Of One Blood; or, The Hidden Self by Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins (review)

Reviewed by: Of One Blood; or, The Hidden Self by Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins Nadine M. Knight Of One Blood; or, The Hidden Self. By Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins. Edited by Eurie Dahn and Brian Sweeney. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2022. vi + 331 pp. $18.25 paper/ $10.31 e-book. Although Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins first published Of One Blood serially in the short-lived Colored American Magazine (of which she was the literary editor) in 1902 and 1903, its fantastical plot remains riveting and relevant to readers today. From his introduction as a moping figure in an impoverished apartment during a dreary Boston autumn, protagonist Reuel Briggs finishes the novel as the long-lost heir and newly crowned king of the secret and long-lost city of Telassar, in Ethiopia, "which had its zenith six thousand years before Christ's birth" (141). Telassar is wondrous, protected from the colonization, scientific explorations, and treasure hunting that had marked the rest of Africa as a place of deficit and failure. A white travel companion of Briggs's encapsulates this view when he "misse[s] the march of progress" in Africa and reflect[s] that "there is no future" in the region (120). In positing a hidden yet magically advanced African kingdom, untroubled by the outside world and permitting only a few of its inhabitants to cross beyond its borders, Hopkins imagines an Afrofuturistic utopia that will likely conjure up images of Wakanda from Marvel's Black Panther films for many readers today. The novel's fast-paced story packs in the thrills of mesmerism and prophetic visions; the tragedy of racial passing that enables inadvertent incest and inspires medical malpractice, murder, and attempted murder for hire; and mystically-induced suicide as extralegal justice, just to mention a few notable highlights. Of One Blood inspires inquiries into the nineteenth-century fascination with mesmerism, the construction and eventual subversion of the African continent as primitive and undeveloped, the role of African American spirituals as the legitimizing genre of Black artistic achievement, and the anxieties around racial passing. Editors Eurie Dahn and Brian Sweeney do a remarkable job of organizing and highlighting these leading themes for readers. Their introduction comprises eight sections, offering biographical information and a timeline of notable events in Hopkins's life, as well as historical background and cultural context for the Colored American Magazine's decade of existence at the turn of the century; Afrofuturism and "the lost world adventure" genre; Africa in the popular imagination at the turn of the century; mesmerism and medical training; the significance of African American spiritual music; and feminist interpretations of the text. Dahn and Sweeney devote the largest section of the introduction to discussing scholarly debates about Hopkins as a plagiarist. They focus on Geoffrey Sanborn's catalog of the extensive similarities [End Page 266] between multiple passages in Of One Blood and other texts. Dahn and Sweeney reference contemporary scholarship that rebuts Sanborn's framing, and they deftly explain the championing of imitation found in the writings of Zora Neale Hurston as well as in Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s theory of signifyin' to situate Hopkins as a writer deliberately working to "decenter the source text's imperialist perspective" (25). Perhaps most intriguing, Dahn and Sweeney argue that, as a professional stenographer, Hopkins had mastered "the skill of transcribing others' words, which has obvious resonances with the practice of plagiarism" (28). This claim recalls Frederick Douglass's pride, described in his 1845 Narrative of the Life, in teaching himself to read and write by copying his young master's hand. Dahn and Sweeney restore the "to be continued" at the end of certain chapters to remind readers of the novel's serial origins. They correct presumed printing errors to reduce confusion and uphold consistencies of spelling. The annotations in the text are thorough. In addition to pointing out the vast range of literary inspirations and allusions throughout the novel, the annotations gloss archaic terms and explain the invocations of different mythological and historical figures. Dahn and Sweeney demonstrate their ongoing interest in the debates about plagiarism by assiduously noting the source material for countless passages throughout the novel and including excerpts from many...

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