“Infectious Laughter, Pauline Hopkins’s Mammy, and the Living Ghost”

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

Description for Program

In Pauline Hopkins’s Of One Blood (1901/1902), characters are brought back to life and undergo a trans-racial transformation, a process I refer to as “racial transmigration.” Black writers use racial transmigration to resolve competing cultural anxieties about miscegenation, black overpopulation, and black extinction. I use Mladen Dolar’s concept of “comic mimesis” to conceptualize miscegenation anxiety as self-parody: black people are conscripted to imitate whiteness in order to instantiate whiteness’s social value; in that sense, the property of whiteness necessarily produces its own decrowning double, a destabilizing imitative rival that threatens to displace or replace the original. The text stages this paradox modeling how cross-cultural fears of racial contamination and extinction actually disguised a shared, sublimated desire to invert the schematic racial hierarchy by, as Fanon once wrote, “changing Whites into Blacks.”

Author

• amadi ozier, UW-Madison