Pauline Hopkins's Of One Blood, Africa, and the "Darwinist trap".

An adventurous novel "intermingling [literary] traditions such as historical romance, realism, allegory, fantasy, science fiction, and mystery" (Horvitz 246), and also the first African American novel featuring "both an African setting and African characters" (Gruesser 77), Pauline Hopkins's Of One Blood attempts to counter turn-of-the century racism by looking toward Africa and its past with pride. Directed at an African American reading audience--the novel was serialized in the Colored American Magazine from November 1902 to November 1903--and pointing to the splendors of ancient African civilizations, the novel is designed to "provide African-Americans with a usable, livable past" (Gruesser 75), a past meant to support the development of a healthy self-image, support the struggle for equal rights, and lead to recognition in an environment hostile to or oblivious of and uninterested in the accomplishments of Africans and their descendants. By delineating an impressive ancient Meroe, the historical center of an ancient Kushite (or Nubian) civilization, Of One Blood reverses mainstream racist visions of Africa as representing, to quote Hegel and also to cite nineteenth-century European historians' widespread assessment, "the unhistorical and underdeveloped spirit, still involved in the conditions of mere nature" (qtd. in Magubane 24). But in doing so, Of One Blood runs into a number of problems, the most ideologically dangerous of which is what could be named the "Darwinist trap": Making the "worth" of a people dependent on technological and cultural accomplishments means following the same quasi-Darwinian logic that served nineteenth- and twentieth-century imperialists to "justify" their ventures.

The "Darwinist trap," or the temptation to make material, technological accomplishments the standard by which any people should be measured, allows technology and pseudo-scientific racism to come together as a world view:

In the middle of the nineteenth century, steamers started carrying European cannons deep into the interior of Asia and Africa. With that a new epoch in the history of imperialism was introduced. This became a new epoch in the history of racism. Too many Europeans interpreted military superiority as intellectual and even biological superiority. (Lindqvist 47)

Wealth and technological progress served both as means and rationalization of the imperialism Europeans and their descendants aggressively pursued in Africa and Asia, as well as within their own territories. In The Descent of Man, Charles Darwin reasons that "without the accumulation of capital the arts [meaning chiefly the mechanical arts--i.e., technology] could not progress; and it is chiefly through their power that the civilised races have extended, and are now everywhere extending their range, so as to take the place of the lower races" (135). But as this quote exemplifies, technology, or "civilization," which in nineteenth-century usage virtually always means "Western civilization," did, in Darwin's view, not merely entitle imperialists to territories, but even justified, implicitly, the extermination of those unable militarily to resist it. As Darwin claims, "The grade of their civilisation seems to be a most important element in the success of competing nations .... It is a ... curious fact ... that savages did not formerly waste away before the classical nations, as they do now before modern civilised nations" (183).

In "Exterminate All the Brutes", an impressive essay on the pervasiveness of such justifications for genocide, Sven Lindqvist traces such sentiments, or at least their expression in the natural sciences, back to Robert Knox, who, in his 1850 work The Races of Man, announced that he felt "disposed to think that there must be a physical and[,] consequently, a psychological inferiority in the darker races generally" (qtd. in Lindqvist 125). Knox did not remain a lone voice for long. Fourteen years after the publication of his work, the Anthropological Society in London "arranged a debate on the extinction of the lower races" (Lindqvist 131), and a few decades later, genocide had actually become a matter of pride. "Benjamin Kidd[,] in his hugely successful Social Evolution (1894) ... observes that the Anglo-Saxon has exterminated the less developed peoples even more effectively than other races have managed to. Driven by the inbuilt forces of his own civilization, the Anglo-Saxon goes to the foreign country to de velop its natural resources--and the consequences seem inescapable" (Lindqvist 138-39). The extent to which such pronouncements became mainstreamed is perhaps best exemplified by the fact that an English Prime Minister could utter them publicly, as Lord Salisbury did "in his famous speech in the Albert Hall on May 4, 1898: 'One can roughly divide the nations of the world into the living and the dying'" (qtd. in Lindqvist 140). In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, much of the European scientific establishment and popular opinion saw nothing objectionable in the idea of extermination when applied to "lower races." Even more than that, imperialism was often regarded as a natural process that would, in due time, extinguish all who stood in the way of European imperialism, a process legitimized by the idea of natural selection.

Such sentiments were not confined to Europe, but also held sway in the U.S., which, as an imperial power in its own right, fought a murderous war in the Philippines at the turn of the century--which Hopkins covered in the Colored American Magazine (Gillman 58)--and had, of course, its own internal colonialism. With respect to African Americans, such colonialism was expressed in "Black Code" legislation after the Civil War, in an unabated stream of lynchings, and in home-grown pseudo-science. "In Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro (1896), for example, Frederick L. Hoffman marshaled the latest 'scientific' evidence to support his claim that weakness and depravity were characteristic of Negro blood; racial uplift, he concluded, would ultimately prove futile" (Kassanoff 161). Hopkins's novel may be understood as a response to threatening racist ideologies, and its depiction of Africa as a refutation of them. As Kimberly Hebert has said, Hopkins's novel enacts a "struggle for definition, for somethin g to ground not just an individual identity but that of a people from within the 'belly of the beast'--from within nineteenth-century America's internal imperialism" (260). However, Hopkins's depiction of the city of Telassar, the descendant of Meroitic civilization and her idealized Africa, reveals the impact of imperialist thought. Her descriptions of Telassar not only focus insistently on wealth, power, and military prowess but also feature recurring comparisons with the industrialized world. These comparisons take place in a framework of superiority and inferiority, with Telassar featuring favorably in the comparison, establishing a "revised racial hierarchy drawn from the dominant evolutionary notion of 'race development' measured on the scale of civilization" (Gaines 436).

