Abstract
This paper explores the political imagination in Pauline Hopkins’ Of One Blood, or The Hidden Self (1902-1903). During the time that she wrote, the contrived delusions of racial purity provoke racial hysteria and the fear of racial passing. Hopkins converts this racial fantasy to arguing that all white and black in America are “of one blood.” Despite the taboo of miscegenation, Hopkins proposes the alternative polity and the citizen identity based on the hybridity of Mulatto/a. Hopkins encodes the public and political concerns in the very form of melodrama. Conflicts between virtue and vice in Of One Blood are separated from the racial legibility and become the psychological, historical, political issues, which negotiate the social tensions in post-Reconstruction years. The desire for transforming the political model of white supremacy is alluded to the family romance of replacing white paternal authority. With a new model of the mulatto/a fraternity, Of One Blood implies Hopkins’ radical imagination on political equality and the racial uplift in the Jim Crow era.
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