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ABSTRACT
This essay examines Pauline E. Hopkins’s speculative novel Of One Blood (serialized 1902–03) as it represents the distinctive nonlinear time of Ethiopianism, an African American prophetic tradition premised upon Psalm 68:31, “Princes shall come out of Egypt; Ethiopia shall stretch forth her hands unto God” (KJV). Of One Blood proves uncertain about when and how Ethiopianism’s key promise, the rise of a new social order featuring African American leadership, might be enacted. As the text grapples with that uncertainty, though, it models for readers how religious historiographies can drive acts of political resistance against systems of oppression that show no signs of giving way. Rather than an escape from the racist realities of the turn-of-the-century United States, the Ethiopianist narratives in Of One Blood convey a mode of confronting those realities and summoning the theological hope to pursue unseen alternatives.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Joanna Brooks traces the beginnings of Ethiopianism in the US to eighteenth-century freemasonry (“Prince Hall”). By the early twentieth century, Ethiopianism as such was in decline, having evolved into Black Nationalist movements like Garveyism and separatist religious traditions like Rastafarianism.
2 Turn-of-the-century Ethiopianists’ version of Psalm 68:31 came from the King James Bible.
3 Ethiopianists interpreted Psalm 68:31 metonymically as a commentary on all of Africa.
4 Hopkins, A Primer of Facts, 293.
5 This essay uses the term African American when discussing Ethiopianism because followers’ relationships to Africa figured so centrally into the movement. Ethiopianism encouraged all people of African descent, including members of the African diaspora whose African lineages had been erased by enslavement and colonization, to perceive Africa’s biblical history as part of their racial identity and to identify as part of a pan-African collective. The essay uses the term Black when referring to traditions and categories of experience that extend into the present day or are not United States-specific, in keeping with more recent methods of acknowledging the diasporic richness of African descended identities.
6 For more on the continuities between Of One Blood and Black Panther, Ethiopianism and Afrofuturism, see Pinto, “Wakanda and Black Feminist Political Imagination.”
7 Hopkins, Of One Blood, 139. Subsequent references to Of One Blood appear parenthetically in the text.
8 Sundquist, To Wake the Nations, 569; Nurhussein, “‘The Hand of Mysticism,’” 279.
9 Lloyd, “Introduction: Managing Race,” 12.
10 See Raboteau, “Fire in the Bones”; Glaude, Exodus!; Weisenfeld, New World A-Coming; Brooks, American Lazarus; Douglas, Black Bodies; Crawley, Blackpenecostal Breath; Dery, “Black to the Future”; Nelson, “Introduction: Future Texts”; Bould, “The Ships Landed Long Ago.”
11 See Tolliver, “The Racial Ends of History”; Robey, “Excavating Ethiopia”; Albanese, “Unraveling the Blood Lines.”
12 McGarry, The Ghosts of Futures Past, 5.
13 Fessenden, “The Secular,” 635.
14 Lloyd, “Introduction: Managing Race,” 7; Lloyd, Religion of the Field Negro, 12.
15 Gruesser, Black on Black, 8–10.
16 Literary scholars have identified only three other novels from the era that take up Ethiopianist ideals among their central motifs: Sutton E. Griggs’s Unfettered (1902) and The Hindered Hand (1905) and John E. Bruce’s The Black Sleuth (serialized in McGirt’s Magazine from 1907–09).
17 Luciano, Arranging Grief, 2.
18 Shipps, Mormonism, 71, 52.
19 See Gill, “The Uses of Genre,” 72–73. As Gill notes, although the boundaries of all genres are fluid and overlapping, speculative fiction is particularly diverse and difficult to define.
20 Lauren Goodlad suggests in “The Mad Men in the Attic,” 204, that the “regular intervals of waiting” involved in consuming serialized texts prolong and deepen audiences’ relationships to those texts. The texts call forth a “ritual” of “enjoying new installments followed by interludes of contemplation, discussion, and expectation.”
21 Jameson, “In Hyperspace,” n.p.
22 In “Unraveling the Blood Lines,” 234, Mary Grace Albanese argues that the “historical pain” enacted by slavery “accumulates, repeats, and compounds in the vehicular body of the formally free woman,” Dianthe.
23 Ammons, Conflicting Stories, 83.
24 Brooks argues in American Lazarus, 18, that early Black and indigenous authors were trained interpreters of American religious thought, not “merely dupes, apologists, or victims of missionary colonialism.”
25 Brueggemann, Prophetic Imagination, xvi.
26 Ibid., 39.
27 Ibid.
28 Brueggemann, Prophetic Imagination, xix.
29 Ibid., 39.
30 Gillman, Blood Talk, 44.
31 Maffly-Kipp and Lofton, “Introduction,” 4; Ernest, Liberation Historiography, 8.
32 Brooks, Lazarus, 12.
33 Maffly-Kipp and Lofton, “Introduction,” 10.
34 Ibid., 4–5.
35 Ibid., 13.
36 Nadia Nurhussein has argued convincingly in “The Hand of Mysticism,” 283, that Reuel’s pride is inextricably tied to his royal blood line or exclusive social status.
37 Lloyd, Religion of the Field Negro, 131.
38 Ibid., 132.
39 Lloyd, “Introduction: Managing Race,” 12.
40 Lloyd, Religion of the Field Negro, 134.
41 Ibid.
42 Lloyd, “Introduction: Managing Race,” 15.
43 Ibid.
44 Crawley, Blackpenecostal Breath, 25, 3, 11.
45 Ibid., 2–3.
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Christine Hedlin
Christine Hedlin is a 2021–22 Leading Edge Fellow through the American Council of Learned Societies. The program pairs scholars working on religion with nonprofit organizations serving public needs. Hedlin is writing and researching for PublicSource, a news organization based out of Pittsburgh. Previously she was a postdoctoral fellow and lecturer at Valparaiso University in Indiana. She received her PhD in English from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she held interdisciplinary fellowships in the humanities and neuro-humanities. Her research interests include nineteenth-century US literature, secular theory, US religious histories, and theories of the novel. Her essay “‘Was There Not Reason to Doubt?’: Wieland and Its Secular Age” has appeared in the Journal of American Studies. She is currently working on a book project entitled “Novel Faiths: How Postbellum Fiction Changed American Protestantism.”