ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how the intersection of gender and transnationalism in Pauline Hopkins’s 1902–1903 serialized novel, Of One Blood, or the Hidden Self devolves into an effigy of whiteness as embodiment of ideal womanhood. Imagining blackness as a product of trans-Atlantic and trans-African networks, this work exemplifies Hopkins’s significance as an early conscious voice of black transnationalism in African American fiction. Despite the novel’s bold nineteenth-century assertion of blackness as site of civilization’s origins and in its pre-twentieth-century narrative of Ethiopianism, Hopkins seems unable to imagine the black heroic in the form of an unambiguous black female body. This paradoxical disjunction of race and womanhood ultimately compromises the novel’s black transnationalist message.
