The Pleasure of Its Company: Of One Blood and the Potentials of Plagiarism

Abstract

In this essay, Sanborn extends his earlier work on Pauline Hopkins’s plagiarism by showing that Hopkins plagiarized a total of 143 passages from 36 texts in her novel Of One Blood and that at least 10,492 of the roughly 52,730 words in the novel—20%—were imported from other people’s publications. Sanborn argues that plagiarism is, for Hopkins, not a canny subversion or artful transmutation of another writer’s work; it is a means by which she can hold her text internally open to other voices and temporalities. It does not point us backward to a critique of the texts from which she drew—texts that she could not have imagined anyone discovering—but forward to the pleasurable possibility of a profoundly mixed-voice world. Like Marvel’s The Black Panther (2018), Of One Blood offers its audience a series of resources for dreaming, a series of larger-and-stranger-than-life scenarios capable of being used in self-transformational ways.