Pauline Hopkins, Afrofuturism, and Black Panther

A few weeks ago, I got asked to present on Pauline Hopkins at an upcoming conference. I accepted, and I chose to present on Hopkins’ Of One Blood, Afrofuturism, and Black Panther. Instead of looking at the film, as other scholars have done, I looked at the opening scene in Fantastic Four #52. As well, I did not focus on everything I could have focused on because of space and time, so I zeroed in on representation while hinting at the colonialism of both Hopkins’ novel and Black Panther’s debut. In this piece, I do not give a summary of the novel either, so if you want to know more about it, you can do so on Wikipedia and elsewhere. If I expand this piece for publication, this post will go down, but I wanted to share it now because it’s important to think about everything in relation to works that proceeded it. We need to think about things in relation to the past and the future as well as the present.

Sixty years before Jack Kirby and Stan Lee introduced the world to Wakanda and ninety years before Mark Dery coined the term Afrofuturism, Pauline Hopkins’ Of One Blood: Or, The Hidden Self appeared serially in The Colored American Magazine from November 1902 to November 1903. Dery defines Afrofuturism as “[s]peculative fiction that treats African-American themes and addresses African-American concerns in the context of twentieth century technoculture — and, more…