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

Abstract

An adventurous novel intermingling [literary] traditions such as historical romance, realism, allegory, fantasy, science fiction, and mystery (Horvitz 246), and also first African American novel featuring 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 with pride. Directed at an African American reading audience--the novel was serialized in Colored American Magazine from November 1902 to November 1903--and pointing to splendors of ancient African civilizations, novel is designed to provide African-Americans with a usable, livable past (Gruesser 75), a meant to support development of a healthy self-image, support struggle for equal rights, and lead to recognition in an environment hostile to or oblivious of and uninterested in accomplishments of Africans and their descendants. By delineating an impressive ancient Meroe, historical center of an ancient Kushite (or Nubian) 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 conditions of mere nature (qtd. in Magubane 24). But in doing so, Of One Blood runs into a number of problems, most ideologically dangerous of which is what could be named Darwinist trap: Making worth of a people dependent on technological and cultural accomplishments means following same quasi-Darwinian logic that served nineteenth- and twentieth-century imperialists to justify their ventures. Darwinist trap, or temptation to make material, technological accomplishments standard by which any people should be measured, allows technology and pseudo-scientific racism to come together as a world view: In middle of nineteenth century, steamers started carrying European cannons deep into interior of Asia and Africa. With that a new epoch in history of imperialism was introduced. This became a new epoch in 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 imperialism Europeans and their descendants aggressively pursued in Africa and Asia, as well as within their own territories. In Descent of Man, Charles Darwin reasons that without accumulation of capital arts [meaning chiefly mechanical arts--i.e., technology] could not progress; and it is chiefly through their power that civilised have extended, and are now everywhere extending their range, so as to take place of lower races (135). But as this quote exemplifies, technology, or 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, extermination of those unable militarily to resist it. As Darwin claims, The grade of their civilisation seems to be a most important element in success of competing .... It is a ... curious fact ... that savages did not formerly waste away before classical nations, as they do now before modern civilised nations (183). In Exterminate All Brutes, an impressive essay on pervasiveness of such justifications for genocide, Sven Lindqvist traces such sentiments, or at least their expression in natural sciences, back to Robert Knox, who, in his 1850 work Races of Man, announced that he felt disposed to think that there must be a physical and[,] consequently, a psychological inferiority in darker generally (qtd. in Lindqvist 125). Knox did not remain a lone voice for long. …