Abstract
Despite being considered a key text in African American literary history especially after its reevaluation in the 1980s, Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted (1892) by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper has generally been dismissed by critics for its aesthetic and political accommodationism, bourgeois didacticism, and alleged historical amnesia. Most of these critical evaluations focus exclusively on Iola’s character. Situating Iola Leroy in its cultural and political context, this article rereads Iola’s character in relation to other women characters to argue that Harper’s text conceives a “New Negro Woman” as a counterpart of the New Negro man, long before the term became popularized. Even more, this “New Negro Woman” is shaped by African American racial heritage alongside postbellum racial uplift ideology contra the dominant “bourgeois” conceptions of the New Negro that “buried” the past in an attempt to “escape the recollection of enslavement” Gates, 1988, 139.
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Notes
See Christian, Elder (1978), Jackson, Lewis, McDowell, and Wilson.
All subsequent textual citations are indicated by page numbers only.
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Siddiqa, A. Reimagining Black Womanhood: Frances E. W. Harper’s “New Negro Woman”. J Afr Am St 26, 37–52 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12111-022-09575-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12111-022-09575-5