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Of One Blood, or The Hidden Self (1903)
by Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins
Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins
Of One Blood, or The Hidden Self (1903)
by Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins
Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins
1.99
In Stock
Overview
"Hopkins links the science of the occult with psychology, ethnology, Egyptology, and Ethiopianism in order to destabilize fixed notions of race and culture." - Imperfect Unions: Staging Miscegenation in U.S. Drama and Fiction (2012)
"Hopkins...counters the broken rubric of both the African American past under slavery and the post-Reconstruction present...finds a proud racial heritage." - The Motherless Child in the Novels of Pauline Hopkins (2012)
"Of One Blood grafts the political issue of post-Reconstruction racial justice onto the supernatural and psychological themes that fascinated her." - The Unruly Voice: Rediscovering Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins (1996)
"The protagonist discovers a hidden African civilization called Telassar that...was able to escape the ravages of colonialism and the trans-Atlantic slave trade." -Boston Globe, August 29, 2021
Why is African-American author Pauline Hopkins considered one of the greatest turn of the century novelists who explores the boundaries of race and culture?
"Of One Blood: Or, The Hidden Self" is a novel by author Pauline Hopkins (1859 –1930) that was serialized in The Colored American Magazine in the November and December 1902 and the January 1903 issues of the publication, during the four-year period in which Hopkins served as its editor.
Of One Blood: Or, The Hidden Self tells the story of Reuel Briggs, a medical student who does not care about being black or appreciating African history but finds himself in Ethiopia on an archaeological trip. His motive is to raid the country of lost treasures, which he does find. However, he discovers much more than he expected: the painful truth about blood, race, and the half of his history that was never told.
The novel's title was inspired by Acts 17:26 in the Bible: "Of one blood I made all nations of man to dwell upon the whole face of the earth (...) No man can draw the dividing line between the two races, for they are both of one blood!"
Hopkins's main purpose in writing the novel was to expose and unravel the entangled genealogies of blacks and whites, the irrefutable evidence that they were literally, biologically, "of one blood". The text's collective argument, according to its introduction, is that blood has so effortlessly mixed between the two races that any attempt to disentangle them is rendered impossible.
Critics often regard it as one of the earliest articulations of Black internationalism because it is the first African-American novel to both feature African characters and take place in Africa.
The novel was published in the same year that W. E. B. Du Bois originated the famous phrase "the color line" in his collection of essays The Souls of Black Folk (1903), in which the phrase describes the hypothetically dividing line between the white and black races. Hopkins's originating the text in Boston honed in on one of the epicenters of debate in the United States on "blood", bloodlines, and roots of "human family". The selection of "The Hidden Self" as the subtitle serves as a "metaphor for the suppressed history of oppressive social and familial relations under the institution of slavery."
"Hopkins...counters the broken rubric of both the African American past under slavery and the post-Reconstruction present...finds a proud racial heritage." - The Motherless Child in the Novels of Pauline Hopkins (2012)
"Of One Blood grafts the political issue of post-Reconstruction racial justice onto the supernatural and psychological themes that fascinated her." - The Unruly Voice: Rediscovering Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins (1996)
"The protagonist discovers a hidden African civilization called Telassar that...was able to escape the ravages of colonialism and the trans-Atlantic slave trade." -Boston Globe, August 29, 2021
Why is African-American author Pauline Hopkins considered one of the greatest turn of the century novelists who explores the boundaries of race and culture?
"Of One Blood: Or, The Hidden Self" is a novel by author Pauline Hopkins (1859 –1930) that was serialized in The Colored American Magazine in the November and December 1902 and the January 1903 issues of the publication, during the four-year period in which Hopkins served as its editor.
Of One Blood: Or, The Hidden Self tells the story of Reuel Briggs, a medical student who does not care about being black or appreciating African history but finds himself in Ethiopia on an archaeological trip. His motive is to raid the country of lost treasures, which he does find. However, he discovers much more than he expected: the painful truth about blood, race, and the half of his history that was never told.
The novel's title was inspired by Acts 17:26 in the Bible: "Of one blood I made all nations of man to dwell upon the whole face of the earth (...) No man can draw the dividing line between the two races, for they are both of one blood!"
Hopkins's main purpose in writing the novel was to expose and unravel the entangled genealogies of blacks and whites, the irrefutable evidence that they were literally, biologically, "of one blood". The text's collective argument, according to its introduction, is that blood has so effortlessly mixed between the two races that any attempt to disentangle them is rendered impossible.
Critics often regard it as one of the earliest articulations of Black internationalism because it is the first African-American novel to both feature African characters and take place in Africa.
The novel was published in the same year that W. E. B. Du Bois originated the famous phrase "the color line" in his collection of essays The Souls of Black Folk (1903), in which the phrase describes the hypothetically dividing line between the white and black races. Hopkins's originating the text in Boston honed in on one of the epicenters of debate in the United States on "blood", bloodlines, and roots of "human family". The selection of "The Hidden Self" as the subtitle serves as a "metaphor for the suppressed history of oppressive social and familial relations under the institution of slavery."
Product Details
| BN ID: | 2940160715858 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Far West Travel Adventure |
| Publication date: | 04/03/2022 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Sales rank: | 942,264 |
| File size: | 465 KB |
About the Author
Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins (1859 – August 13, 1930) was an American novelist, journalist, playwright, historian, and editor. She is considered a pioneer in her use of the romantic novel to explore social and racial themes.
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