Local Americanists Series: Lara Langer Cohen on "George Eliot, Pauline Hopkins, and the Shadow of Zionism in OF ONE BLOOD"
Local Americanists Series: Lara Langer Cohen on "George Eliot, Pauline Hopkins, and the Shadow of Zionism in OF ONE BLOOD"
The Local Americanists Series features Lara Larger Cohen of Swarthmore College who will share her work-in-progress, "George Eliot, Pauline Hopkins, and the Shadow of Zionism in Of One Blood." In Professor Cohen's words: "This essay reads Telassar, the hidden Ethiopian city at the heart of Pauline Hopkins’s novel Of One Blood (1902-3), in relation to a better-known project for the regeneration of a diasporic people: Zionism. The Zionist movement enters the novel most strikingly through Hopkins’s reworking of elements of George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, which famously ends with its protagonist discovering his Jewish identity and setting off to establish a Jewish state in Palestine. For Hopkins, I argue, Zionist ideology becomes a foil over and against which to formulate a countervailing vision of Blackness. Demurring from Zionism’s colonizing project and its equation between Jewish community and the construction of a nation-state, Hopkins depicts Telassar less as a homeland and more as a battery that will galvanize connections between Black people around the world." Please email Edlie Wong or Bob Levine to RSVP. They will send you the Zoom link and essay in advance of the event.
About the Speaker:
Lara Langer Cohen teaches courses at Swarthmore College on early American literature, especially nineteenth-century African American literature, as well as literary theory, Marxism, and old media. She is the author of Going Underground: Race, Space, and the Subterranean in the Nineteenth-Century United States (Duke University Press, 2023) and The Fabrication of American Literature: Fraudulence and Antebellum Print Culture (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012); she is also co-editor, with Jordan Alexander Stein, of Early African American Print Culture (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). Recent publications include essays on the literature of Mammoth Cave, music in Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave, mid-nineteenth-century city mysteries, and summer jams. She has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Antiquarian Society, the Library Company of Philadelphia, and the American Council of Learned Societies.