Of One Blood tells the tale of Reuel Briggs, a Harvard medical student who is passing to gain entrance into the medical profession. Unusually gifted in the paranormal realm, he is called to help when a beautiful African American singer, also capable of passing, falls into a coma. He rescues her and falls in love with her, as does his best friend Aubrey. Aubrey, seemingly white, rich, and well-connected, arranges for the impecunious Reuel to go on a potentially financially rewarding expedition to Ethiopia in search of ancient Meroe. Aubrey's generosity masks his determination to pursue Dianthe, the beautiful singer, who, after her coma, does not remember her African ancestry. In the meantime, he arranges for the murder of Reuel on his expedition. This does not succeed, however, and Reuel comes across the hidden city of Telassar, direct descendant of Meroitic glory, a magnificent civilization that has survived in seclusion into the present. There, he is received as the long sought-for descendant of the Meroitic royal line, affirms his African descent, and assumes the throne. Through his and the Meroitic priests' mesmeric capabilities, he learns of what is transpiring at home, of Aubrey's plot. Further, it is revealed that Reuel, Aubrey, and Dianthe are brothers and sister, all descended from Mira, a slave of the wealthy father of Aubrey, who did not know that Aubrey had been exchanged at birth by Mira for his "white" son. Dianthe is eventually killed by Aubrey because she refuses him, and Aubrey commits suicide, induced to do so by Reuel's mesmeric command. Reuel takes his grandmother, whom he has earlier re-united with, back to Telassar and begins his rule as king.

Hopkins's novel provides a veritable kaleidoscope of African American attitudes toward Africa at the turn of the century. Thoughts of emigration to Africa, attitudes shared with much of the white public, which saw Africa as a continent in need of "civilization" and Christianity, and Pan-Africanist ideas all had adherents and sometimes existed side by side, and Of One Blood represents all of these facets of African American opinion on Africa to some extent. Emigrationism finds expression in the novel's protagonist's and his family's ultimate move to Telassar. However, the civilization to which he becomes heir and king will also adopt the Christianity he introduces there, and he will spend "his days in teaching his people all that he has learned in years of contact with modern culture" (621). Such seemingly paradoxical positions were not confined to the novel. Sylvia M. Jacobs claims that, in the latter third of the nineteenth century, many middle-class African Americans "accepted the current ideology of taking up the 'white man's burden,' the mission civilisatrice, in Africa and praised the 'civilizing' influences of imperialism but also warned of the dangers of white domination of Africa" (10). At the same time, already the novel's title, in its ambiguity, sounds a Pan-African note, as it may be understood to affirm both the common origins of humankind and the connectedness of all peoples of African descent, not least through their posited common source in ancient Ethiopia (Cassidy 670). The end of the novel, in a gesture of solidarity, gives ominous warnings of the imperialist rumbling surrounding Ethiopia at the beginning of the twentieth century and ushers in the idea of a necessary defense of Africa. However, in its central assertion, Of One Blood goes beyond the views of Africa cited above: It focuses not only on the accomplishments of African, or specifically Kushite, civilization but depicts its superiority; most notably in arts, luxuries, and technology.

Why did Hopkins choose to locate her adventure plot in Meroe, seen as Ethiopia's predecessor, rather than in West Africa, a more likely point of reference for an African American audience with mainly West (or Central) African ancestors? For one, as Bernard Makhosezwe Magubane maintains, "To the emotions of masses of black churchgoers the Ethiopia of today is the wonderful Ethiopia of the Bible. In a religious sense it is far more real to them than the West African lands from which most of their ancestors came" (164). (1) In keeping with the novel's intent of fostering pride in African ancestry and refuting racist arguments of inferiority. Hopkins could not only point to the fact that Kushite civilization long preceded the rise of Europe, but in 1896, merely seven years before the novel's publication, an Ethiopian army had dealt a crushing defeat to the invading Italians, the most spectacular setback to European imperialism of its time. (2) This Ethiopian triumph "became a kind of folk story ... passed among i ndividuals within the black community in beauty parlors and barber shops, at church congregations ... and in family circles" (Jacobs 194). Possibly, this event might have served as an inspiration for Hopkins's plot device of having ancient Meroitic power and splendor survive into the twentieth century, a device that, like the Ethiopian military victory which would still have reverberated in the minds of her readers, allows her to point to contemporaneous African accomplishments as well as to ancient ones. Moving from the symbolic to the biological, Hopkins literalizes the connection between Ethiopia and African America by having a British scholar on the expedition to Meroe explain to an incredulous Anglo-American that" 'undoubtedly your Afro-Americans are a branch of the wonderful and mysterious Ethiopians who had a prehistoric existence of magnificence, the full record of which is lost in obscurity'" (532). Just in case any readers missed the parallelism the novel constructs, the Colored American Magazine ga ve some editorial help: At the same time that the magazine ran Of One Blood, it also published a non-fiction serial entitled "Ethiopians of the Twentieth Century" (Carby 157-58). Hopkins's novel and Ethiopian battlefield success forward Meroitic power into the present.

