"The Heart Of Africa" In The Shadow Of Early Zionism: Pauline Hopkins's Of One Blood

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

6-1-2025

Published In

American Quarterly

Abstract

This essay reads Telassar, the hidden Ethiopian city at the heart of Pauline Hopkins's psychological-historical-occult mystery Of One Blood (1902–3), in relation to a better-known contemporaneous project for the regeneration of a diasporic people: Zionism. I argue that in Of One Blood, Hopkins, whose wide-ranging writing made her a key figure of early twentieth-century Black literary history, reworks elements of George Eliot's 1876 novel Daniel Deronda, which famously ends with its protagonist discovering his Jewish identity and setting off to establish a Jewish state in Palestine. Yet even as she adapts Daniel Deronda, Hopkins strikingly rejects its Zionist logic. Demurring from Zionism's colonizing project and its equation between Jewish community and the construction of a nation-state, Hopkins depicts Telassar less as a homeland than as a battery that will galvanize connections between Black people around the world. By excavating the presence of Zionism in Of One Blood, we glimpse how Hopkins made Zionist ideology a foil over and against which to formulate a countervailing vision of Blackness, deepening the history of American anti-Zionism and indicating its generative political possibilities.

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