“‘In the water… we see the future’: Imaging Black Futures in Pauline Hopkins’s Of One Blood”

• In Event: Hopkins and Butler: Black Women Body Sense

Description for Program

Several fin de siècle Black American writers and public intellectuals grappled with questions about what the new century would hold. Whereas “race men” like W.E.B. DuBois were focused on predicting the “problem[s] of the twentieth century,” in the imaginative work of “race women” like Pauline E. Hopkins, we find not predictions, but rather, prognostications. In her proto-science fiction novel Of One Blood (1902-3), Hopkins invents medical technologies that are capable of producing a reliable picture of the future. These innovative apparatuses, concealed from the west in the hidden African city of Telassar, combine new mainstream tools, like X-rays, with the devices of older alternative healing traditions, like Rosicrucianism and animal magnetism. As Hopkins’s protagonist, physician Reuel Briggs, realizes, however, both old and new western diagnostic methods are incapable of accurately mapping turn-of-the-century Black Americans’ traumatic bodily inheritances. He soon discovers that the advanced imaging tools of Telassar can capture not only the unchangeable truths of the past but can also use water to scan the future. Water, Hopkins’s novel surmises, is like connective tissue, providing a sensory link between the traumatic past of slavery and the unknown deep of what is to come. Through the metaphoric convergence of these scientific imaging technologies, Hopkins emphasizes the importance of knowing the fixed realities of the past when facing the fluidity of Black futures in the next century.

Author

• Rudrani Sarma, Rutgers University