At the turn of the century, as now, the name Ethiopia would have been understood to refer to the northeastern African country we still associate with the word, also (formerly) known as Abyssinia. Classical writers at times used the name to refer to a region located in today's southern Egypt and in the Sudan. In the Bible, or in its English version, the name referred to Africa in general. By locating her plot in present-day Ethiopia, Hopkins could thus utilize the appeal of an un-colonized Christian (Coptic) kingdom with an ancient history and a distinguished military record and also tap into "Ethiopianism," an ideology which used Psalms 68:31 as its foundational document: "Princes shall come out of Egypt, [and] Ethiopia shall soon stretch forth her hands to God." The verse was often interpreted to predict a future of glory for Africans and people of African descent and "acquired a combined spiritual and political significance that was repeatedly summed up by African and African American leaders from the 1890s through the 1920s. The magic of Ethiopia as a symbolic homeland ... derived principally at the turn of the century from the idealized history of Ethiopia itself..." (Sundquist 553-54). In U.S. Ethiopianism, African Americans were often seen as the leaders of the coming redemption of Africa, exactly as outlined by Hopkins's novel. This redemption often assumed a Christianizing and "civilizing" mission on the part of African Americans, as noted above, so that Ethiopianism often became mired in a paradox: On the one hand, it advocated racial pride and racialism (the common fate and implicit solidarity of all people of African descent); on the other hand, it saw Africa as needy of change on Western, even imperialist, terms (Sundquist 554ff.). The paradoxes of Ethiopianism turn out to be the paradoxes of Hopkins's novel, informed by Darwinism and the notion of progress.

When Reuel, at the end of his expedition, chances upon the hidden city of Tessalar, not only is he not proud of his African ancestry but, giving in to the economic and social realities of white supremacy, he has also denied it. Ai, Telassar's High Priest and Prime Minister, questions Reuel whether it is true that in the U.S." 'the Ethiopian ... is counted less than other mortals,'" and Reuel assents, explaining that" 'it is a deep disgrace to have within the veins even one drop of the blood you seem so proud of possessing'" (560). Reuel refers to the so-called "one-drop rule," of course, the notion that even the minutest trace of African ancestry is sufficient for one's categorization as black (Davis 5). The novel appears to accept the logic of this convention, as all the distant descendants of Meroitic royalty--Reuel, his brother Aubrey, and his sister Dianthe--appear white and can pass for white, yet are counted as African. Reuel, indeed, has passed, as Ai understands, to escape the social meaning assigned to African descent in his society. In Telassar, however, the one-drop rule is reversed. What has been a social liability becomes an asset: Reuel's distant African descent now entitles him to a throne.

The symbolic implications of the plot are clear enough: African ancestry should be regarded with pride and acknowledged with enthusiasm, not hidden in shame. Reuel understands the lesson, thinking "that he had played the coward's part in hiding his origin" (560). Hopkins takes a strongly assertive position here, one consistent with her work elsewhere: On the editorial staff of the Colored American Magazine, she contributed such serials as "Famous Men of the Negro Race" and "Famous Women of the Negro Race" (Carby 123). Hopkins's work, whether fictional or journalistic, hoped to foster pride in African ancestry. But her position in Of One Blood is deeply implicated in a racial essentialism that also underwrites the one-drop rule, in either of its manifestations. Reuel's African ancestry asserts dominant power over his being, despite amalgamation and temporal distance. His African ancestry is also associated with "occult powers," an association dangerously close to contemporaneous primitivist conceptualizations of Africa, as Cynthia Schrager notes (321), but also one of the novel's many "reversal[s] of a negative into a positive image" (Wallinger 211). Hopkins validates here what has been seen, in the traditions of hoodoo and conjuring, as a specifically African (American) mode of knowing, a "distinctively African understanding of the mind's nature" (Otten 240). As Reuel recalls, "It was a tradition among those who had known him in childhood that he was descended from a race of African kings. He remembered his mother well. From her he had inherited his mysticism and his occult powers. The nature of the mystic within him was, then, but a dreamlike devotion to the spirit that had swayed his ancestors; it was the shadow of Ethiopia's power" (558). Hopkins literalizes here what Du Bois talks of in reference to world history: "The shadow of a mighty Negro past flits through the tale of Ethiopia the Shadowy and of Egypt the Sphinx" (Du Bois, Souls 3). For Hopkins, the shadow has psychic-physical manifestations; the rule o f hypo-descent is affirmed, only now African ancestry is shown as genetically superior, more powerful, and more desirable.

