Hidden Cities, Hidden Selves: Lost-Race Romance in Pauline Hopkins's Of One Blood and Walter Mcdougall's The Hidden City
Abstract:This essay turns the critical focus on genre in Pauline Hopkins's Of One Blood (1902-03) to the spatial and temporal logics of lost-race romance. It argues that pairing Hopkins's assertion of black American identity through ancient Ethiopian civilization with Walter McDougall's founding of white American lineage on disappearing American Indianness in The Hidden City (1891) elucidates the neatness and messiness of the genre's ideological functioning. Its imaginary shapes American racial identity by yoking colonial to national space and past to future, reaching across a socially turbulent present within the US that nevertheless emerges significantly in Hopkins's adoption.