrid future.
