Tanya N. Clark

“Pauline E. Hopkins and Afrotemporalism” examines how Hopkins’s fiction, essays, and editorship of the “Colored American Magazine” transform memory into a tool for Black community repair and development. Afrotemporalism names this practice: a way of understanding Black cultural production through the continuum of past, present, and future rather than through a linear model of time. Through close reading and periodical analysis, the study traces how Hopkins’s body of work, together with the magazine’s broader contents, constructs a reader community oriented toward historical recovery, present action, and future imagination at once. In this account, memory becomes practical, shaping ethical, political, and communal possibilities. The project thus offers a clear framework for understanding how Hopkins makes time and memory do cultural work, while also providing a reading method that travels across literary study, archival inquiry, and classroom practice.