This runs counter to some passages that reveal an assimilated aesthetic, typical of all of Hopkins's novels, which feature light-skinned female heroines (Lewis 616). Hazel Carby has stressed that Hopkins's use of light-skinned characters has a strategic function: "Her use of mulatto figures engaged with the discourse of social Darwinism, undermining the tenets of 'pure blood' and 'pure race' as mythological, and implicitly exposed the absurdity of theories of the total separation of the races" (140). At the same time, however, her novel employs the notion of "racial purity" when it comes to Meroitic civilization. Moreover, the novel's description of Reuel, to name just one example, praising his "nose [as] the aristocratic feature, although nearly spoiled by broad nostrils" (443), reveals that Eurocentric aesthetics are not merely employed strategically but are also internalized. As Kimberly Hebert notes, "Her creation of racially diluted, highly miscegenated 'black' characters both in Europe and Africa reflec ts her inextricable dependence on a European paradigm for a conceptualization of self-identity" (260). This reliance on European paradigms also finds expression in the novel's use of argumentative lines based on a Darwinist understanding of history.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, "There was a generally accepted correlation between color and civilization," as George W. Stocking, Jr., explains. He outlines the turn-of-the-century Darwinist understanding of history with reference "to the linkage of race and civilization in an evolutionary framework" as follows:

Social evolution was a process by which a multiplicity of human groups developed along the lines that moved in general toward the social and cultural forms of Western Europe. Along the way different groups had diverged, regressed, stood still, and even died out. ... The progress of the "lower races" had been retarded or even stopped, but the general level had always advanced as the cultural innovations of the "superior" or "progressive" races were diffused through much of the world. Leadership, as Lewis Henry Morgan argued, had often changed hands, but "from the middle period of barbarism, however, the Aryan and Semitic families seem fairly to represent the central threads of this progress, which in the period of civilization has been gradually assumed by the Aryan family alone." (Stocking 14)

Such an understanding of history wrote Africa entirely out of the record, and its teleology left no place for anyone but Europeans. It is against this background that Hopkins asserts that not only Egyptian but also Babylonian royalty was African as well, and insists on the "racial purity" of Meroitic Kushite civilization: "'And Meroe, the greatest city of them all, pure-blooded Ethiopian'" (556). While clearly affected by the eugenic climate of her day, in all likelihood Hopkins takes this stance to counter the notion that "Anglo-Saxon blood" is responsible for technological and administrative accomplishments, a position taken by apologists for slavery and social Darwinists, (3) and a corner she has backed herself into by apparently subscribing to Eurocentric aesthetics. Thus, the African origin of all ancient civilizations needs to be emphasized so the overall trajectory of her argument and purpose does not collapse. In a radical move for her time, Hopkins "boldly locates the origins of western culture in Af rica" (Ammons 83).

But while Hopkins's aesthetics stand in opposition to the role she ascribes to African ancestry in terms of its genetic and psychological importance, the anteriority and superiority of Meroan civilization clearly sound a dominant note in the novel. Eric Sundquist has commented on this tension:

In Hopkins's syncretic conception, the race leader ... is distinctly assimilated and bourgeois (and "white"). At the same time, he is infused with the racial survivals of ancient Africa, and his career leads him back into a mystical transhistorical dimension where he can assume his rightful place in the lineage of deified Ethiopian kings. To go "back to Africa" in Hopkins's patently escapist fiction meant to flee the brutality and racism of American history in favor of a lost history of great wealth, material achievement, and intellectual superiority. (569)

While, when in need of escape, it is common to imagine a place that is the opposite of the place one wishes to escape from, this very inversion may pose problems of its own. Hopkins wishes to restore Africa to its rightful historical stature, but she also wants to change the stature of African lineage in the U.S., not least in the psychology and world view of African Americans. This world view, however, like that of the rest of U.S. American society in particular and of the Western world in general, was deeply informed by Darwinism, especially among the educated classes. Thus, the paradox: Of One Blood reflects a Darwinist outlook on history at the same time that it opposes and undermines a racism deeply informed by Darwinism.

One may notice that Reuel only fully decides to embrace his African heritage once this heritage assures him an elevated social and economic position. This must be read allegorically, of course, as has already been mentioned: The African past, as presented in racist historiography and popular media, has been shrouded in an imagery of primitivism and savagery, or even denied altogether. As W. E. B. Du Bois remarked in The World and Africa, "Since the rise of the sugar empire and the resultant cotton kingdom, there has been a consistent effort to rationalize Negro slavery by omitting Africa from world history" (vii), accompanied by an "all-pervading desire to inculcate disdain for everything black" (Souls 7). Such denials or misrepresentations led African Americans to feel at best ambiguous about their ancestral link to the continent. Hopkins's novel, to a significant extent, deals with the psychological role African ancestry plays for African Americans. (4) In psychological terms, Hopkins assumes that, if the A frican past comes to be seen in terms of power, wealth, technological prowess, and organizational sophistication, such an ancestry and past will cause African Americans to embrace Africa and simultaneously elevate African American cultural self-esteem. This is an assumption she shared with Du Bois and a number of earlier writers on Africa. (5)

Hopkins herself published a Primer of Facts Pertaining to the Early Greatness of the African Race in 1905, two years after Of One Blood, so her fictional efforts supported work of African American intelligentsia intended to counter the racism developing side-by-side and within the Darwinist evolutionary paradigm. The U.S. context for this was the hostile environment of the post-Reconstruction era--one might think here of the affirmation of the "separate but equal" doctrine of Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, or the unbroken string of lynchings across the South in the late decades of the nineteenth and the early decades of the twentieth century. The novel serves as "a reservoir of ideas to spur new conceptualizations of race consciousness" (Sundquist 567), conceptualizations affirmative in nature and based on a Pan-African consciousness, making slavery not the defining element of African American history but rather a painful aberration in the larger story of African civilization.

