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  • Excavating Ethiopia: Biblical Archaeology in Pauline Hopkins’s Of One Blood
  • Molly K. Robey (bio)

Pauline Hopkins’s novel Of One Blood, published serially between November 1902 and November 1903 in the Colored American Magazine, depicts an archaeological expedition that aims to excavate the ancient cultural capital of Meroe, Ethiopia. This endeavor promises to make its participants wealthy as well as to recover lost African histories. As the expedition reaches East Africa, one of the novel’s white archeologists, Charlie Vance, gives voice to commonplace western perceptions of Africa:

It was not a simple thing to come all these thousand of miles to look at a pile of old ruins that promised nothing of interest to him after all. This was what he had come for—the desolation of an African desert, and the companionship of human fossils and savage beasts of prey. The loneliness made him shiver. It was a desolation that doubled desolateness, because his healthy American organization missed the march of progress attested by the sound of hammers on unfinished buildings that told of a busy future and cosy [sic] modern homeliness. Here there was no future. No railroads, no churches, no saloons, no schoolhouses to echo the voices of merry children, no promise of the life that produces within the range of his vision. Nothing but the monotony of past centuries dead and forgotten save by a few learned savans [sic].1

In this passage, the United States’ bright future—the endless progress promised by hammers and railroads and schoolhouses—is defined against the stagnancy of Ethiopia. But Vance’s “healthy American organization” does not simply construct Ethiopia as a foreign other that defines home. Underlying Charlie’s vision of a lonely, savage Africa is a specifically Protestant interpretation of history. East Africa’s apparently fossilized state [End Page 183] validates the biblical prophecies that describe Ethiopia’s destruction, just as the United States’ “promise of the life that produces” confirms Americans’ sense that their country represented the culmination of biblical history. For Charlie and other U.S. Protestants, the social and technological advances of the past century of American nation building—the spread of evangelical Christianity, the building of settlements, the development of the railroad—signaled that America was chosen, that it had a unique and important global role as the “Redeemer Nation,” which would lead the world socially, politically, and morally.2 As Charlie gazes at the seemingly desolate African landscape, he perceives Africa as merely a trace and record of a past whose future is reaching completion in the United States. Charlie’s very historical sensibilities, specifically his sense of continual American progress, depend upon an unspoken interpretation of the Bible and the landscapes—Palestine, Egypt, and Ethiopia among them—that offer evidence of scripture’s events and prophecies.

Previous scholarship has rightly observed Hopkins’s biblical allusions in Of One Blood, most prominently the title’s reference to Acts 17:26, which states that God made all races “of one blood,” and the plot’s seeming fictionalization of Psalm 68:31, which predicts “Princes shall come out of Egypt; Ethiopia shall soon stretch her hands to God.”3 As scholars such as Laurie Maffly-Kipp and Allen Dwight Callahan have recently demonstrated, African Americans often looked to these biblical passages as a rhetorically powerful “foundation for racial justice.”4 Yet, literary critics have often viewed Hopkins’s biblical references as merely a means to a psychological or political end, a strategy that allows her to confront the contradictions of U.S. history, to explore African American consciousness, or to conceptualize a pan-Africanist identity.5 I argue to the contrary that Of One Blood does more than invoke biblical themes; the novel is centrally concerned with contemporary biblical study and with undermining the racial hierarchies that such study frequently endorsed. Specifically, Of One Blood depicts and deconstructs biblical geography and archaeology, overlapping theological fields that fused scientific methods with literalist interpretations of the Bible. Through the close reading of primary historical documents, painstaking survey and measurement, and the excavation of biblical sites, biblical geographers and archaeologists sought to authenticate biblical narrative and bring readers into contact with the world of the Bible...

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