"'Nothing but a feeling of brotherhood': the Interracial Question and the Return to Africa in Pauline Hopkins's Of One Blood"

During the last twenty years Pauline Hopkins’s novel Of One Blood: Or, the Hidden Self (1903) has turned out to be one of the most debated text of early twentieth-century African American literature. In my essay I engage in a close reading of the novel in order to further investigate the method of characterization in relation to the ideological stances of the author. While most recent criticism has focused on Hopkins’ portrayal of male/female and/or the female/female relations in the novel, my study analyzes the dynamics among the four chief male characters and possibly proposes a fresher understanding of the race relations in the text. On the one hand, my study questions those pessimistic interpretations which tend to overlook any significant positive interracial relations in the story. On the other hand it provides new elements to reassess the supposed influence of late nineteenth/early twentieth-century imperialist rhetoric over Hopkins’ fiction, which has been already suggested by other scholars. My research on the method of characterization also calls attention to Hopkins’s creative handling of the figure of the mulatto and puts a new emphasis on her ability of representing black women’s pivotal role in the construction of black identity in America.