Paranormal Counterintelligence: Early Black Disability Politics beyond the Human

This essay uses Pauline Hopkins's Of One Blood; or the Hidden Self (1903) to trace out Hopkins's anti-ableist neurodiverse reimagining of a post-Reconstruction evolutionary humanism. By invoking a folk tradition of the "paranormal," particularly stories of "second sight" in the African American folk tradition (e.g., "Married to a Boar Hog"), Hopkins creates an alternative language for thinking about human cognitive/psychological variations outside the ability/disability binary that structured debates over Black citizenship. "Paranormal Counterintelligences," thus, argues for needed critical attention to how Black writers turned to folklore to speculate about para-normal Black futures rather than insisting on a shared white humanity.