Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins

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. The 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 edition's introduction surveys current debates about Hopkins's textual borrowings of from other contemporary writings, and the appendices provide extensive materials on the novel's cultural, musical, and political contexts.

A rip-roaring lost worlds thriller written in the early 1900s by a pioneering black writer of black fiction. The story of Reuel is fuelled by love, betrayal and a heavy undertow of the supernatural; an impulsive medical student, he travels from Boston to Ethiopia, discovers a hidden city, ancient treasure and his own heritage. A new edition with a new introduction which considers Pauline Hopkin's development of the social and racial themes also explored by W. E. B. Du Bois. A new title in Foundations of Black Science Fiction series. Foundations of Black Science Fiction. New forewords and fresh introductions give long-overdue perspectives on significant, early Black proto-sci-fi and speculative fiction authors who wrote with natural justice and civil rights in their hearts, their voices reaching forward to the writers of today. The series foreword is by Dr Sandra Grayson.

Hagar’s Daughter is Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins’s first serial novel, published in the Boston-based Colored American Magazine (1901-1902). The novel itself features concealed and mistaken identities, dramatic revelations, and extraordinary plot twists. In Part 1, Maryland plantation heirs Hagar Sargeant and Ellis Enson fall in love, marry, and have a daughter. However, Ellis’s covetous younger brother, St. Clair, claims that Hagar is of mixed-race ancestry, putting her and her infant in peril. When Ellis is presumed to be dead, St. Clair sells Hagar and her child into slavery, and they presumably die when Hagar, in despair, leaps into the Potomac River with her daughter. This is the backdrop for Part 2 (set twenty years later), which includes a high-profile murder trial, an abduction plot, and a steady succession of surprises as the young Black maid Venus Johnson assumes male clothing to solve a series of mysteries that are both current and decades-old. The appendices to this Broadview edition feature advertising for the original publication, other writing by Hopkins and her contemporaries, and reviews that situate the work within the popular literature and political culture of its time.