However, there is also a disturbing utilitarianism to a turn of the plot that has Reuel Briggs cross the royal bridge to his African ancestry only when he stands to gain so much from it. After all, Reuel has also decided to hide his (partial) African ancestry in order to be able to pursue his medical studies, a potential pathway to prominence and wealth. Now that Africanness can offer that, he chooses African ancestry. The novel renders his thoughts on the impending union with Queen Candace which will seal his ascension to the throne: "All the dreams of wealth and ambition that had haunted the feverish existence by the winding Charles, that had haunted his days of obscure poverty in the halls of Harvard, were about to be realized" (570). Of One Blood runs into some difficulties here: African American passing novels generally reject passing and align it with selfishness and materialism. A prominent example preceding Hopkins's novel is Frances E. W. Harper's Iola Leroy (1892), which has its protagonist reject t he possibility of passing in favor of a life in the service of "racial uplift," to use the contemporaneous terminology. The path of whiteness thus comes to be associated with materialism, with a "mess of pottage," as James Weldon Johnson's Autobiography of an ExColoured Man (1912) famously has it, and blackness with altruism and idealism. Thus, choosing African ancestry is presented as the better moral choice. The choice that Hopkins offers Reuel, however, differs importantly from the one Harper offers Iola in her novel. Since voluntary association with an exploited and oppressed group has no material benefits, Harper only holds out moral and spiritual values for making this choice. The circumstances of Reuel's choice make it a less idealistic and a more self-interested one and blur the distinction between materialistic whiteness and altruistic blackness, as he stands to gain so much by his choice. In other words, should African ancestry only be chosen when it offers glory and splendor?

On a first tour of the hidden city, Reuel is impressed by what he sees: "Used as he was to the improvements and luxuries of life in the modern Athens, he could but acknowledge them as poor beside the combination of Oriental and ancient luxury that he now enjoyed. Was ever man more gorgeously housed than this?" (548). Presumably, "the modern Athens" refers to Boston, Reuel's place of residence. Boston cannot live up to the standards of Telassar, where everything is made from marble, gold, silk, and jewels, and where gigantic statues, palaces, and public baths are located in a paradisiacal, garden-like setting. Ai, Telassar's Prime Minister, informs Reuel that" 'here in Telassar are preserved specimens of the highest attainments the world knew in ancient days. They tell me that in many things your modern world is yet in its infancy'" (551). Not only does the modern world not match the accomplishments of Telassar, but what it has achieved it owes to that ancient civilization. Ai gives Reuel a history lesson: "'. .. from Ethiopia came all the arts and cunning inventions that make your modern glory. At our feet the mightiest nations have worshipped, paying homage to our kings, and all nations have sought the honor of alliance with our royal families because of our strength, grandeur, riches and wisdom'" (560). While its rhetoric is biblical in its overtones, the passage focuses on the very qualities imperialist powers prided (and pride) themselves of: superiority both technological and intellectual, and military prowess, resulting in an almost god-like ascendancy, causing others to "worship" one's nation--at least that is how imperialist nations prefer to perceive their relationship to others.

It is both striking and consistent with Hopkins's ideological goals how often the novel reverts to comparative assessments of Telassar and industrialized nations. On Reuel's guided tour of Telassar, Ai describes the decorations of a great temple, of which he says that the "'sages have seen nothing equal to it in the outer world'":

"The decorations of the hall are prepared natural flowers; that is, floral garlands are subjected to the fumes of the crystal material covering them like a film and preserving their natural appearance. This is a process handed down from the earliest days of Ethiopian greatness. I am told that the modem world has not yet solved this simple process," he said, with a gentle smile of ridicule. (561-62)

Here, even the condescension apparent in the passages from Darwin's Descent of Man is replicated, though tempered by gentleness. Ai appears amazed that the "modem world" has not been capable of replicating even Telassar's "simplest" inventions, implicitly doubting the intellectual capacities of the modem world's citizens. The novel tangles itself in some contradictions here, since Telassar is also quite willing to receive its king from that self-same modem world, and even to learn from him. But for the purposes of this analysis, what is noticeable is the extent to which Of One Blood leans on Darwinist rhetoric. When Al informs Reuel of the source of his psychic powers, he makes a telling comparison: "'Of a truth thou art a legitimate son of Ethiopia. Thou growest the fruits of wisdom. Descendant of the wise Chaldeans, still powerful to a degree undreamed of by the pigmies of this puny age, you look incredulous, but what I tell you is the solemn truth'" (572). In comparing Reuel favorably to "the pigmies of th is puny age," Hopkins adopts a metaphor from the same Darwinist rhetorical tradition that has conspired against Africans, even to the degree that she uses an African people as a metaphor to express the idea of underdevelopment and inferiority.

