The Racial Ends of History: Melancholic Historical Practice in Pauline Hopkins’s Of One Blood

The essay positions the deployment of the Ethiopianist tradition of popular history in Of One Blood as a challenge to late nineteenthcentury white academic historians’ ideological support of black political exclusion. Reading the concern with lost origins as melancholic attachment, the essay argues that Hopkins’s novel subtly reveals the costs of framing history as a biological inheritance.