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 generally, African-American signification that appropriates images of technology and prosthetically enhanced future.” Since its introduction in 1993, scholars have expanded upon Dery’s definition, with Ytasha Womack writing that Afrofuturism “combines elements of science fiction, historical fiction, speculative fiction, fantasy, Afrocentricity, and magic realism with non-Western beliefs.” Valerie Babb, pulling from Dery and Womack, argues that we need to think about Of One Blood and similar works of art from the turn of the twentieth century as Black speculative fiction because it “has been popular with African American writers since the canon’s early years precisely because it enabled the representation of worlds in which enslavement and racial discrimination were remedied.”

The Colored American Magazine served as a space, at the turn of the twentieth century, where Hopkins and others worked to cultivate African American popular fiction. The editors sought to, as Hazel Carby puts it, “create the literary and political climate for a black renaissance in Boston two decades before the emergence of what we now know as the ‘Harlem Renaissance.’” They did not limit it to just Boston or the Northeast; rather, they wanted the magazine to reach far and wide and “encourage the flowering of any black talent which had been suppressed by a lack of encouragement and opportunity to be published.” They sought to attract a large readership, promoting popular fiction through its pages. While not a direct correlation, Marvel focused its output on a mass audience, seeking to get its publications in as many hands as possible, thus creating and cultivating popular fiction through comics. Each, as well, worked to influence culture, specifically addressing, in differing ways, social issues.

Of One Blood exists at the intersections of the violent tethering of history through the Middle Passage and the institution of chattel slavery and the hope of reformulating that thread by looking back to Africa. As Carby notes, the novel, through its myriad conventions and plot points, works to move “the reader away from the American consequences of secret histories toward an Africa that embodies both history and future possibilities for black people.” The conventions of the gothic and passing literature move the plot forward, providing the reader with a grounding that feels familiar, but Hopkins makes that grounding shaky, pushing and pulling readers along. The main pull, though, takes place with Reul Briggs’ participation in the archeological expedition to Africa. While Briggs’ initial impetus for making the journey to Egypt in search of the treasures of Meroë centers on the acquisition of wealth to support himself and Dianthe, thus reinforcing colonial extraction of goods from the continent, his perspective changes once he wakes up in Telassar, a city hidden within the ruins of Meroë.

The group going on the expedition to Meroë consists of “artists, savans, and several men — capitalists — who represented the business interests of the venture.” The makeup of the expedition highlights its goal as a colonial and imperialistic expedition seeking to extract wealth from Meroë and the region, taking it back to the West. Professor Stone and Briggs hope that the treasures they find in Meroë will point to the flourishing of Meroë and the region, thus altering the stereotypical narrative or Africa as uncivilized. When they stop for the night on their way to Meroë, Stone and Briggs discuss this, and Stone points out that Meroë rested at the center of trade network where “African caravans poured ivory, frankincense and gold into the city,” filling its coffers with wealth. Briggs, who throughout the novel struggles with his own identity, responds to Stone by saying, “Your theories may be true, Professor, but if so, your discoveries will establish the primal existence of the Negro as the most ancient source of all that you value in modern life, even antedating Egypt. How can the Anglo-Saxon world bear the establishment of such a theory?” Stone responds, “You and I, Briggs, know that the theories of prejudice are swept away by the great tide of facts.” Stone believes that once they uncover the treasures at Meroë that the world will recognize it as the cradle of civilization, the cradle that birthed Egyptian civilization, Greek civilization, Roman civilization, and beyond, thus eliminating prejudice. As Babb points out when discussing these threads, “In a Janus-faced manner, black speculative writers look to the past and pair imagined African origins with Afrofuturist content to compensate for a historical record that does not recognize black achievement.” What the expedition discovers in Meroë and ultimately Telassar creates a historical thread that weaves its way across both time and space, reconstituting the thread severed by the Middle Passage and the race for Africa.

Likewise, Kirby and Lee saw T’Challa’s introduction into the Marvel Universe as a way to impact society and push back against white supremacy and prejudice. T’Challa debuted in Fantastic Four #52 (1966). Our first introduction to Wakanda mirrors, in many ways, the expedition to Meroë. The issue opens with the Fantastic Four in a flying car headed towards Wakanda, and the first dialogue spoken comes from Benn Grimm (The Thing). Sitting in the back seat, he asks Reed Richards (Mr. Fantastic), “Hey stretch . . . when did you have time to dream up a jazzy flyin’ fastback like this baby?” Richards simply replies that he didn’t dream up the car and that “an African chieftain, called . . . the Black Panther” sent it to him. To this, Grimm resorts to stereotypical typical images of Africa that he has imbibed from mass media and asks Richards, “How does some refugee from a Tarzan movie lay his hands on this kinda gizmo?” By having Grimm refer to T’Challa as “some refugee from a Tarzan movie,” Kirby and Lee seek to lay a foundation for readers based on stereotypical images only to pull it out from underneath them.