The Darwinist hierarchical thinking underlying such passages is based on the novel's apparent assumption that "we are all of one blood ... yet God decrees that some races rule others, a state of affairs that is at once repudiated as the present ascendancy of the white race and recuperated as a utopian elevation of African peoples," in Susan Gillman's words (66). But while Gillman also claims that "Hopkins' point is not simply to challenge the mythology of European superiority nor to reverse the traditional hierarchy of higher and lower races" (72), it is difficult to see the novel's insistent comparisons in any other light. (6) As both Thomas Otten and Susan Giliman show, paranormal abilities connect to African heritage throughout the novel-all of Mira's descendants possess mesmeric powers. Giliman thus comes to the conclusion that the "novel represents the unconscious, operating through both Reuel's 'blood' inheritance and the occult sciences he studies in Meroe and Cambridge, as racially evolutive" (74). In challenging racist evolutionary science, then, Hopkins gets caught in the meshes of its Darwinist hierarchical logic.

When Reuel witnesses a demonstration of a technique that allows the initiated in Telassar to know past, present, and future, Hopkins reveals the intended target of her persistent comparisons: "What would the professors of Harvard have said to this, he asked himself. In the heart of Africa was a knowledge of science that all the wealth and learning of modem times could not emulate" (576). A Bostonian herself, Hopkins would have been likely to perceive Harvard as the seat of the kind of learning her novel means to oppose, a choice illustrating her African American perspective, since London, Paris, or Berlin would have made for equally suitable or maybe more appropriate targets, given her focus on Africa. However, the choice of Harvard here also reminds one that the novel's preoccupation is the image of Africa in the U.S. in general, and among African Americans in particular. Science is chosen here as the basis of comparison between Telassar and Harvard because it is a basis Harvard would have to accept. But Hop kins strikes a dangerous bargain here: In accepting and adopting the standard by which people and civilizations supposedly are to be measured, she subverts her own intentions.

Hazel Carby emphasizes that the "history that Hopkins wanted to rewrite and reclaim was a history that could challenge theories of black inferiority .... she believed that a transformation of racist ideas, attitudes, and ideologies were the prerequisite of a subsequent transformation in the social relations between blacks and whites" (161). One argumentative trajectory in Of One Blood aims at the establishment of equality--social, historical, and biological. Nothing clarifies this better than the tangled kinship relationships the plot relies on, which underline the futility of "race" as an indicator of anything. However, another trajectory relies on a pseudo-scientific rhetorical tradition that has been used in the attempt to rationalize exploitation, colonization, and even extermination of peoples defined as "inferior." Such rationalizations often relied on defining "civilization" in materialist terms, focusing on technology. inventions, and military prowess. In leaning heavily on such a line of argumentatio n, Hopkins appears to accept its basis: that the level of material and scientific accomplishments of a people somehow defines their relative "worth" and the respect accorded them. (7) African Americans, then, should be proud of African ancestry because Africans, too, have excelled in the terms spelled out by imperialists, have once been imperialists themselves, or are superior in attainments and potential. Adopting this Darwinist logic, however, means to enter an ideological arms race that is bound to end up in a vicious cycle: Each new technological attainment, or each new re-discovery of ancient splendor, each new skeleton found anywhere becomes embroiled in the struggle for anteriority or superiority.

My point here is not to question the accomplishments of Hopkins's novel. As Carol Allen has pointed out, Of One Blood "restores a great East African State to history's annals; deconstructs the imperialist adventure tales made popular by Rider Haggard ... [and] dismisses the American plantation genre as outmoded and amoral" (41). However, subscribing to Darwinist logic undermines any attempt at a sustained critique of imperialism and racism, and by adopting Darwinist rhetoric, Hopkins's Of One Blood endangers the very project she wishes to accomplish. What Hopkins adopts here is a "logic of inclusion," but here this means inclusion into a Darwinist and imperialist paradigm. The paradigm itself is not challenged, but inclusion is sought.

Hopkins can hardly be blamed for this since, to this day, the Darwinist paradigm and its corollary, the ideology of progress, hold almost unquestioned sway. One may see this as an example of the consciousness of a society being the consciousness of its ruling class, using the Marxian formulation, and adding "race" to "class." The side effects of attempting to operate within a paradigm established in large measure in order to subjugate can still be seen today, when individuals with very faint African bloodlines or participants in imperialist projects are celebrated in the framework of African American history, a history that is-at least in its mainstream manifestations during Black History Month and in African American popular culture--sometimes conceived of in terms of an accompanying volume to the history of imperialism. (8) The continued pointing out of African and African American accomplishment, no matter to what end it lent itself, can be understood against the continued background of denial and silence about the crucial role African-descent people have played in world history in general and in the history of Western civilization in particular, but the logic of inclusion and its framework, the Darwinist paradigm, may also trick one into assenting to an imperialist logic. Competing in terms of this paradigm then becomes more important than what it actually accomplishes. Power and prowess may then be celebrated as ends unto themselves. However, one encounters this Darwinist trap in all quasi-colonial situations, of course, and it is hardly confined to an African American context. (9)

Hopkins's novel, then, bears witness to the interiorization of a dominant ideology, but also to her determined struggle to ameliorate some of the most deleterious psychological side effects of that ideology. Hopkins can be applauded for her early efforts to undermine imperialist logic, and her novel may also serve as a warning to us who are still so deeply influenced by it. Carter G. Woodson indicated a direction a critique of colonialism might take which, I believe, may enable a more fundamental and far-reaching critique and which, implicitly, opposes a Darwinist interpretation of history and culture:

The war lords have done good only accidentally or incidentally while seeking to do evil. The movements which have ameliorated the condition of humanity and stimulated progress have been inaugurated by men of thought in lifting their fellows out of drudgery unto ease and comfort, out of selfishness unto altruism. The Negro may well rejoice that his hands, unlike those of his oppressors, are not stained with so much blood extracted by brute force. Real history is not the record of the successes and disappointments, the vices, the follies, and the quarrels of those who engage in contention for power. (qtd. in Hayes 7)

An ideology that does not replicate the values that serve to rationalize oppression is more likely to be able to envision alternative modes of structuring how we live together than a "Darwinist" outlook on history and culture that reinscribes the latter's preoccupation with notions of "inferiority" and "superiority."

