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Pauline hopkins’s magazine novel of one blood; Or, the Hidden Self (1903) utilizes the discourses of an emergent psychology and Ethiopianism to develop an aesthetic critique of the exclusion of African Americans from the political life of the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. This exclusion, the culmination of the white supremacist and segregationist assault on African American political rights that began two decades earlier with the canceling of Reconstruction in 1876, had been given constitutional approval in the Plessy v. Ferguson U.S. Supreme Court case of 1896. With Jim Crow becoming the effective law of the land, intellectuals like Hopkins redoubled their efforts to inspire African Americans in the struggle to secure voting rights. Some of these intellectuals found inspiration in the references to Ethiopia in the Bible and in classical writers such as Diodorus Siculus, which they understood as foretelling the destiny of African Americans. In the Ethiopianist tradition of popular history, these references were both evidence of a glorious black past and a herald of the race’s future redemption. Developed over the course of the nineteenth century by figures as diverse as William Wells Brown, Frances Harper and George Washington Williams, this historical discourse was mobilized to undermine one ideological justification for the political exclusion of African Americans: the apparent lack of civilization in the historical record of black people. Indeed, the main function of the African section of Of One Blood is to impart this history of the race to readers.
The novel’s use of race history complements its psychological aspect. In its opening section, Of One Blood introduces these aspects in a careful description of the protagonist Reuel Brigg’s melancholia and his close study of psychology, particularly as it relates to mysticism. The novel relates his melancholia and his mysticism to his unacknowledged, at least in the beginning, racial origins. When Reuel finally embraces his racial origins in the novel’s African section, he both realizes the source of his mysticism and overcomes his earlier melancholia. Thus, the explorations of both race history and mysticism in the novel represent two aspects of a single project: discovering “the hidden self” of the subtitle. In this way, the novel provides knowledge of the ancient Ethiopian past to stoke...