Haunting as Modality: The Black Feminist Spectral Possibility of Pauline Hopkins' Of One Blood

• In Event: Black Horror and Haunting in Literature and Film

Abstract

Pauline Hopkins’ early nineteenth century magazine novel Of One Blood; Or the Hidden Self has more than once been deemed escapist with critics emphasizing its Pan-Africanist undertones. In their analyses, these critics take for granted that the novel’s shift in setting from the U.S. to a hidden Ethiopian civilization represents a desire to flee the brutality of American racial politics for the pleasure of African utopia. While these studies acknowledge the way that Hopkins uses Of One Blood to uncover Ethiopian pasts and futures alike, they neglect to consider the other migration in the text: the movement from the material world to the spirit realm. Through an analysis of the porosity of the novel’s transatlantic settings, this essay argues that Hopkins uses haunting as both archival modality and plot device. Rather than functioning as escape or a Pan Africanist impulse towards migration, the novel’s shifts in setting—from the U.S. to Ethiopia to the realm of ghosts and spirits—renders the Black feminine legible where she had formerly been erased and offers the seeds of a Black feminist future that exists outside the constraints of normative embodiment and social reproduction. Famous for its “inspired acts of borrowing,” Hopkins’ novel includes uncited references to Ethopianist writings, colonialist travel narratives, lost world novels, French experimental psychology, Black sociology, the bible, and even John Milton’s Paradise Lost. In amalgamating fiction, science, and the historical record, Of One Blood offers a narrative of Black womanhood which emphasizes how it haunts even the most mundane qualities of everyday life. In addition to the novel’s archival practice, the Black women in Hopkins’ text are defined by their abilities to haunt, to astral project, to see and speak prophecy, moving casually between this world and the next. Ultimately this paper argues that amidst the crises of capitalism and colonialism, Of One Blood depicts a world where despite a central role in American labor, science, technology, and innovation, Black women are at their most agential—their most powerful—when they shed their flesh.

Author

• Sarah Buckner, University of Missouri