Black Livingstone: Pauline Hopkins, Of One Blood, and the Archives of Colonialism

And in writing that code there was the sense that I was really fucking with the language at its most intricate level. It was as if I was finally getting my revenge on something that had fucked me over for so long, that I felt that this broken, stumbling thing that "Ferrum" is, is my very own language. For the first time in my writing life, I felt, this is my language—the grunts, moans, utterances, pauses, sounds, and silences.

M. NourbeSe Philip

In an interview with Patricia Saunders, M. NourbeSe Philip describes the process that led her to write Zong! (2008), her brilliant poem (of which "Ferrum" is a part) constructed from the remaining legal archives of the infamous 1781 massacre of captives aboard the eponymous slave ship. That process, Philip explains, includes an earlier work from 1991, Looking for Livingstone: An Odyssey of Silence, which also draws on an archive, albeit one which she invented with an elaborate backstory. Looking for Livingstone concludes with an "Author's Note" that describes in precise physical terms the diary of her fictional Traveller, detailing encounters with the nonfictional missionary explorer David Livingstone. Near its end, Looking for Livingstone's "Author's Note" mentions a handwritten annotation in the diary that claims that its two volumes are facsimiles not originals, only to be followed by a contradictory memo from the Oxford University archivist declaring their originality (78). All of these personae are constructions by Philip, who brilliantly asserts her own voice within a contested archive where her Traveller displaces Livingstone.

Philip's seamless curation of real and imagined sources is an exemplary modern extension of what Brittney Cooper calls "unexpected archives of Black women's thought," which defy categories of literary genre and the expectations of readers (12). Philip's deft archival displacement of Livingstone provides an entry point for reading Pauline E. Hopkins's novel Of One Blood; or, the Hidden Self (1903), written nearly a century before Looking for Livingstone. Hopkins, who is a central figure in Cooper's Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017), cultivated her literary voice by appropriating and manipulating the historical Livingstone in the service of a fictional discourse of African American travel. In Of One Blood, the three primary characters—Reuel Briggs, an African American medical doctor who travels to Africa; Aubrey Livingston, his supposedly white rival; and Dianthe Lusk, a Fisk Jubilee Singer and the object of their affections—are ultimately revealed to be members of the "Livingston" family (spelled without the concluding "e").

As Geoffrey Sanborn has uncovered, Of One Blood goes much farther in its allusions to Livingstone, incorporating more than 300 words, without attribution, from John Hartley Coombs's Dr. Livingstone's 17 Years' Explorations and Adventures in the Wilds of Africa (1857). Although Sanborn does not believe there is "a critical edge in her nearly word-for-word repetition of Coombs's description of central Africa as 'a gorgeous scene,'" I find several critical interventions including Hopkins's deletion of Coombs's "black-faced" adjective used to describe "a goodly number of baboons," eliminating possible racist connotations (Sanborn, Plagiarama! 23; Coombs 131; Hopkins, Of One Blood 565). Furthermore, Hopkins revises Coombs's meandering explication of "the prevailing notions of Europeans respecting the central regions of Africa. It has been believed by many that the greater part of that ground which is marked on the maps as 'unexplored,' is a howling wilderness, or an arid, sterile and uninhabitable country" to read "the European idea respecting Central Africa, which brands these regions as howling wildernesses or an uninhabitable country" (Coombs 131; Hopkins, Of One Blood 565). Hopkins more precisely demarcates the geography as "Central Africa" rather than its "central regions," and corrects Coombs's passive voice ("It has been believed") by clearly ascribing such prejudices to a "European idea," something more deeply institutionalized than Coombs's "prevailing notions."¹ While individual examples such as these suggest that, contra Sanborn, Hopkins's revisions might actually be considered "in Henry Louis Gates's terms, 'motivated Signifyin(g),'" I want to think in the...