When Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins wrote and published her serial novel Hagar’s Daughter: A Story of Caste Prejudice in the Colored American Magazine from 1901 to 1902, African Americans’ struggle for sociopolitical recognition seemed reflected in two images: Booker T. Washington’s White House dinner and lynching postcards. The political implications of the Washington visit and the lynching epidemic appear to be squarely at odds with one another, yet Hopkins, a former singer and actress, editor, and novelist, proposes in Hagar’s Daughter that an important connection binds them: a politics of performance. Like many writers of her time, Hopkins moved away from realism. However, she did not do so to undertake determinism as an explanation for African American evolution or devolution. Instead, Hopkins turned toward the concept of performance to interrogate American epistemologies of sociopolitical progress.