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. Comments “Broadview’s edition of Pauline E. Hopkins’s Of One Blood identifies and contextualizes Hopkins’s wide-ranging and varied inspirations, sources, and allusions in a manner that helps readers trace and understand how she employed her craft to perform ‘historical recovery in the service of racial justice.’ Eurie Dahn and Brian Sweeney’s brilliant introduction and meticulously researched notes bring Hopkins’s voice to life and illuminate her position as one of the foremost African American intellectuals of the early twentieth century. The breadth and depth of primary contemporaneous sources that Dahn and Sweeney have assembled raise the bar for scholarly editions.” — Alisha Knight, Washington College “Dahn and Sweeney’s edition of Hopkins’s Of One Blood; or, The Hidden Self strongly grounds the novel in the context of its publication in the Colored American Magazine and of relevant contemporaneous texts and ideas. Its wealth of background and archival material and meticulous elucidation of many of Hopkins’s textual ‘borrowings’ provide multiple inroads for the study of the novel and a tremendous resource for students, instructors, and scholars.” — Julie Fiorelli, Loyola University Chicago
