Pauline E. Hopkins's attitude towards fiction as a terrain where political and social truths could be uttered, helped her establish a new hybrid writing paradigm in Contending Forces, her historical romance. The extraordinary intertextual load of references, verbatim borrowings and changed citations, her Emersonian ―noble borrowing,‖ is in fact both an audacious maneuvering of popular literature, and a systematic and subversive redrafting of preceding canonical texts from the Anglo-American literary traditions and of contemporary historical political testimonies. Hopkins's palimpsestic aesthetics recreate a sense of African American literary interventions aimed at recomposing a new black archival imaginary redeemed of racist detritus. Hopkins does not emerge in this novel as a plagiarist, as happens in some of her novels, but as an alluder, a narrative voice that always signals readers towards the racial burden of the past hidden in a corpus of intertextual debts to anchor her African American historical romance in a world of textually independent dependence