The reference to Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan, a character who appeared ten years after the first installment of Hopkins’ novel in The Colored American Magazine, draws upon a long history of media representation of Africa that Hopkins, Kirby, and Lee seek to upend. Tarzan, as Aldo Regaldo points out, “employ[s] the gendered and racial discourses that fueled and legitimated American imperial agendas at the dawn of the twentieth century.” For white audiences, Tarzan served as a locus of revulsion of any type of progress for African Americans and provided white audiences with a symbolic mechanism that tapped into their desires while they were “desperately trying to reaffirm white Anglo-Saxon masculine power in the face of the social and cultural forces that threatened to consume it.” Just as white audiences took in these images, they also influenced Black audiences. Frantz Fanon notes how images of Tarzan on screen impacted Black children in the Antilles. The children identified with Tarzan as “civilized” battling to save his life against the Black “savages,” causing the children to identify with the colonizer. To counter this internal identification, Fanon calls for “the establishment of children’s magazines especially for Negroes, the creation of songs for Negro children, and, ultimately, the publication of history texts especially for them, at least through the grammar-school grades.”

In Of One Blood, Charlie Vance becomes the mouthpiece similar to Grimm when he exclaims, upon seeing Telassar, “Great Scott! . . . you don’t mean to tell me that all this was done by n******?” Even though Charlie stands amazed, his use of n****** undercuts his amazement, essentially questioning how individuals whom he perceives as inferior could create something superior to Anglo-Saxons. Similarly, Briggs’ comments to Stone when they discuss what they hope to discover in Meroë sound similar to Grimm’s initial question and they highlight Fanon’s point when discussing Black children watching Tarzan movies in the Antilles. Briggs, who struggles throughout the novel with his identity, hiding it from his peers and others, has internalized the belief that he is inferior due to his ancestry. The novel opens after Briggs attempts to commit suicide due to these internal conflicts, and throughout the novel he struggles with his very being. He cannot find resolution to this internal conflict that arises from the institution of enslavement and the social hierarchies in existence within the nation because, as Carby notes, “Hopkins offers no possibility that these contradictions can be resolved within the boundaries of the United States.” Briggs does not find a resolution until he experiences Telassar, a space untouched by colonization and imperialism. As he approaches Telassar, “[t]he character of the country improved” and Briggs recalled the desert that protected it “against all intrusion.” Even with these thoughts, though. Briggs, “with an American’s practical common sense, bewailed the waste of material. ”This moment, along with others referencing colonization, correlate to the threat of colonization that impacts Wakanda, specifically through the attacks from Ulysses Klaw to steal vibranium from the nation. I do not have time to get into this aspect today, but it is something that needs to be explored further.

While Marvel did not originate as a publishing outlet to counter internalized racism, it became, through characters such as T’Challa, an entity that sought to provide positive representations for Black readers. On creating Black Panther, Kirby told Gary Groth, “I came up with the Black Panther because I realized I had no blacks in my strip. I’d never drawn a black. I needed a black. I suddenly discovered that I had a lot of black readers. My first friend was a black! And here I was ignoring them because I was associating with everybody else.” Putting aside Kirby’s use of “a black,” his statement highlights how he wanted to counteract stereotypical representations through his creations. Some readers responded to T’Challa’s debut by telling Kirby and Lee how much seeing a Black man, a king of a nation like Wakanda, in the pages of a comic book. Ken Greene wrote to the editors,

But the main thing than made my heart sing is the latest concerted effort to bring comic literature to a more adult level by portraying members of races other than white. I have a feeling that the Black Panther will turn out to the first great Negro hero-villain in comic book history! Not only that, but an African king at that!

Greene continued by praising the introduction of Wyatt Wingfoot, a member of the fictional Keewazi tribe, in the same issue. Greene wrote, “Being partially of American Indian ancestry myself, I am always happy to see a modern Indian shown as being something besides a poor relic of the past.”

Henry Clay, another reader, celebrated Kirby and Lee for introducing T’Challa into the Marvel universe. He told the creators, “I was joyous about your breaking all the precedents of your profession, and introducing a Negro as a hero . . . a real live Negro super-hero!!!” Kirby and Lee responded to Clay by thanking him for his letter and saying that they hope that T’Challa will lead readers to “base [their] opinion of a fellow human being on his basic qualities and character — not on the color of his skin, the name of his God, or the place of his birth.” They finish by writing, “Perhaps a comic mag isn’t the proper place for this type of discussion — and yet, there’s a chance that these pages, which are widely perused by thinking readers throughout the world, are possibly one of the best places of all! ‘Nuff said!” Kirby and Lee understood what Fanon, Hopkins, and others understood, the power of mass media to impact individuals by addressing social issues and sparking empathy and understanding.

Today, we consider the Black Panther Afrofuturistic, but many still do not recognize the long lineage of works, specifically by writers such as Sutton Griggs, Martin Delaney, and Hopkins, as Afrofuturism, even if they are not directly in line with contemporary definitions. Yet, as Of One Blood shows, the connective tissue of speculative fiction runs deep, and we need to consider Hopkins’ work within this lineage. We need to build on the work on Womack, Babb, Isaiah Lavender, and others and trace the throughlines that connect African American literature from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to creators such as Black Kirby or other comics publishers such as Milestone. These tissues illuminate the ways that amidst regression and oppression “black creative expression,” as Babb puts it, “has always responded to the reactionary.”