Utopia Is in the Blood: The Bodily Utopias of Martin R. Delany and Pauline Hopkins

"Utopia Is in the Blood: The Bodily Utopias of Martin R. Delany and Pauline Hopkins" considers how Delany and Hopkins employ the discourse of racial science in order to construct their own racial utopias. Focusing on Hopkins' Of One Blood and Delany's Principia of Ethnology, Reid argues that the genre of utopian writing enables both authors to refute contemporary scientific claims at the same time that they use the discourse of science to establish the utopian past (and, Hopkins argues, the future) of Ethiopia. Both Delany and Hopkins reconfigure nineteenth-century and turn-of-the-century American racial science in their ethnological texts and reveal an epistemological (re)vision of the scientific meaning(s) of blackness through a utopian understanding of "black" blood.