people of an empire. African Americans writing in the Colored American, and
Pauline Hopkins in particular, both support and oppose imperialist tactics,
creating homes that both fall victim to and become victors by these tactics.
As an African-American woman, Hopkins may have resisted the violent,
male-oriented imperialist practices detailed in the Colored American Maga-
zine, yet her formulations of domesticity support counter-invasions none-
theless. Even in Of One Blood, where Hopkins associates crossed boundaries
with the horror of incest, she is able to point to some, albeit limited, positive
possibilities of invasion for black American domestic happiness.

What becomes particularly important about the system of domestic im-
perialism is that such ambiguity resists the clear demarcation of ruler from
ruled within an empire. This stands in contrast to Edward Said's argument
that "imperialism acquires a kind of coherence, a set of experiences, and a
presence of ruler and ruled alike within the culture" (11). While I would
agree with Said that the "idea of having an empire" does indeed infiltrate all
aspects of life in an imperial culture, I take exception to the notion that
empire necessitates cultural "coherence": with the boundaries of the home
changing, domestic imperialism blurs positions of the invaders and the in-
vaded, the domestic and the foreign. As such it is a system that resists rein-
scribing African Americans into the territory of empire reserved by white
American culture for subordination. It refuses simply to fix an African-
American space in opposition to white hegemony. Where literary critics
such as Claudia Tate and Ann duCille find African-American writers at-
tempting to establish happy nuclear families for themselves, I would argue
that in the writings in and around the Colored American Magazine, such
a space does not seem fully desirable. Instead, the ability to reformulate
boundaries and borders in the light of political anxieties fuels the desire
behind these narratives. The resulting indeterminacy of the invaded/invad-
ing African-American home--familial, national, and international--is threat-
ening and liberating.

For their help with this essay, I would like to thank Dale Bauer, Dawn Keetley,
Susan Dunn, and Liz Cannon.

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