Book Description

The Afrofuturist plot of Pauline E. Hopkins’s Of One Blood (1902–03) weaves together a lost African city, bigamy, incest, murder, ancient prophecies, a thwarted leopard attack, racial passing, baby switching, mesmerism, and hauntings—both literal ghost hauntings and metaphoric hauntings from the sins of slavery. This Broadview Edition offers for the first time annotations and appendices that contextualize the novel in relation to magazines, Black feminism, travels to Africa, racial discourses, scientific and medical debates, and musical culture. The introduction to this edition surveys current debates about Hopkins’s textual borrowings from other contemporary writings, and the appendices provide extensive materials on the novel’s cultural, musical, and political contexts.