Notes

(1.) As Sylvia M. Jacobs has said, "Ethiopia was a symbol of black independence and successful black self-government years before Menelik's victory over Italy. Blacks had long drawn inspiration from classical and modern Ethiopia as a symbol of black power and pride. [Such pride] found expression In the narratives, songs, and folklore of southern slaves. Antebellum blacks were...exposed to the name of Ethiopia in their Bibles in the prophecy, 'Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God.' This quotation was well known among free blacks and slaves in pre-Civil War America and was viewed as a prediction that Ethiopia, used as a synonym for the whole African continent, would once again rise to the level of its former greatness during ancient times. Black churches were established during this period with names such as Abyssinia, Ethiopian, and Kush" (192-93).

(2.) For a description of these events, see Thomas Pakenham's The Scramble for Africa (ch. 26, 470-86), a book that, while lapsing into admiration of imperialist conquerors and falling into racist phraseology at times, provides detailed information on both European invasions and resistance to them.

(3.) Vashti Crutcher Lewis mentions "20th-century sociologist Edward R. Reuter (1918), who attempted to prove the Anglo-Saxon bloodline of every person of African descent who had graduated from college in this country" (617).

(4.) The novel's emphasis on psychology has been discussed by a number of critics. Deborah Horvitz points out that "Mira warns her son and daughter to recover their African identities through their 'forgotten' memories, which underlie almost every, if not every, aspect of their stories" (246). Both Cynthia Schrager and Thomas Otten have written impressively on the novel's investment in the psychological sciences of its time.

(5.) According to Eric Sundquist, "Arguments about the priority of black African civilizations dated in the United States from the first colonization movement in the early nineteenth century, and over the subsequent decades Henry Highland Garnet, James W. C. Pennington, Frederick Douglass, and Martin Delany among others appealed to the writings of Homer, Herodotus, and other classical writers to argue that Egypt and Ethiopia had been great and progressive civilizations--and that they had been Negro" (567).

(6.) Susan Gillman is not alone in avoiding the conclusion that the logic of Hopkins's Darwinist rhetoric ultimately forces her to embrace the idea of racial superiority. Hanna Wallinger has written that "the voyage into the heart of Africa is used to reveal a splendid richness and superior intellect that make the Negro people the equals of white people" (213). But how does "superior intellect" make for "equality"?

(7.) Kevin Gaines's essay "Black Americans' Racial Uplift Ideology as 'Civilizing Mission'" shares some of the concerns of my essay. Gaines concludes that "the preoccupation of many black leaders with racial uplift ideology as a sign of respectability restricted possibilities for effective resistance and constituted a measure of ideological collusion with discriminatory ideologies and practices.... The racialized terms of civilization upon which racial uplift ideology rested marked a compromised, metaracist antiracism that, needless to say, was not incompatible with the aims of empire or white domination in the South" (450). But while Gaines reaches a conclusion similar to mine, my essay focuses much more specifically on the Darwinist strain in Hopkins's novelistic argument and on the traces it leaves not only in her plot construction but also in the choice of her metaphors and diction. In addition, Gaines's enlightening and excellent essay, which has much of interest to say about the political context of Hop kins's writing, focuses more on Hopkins's magazine articles and only treats Of One Blood in passing.

(8.) To give just two examples: A Journey into 365 Days of Black History, a 2000 calendar, devotes one entry to Queen Charlotte of England (1744-1818) and tells us that "investigation indicates Queen Charlotte descended directly from Margarita de Castro y Sousa, a black member of the Portuguese Royal House" (Catherine). However, it appears at least 300 years intervened between Queen Charlotte and her closest African ancestor, making her African ancestry faint indeed. Nor is there evidence cited that her actions were beneficial to people of African ancestry. England abolished the slave trade while she was queen (however, the calendar neither mentions this nor claims that she had any hand in the decision), but it continued Caribbean slavery until the 1830s. In any case, England was the foremost imperial power of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and it appears this is the reason that the queen's African ancestry is of interest. In an African American context, the Buffalo Soldiers, African American troops who fought for the U.S. Army after the Civil War to conquer Native American lands, are sometimes held up as praiseworthy examples of African American heroism. George Duke's CD Illusions, for example, in a voice lead-in for the song "Buffalo Soldiers," explains: "Officially, they were the ninth and tenth cavalry regiments, but to those who knew them best, they were known with fear and respect as the 'Buffalo Soldiers'" (Duke). Who knew them best? It seems the text refers to Native Americans. But one might ask whether one colonized people's fear of another sent to subdue and destroy them in the service of the colonizer is cause for pride.

(9.) Pointing to Margaret Thatcher or Indira Ghandi as examples of women's empowerment is similarly problematic.

Works Cited

Allen, Carol. Black Women Intellectuals: Strategies of Nation, Family, and Neighborhood in the Works of Pauline Hopkins, Jessie Fauset, and Marita Bonner. New York: Garland, 1998.

Ammons, Elizabeth. Conflicting Stories: American Women Writers at the Turn into the Twentieth Century. New York: Oxford UP, 1991.

Carby, Hazel V. Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist. New York: Oxford UP, 1987.

Cassidy, Thomas. "Contending Contexts: Pauline Hopkins's Contending Forces." African American Review 32 (1998): 661-72.

Catherine, Theodore G. A Journey into 365 Days of Black History. 2000 Calendar. Rohnert Park, CA: Pomegranate Communications, 1999.

Darwin, Charles. The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. New York: Appleton, 1877.

Davis, F. James. Who Is Black?: One Nation's Definition. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1993.

Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. 1903. New York: Bantam, 1989.

--. The World and Africa: An Inquiry into the Part Which Africa Has Played in World History. New York: International, 1972.

Duke, George. Illusions. Warner Bros. Records, 1995.

Gaines, Kevin. "Black Americans' Racial Uplift Ideology as 'Civilizing Mission.'" Cultures of United States Imperialism. Ed. Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease. Durham: Duke UP, 1993. 433-55.

Gillman, Susan. "Pauline Hopkins and the Occult: African-American Revisions of Nineteenth-Century Sciences." American Literary History 8.1 (1996): 57-82.

Gruesser, John Cullen. "Pauline Hopkins' Of One Blood: Creating an Afrocentric Fantasy for a Black Middle Class Audience." Modes of the Fantastic: Selected Essays from the Twelfth International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts. Ed. Robert A. Latham and Robert A. Collins. Westport: Greenwood, 1991. 74-83.

Harper, Frances E. W. Ioia Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted. 1892. Boston: Beacon P, 1987.

Hayes, Floyd W., III, ed. A Turbulent Voyage: Readings in African American Studies. San Diego: Collegiate P, 1992.

Hebert, Kimberly G. "Uncovering Codes/(Re)Covering Africa: Pauline Hopkins' Linguistic Journey to a Hidden Self." Ngugi wa Thiong'o: Texts and Contexts. Ed. Charles Cantalupo. Trenton: Africa World P, 1995. 259-70.

Hopkins, Pauline E. Of One Blood; Or, the Hidden Self. 1902-03. The Magazine Novels of Pauline E. Hopkins. Ed. Hazel V. Carby. New York: Oxford UP, 1996. 439-621.

Horvitz, Deborah. "Hysteria and Trauma in Pauline Hopkins's Of One Blood; Or, the Hidden Self." African American Review 33 (1999): 245.60.

Jacobs, Sylvia M. The African Nexus. Black American Perspectives on the European Partitioning of Africa, 1880-1920. Westport Greenwood, 1981.

Johnson, James Weldon. The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man. 1912. New York: Vintage, 1989.

Kassanoff, Jennie A. "'Fate Has Linked Us Together': Blood, Gender, and the Politics of Representation in Pauline Hopkins's Of One Blood." The Unruly Voice: Rediscovering Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins. Ed. John Cullen Gruesser. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1996. 158-81.

Lewis, Vashti Crutcher. "Worldview and the Use of the Near-White Heroine in Pauline Hopkins' Contending Forces." Journal of Black Studies 28 (1998): 616-27.

Lindqvist, Sven. "Exterminate All the Brutes". Trans. Joan Tate. New York: New P, 1996.

Magubane, Bernard Makhosezwe. The Ties that Bind: African American Consciousness of Africa. Trenton: Africa World P, 1989.

Otten, Thomas J. "Pauline Hopkins and the Hidden Self of Race." English Literary History 59 (1992): 227-56.

Pakenham, Thomas. The Scramble for Africa: White Man's Conquest of the Dark Continent from 1876 to 1912. New York: Avon, 1992.

Schrager, Cynthia. "Pauline Hopkins and William James: The New Psychology and the Politics of Race." Female Subjects in Black and White: Race, Psychoanalysis, Feminism. Ed. Elizabeth Abel, Barbara Christian, and Helene Moglen. Berkeley: U of California P, 1997. 307-29.

Stocking, George W., Jr. "The Turn-of-the-Century Concept of Race." Modernism/Modernity 1.1 (1994): 4-16.

Sundquist, Eric J. To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993.

Wallinger, Hanna. "Voyage into the Heart of Africa: Pauline Hopkins and Of One Blood" Black Imagination and the Middle Passage. Ed. Maria Diedrich, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Carl Pedersen. New York: Oxford UP, 1999. 203-14.

Martin Japtok teaches at West Virginia State College. He is the editor of Women Writers from Africa, the Caribbean, and the U. S.: A Postcolonial Perspective (Africa World P, forthcoming), and has just finished a manuscript entitled Growing Up Ethnic: African American and Jewish American Coming-of-Age Stories, Nationalism, and the Bildungsroman. He has also published essays in AAR, MELUS, Southern Literary, Journal, JOUVERT, and Literature and Medicine.