The novel starts with Reuel Briggs in his apartment alone in Boston, Massachusetts, ruminating on his financial troubles as a medical student.

There Reuel witnesses the talented Dianthe Lusk, a light-skinned "Negress" from the South, perform in the Fisk University Singers and becomes infatuated with her beautiful voice and appearance.

Soon after their arrive at the ruin, however, they receive news from America that Molly and Dianthe drowned in a boating accident on the Charles River near Boston.

A native man named Ai, who had passed as a local guide for the expedition, reveals his identity as a councilor and minister of Telassar.

Telassar's soldiers capture them, but the two manage to escape into the city's tombs where they find a hoard of precious metals and gemstones guarded by serpents.

"[5] Hopkins's main purpose in writing the novel was to expose and unravel the entangled genealogies of blacks and whites, the irrefutable evidence that they were literally, biologically, "of one blood".

[5] The text's collective argument, according to its introduction, is that blood has so effortlessly mixed between the two races that any attempt to disentangle them is rendered impossible.

– discuss] critics often regard it as one of the earliest articulations of Black internationalism because it is the first African-American novel to both feature African characters and take place in Africa.

Hopkins's originating the text in Boston honed in on one of the epicenters of debate in the United States on "blood", bloodlines, and roots of "human family".

[5] The selection of "The Hidden Self" as the subtitle serves as a "metaphor for the suppressed history of oppressive social and familial relations under the institution of slavery.

Faust writes: "By interweaving fantastical delights with historical realities, Hopkins’ Afritopian novel dramatizes the glory not just of what could have been, but what could still be, if we find the power to free our civilization from a philosophy of exploitation, degradation, and death, and replace it with what one nineteenth-century Liberian poet demanded of a new African nation: liberty, 'proud science,' glories, and art, to 'Arise and now prevail/O’er all thy foes;/In truth and righteousness—/In all the arts of peace—/Advance,  and  still  increase/Though  hosts  oppose.'"

[7] In the story, scholar Melissa Asher Daniels has stated that by journeying into the hidden world, Reuel's royal bloodline not only makes him the heir to a long, rich history of African achievement, but also crowns him as king to a body of people that he previously rejected being a part of.

Moving to the African part of Hopkins's narrative of a Utopian world, it is presented as an important factor for cultural worth but otherwise meaningless.

Seen most prominently through the sages that serve the queen and the temple in which they meet, mysticism remains a strong underlying theme as Reuel ventures through the hidden city, blanketed over by the power of kings that were his forefathers.

[9] Reuel leaves America with no knowledge or care for his ancestral history; he sees culture more as a crutch than a gift and it's this mindset of blissful ignorance that leads him towards a relationship he'll regret.

[4] Water is the source of life, but it's also a means for travel (by boat and portal), a carrier of death in form of poison, the final resting place for two characters, and a mirror that reflects images that onlookers in the novel may not care to see.

[10] Blood plays a major role in the novels main theme to describe that the human race, no matter origin or social class, stem from one birthplace, a scientific argument that Hopkins strongly supports.

[11] She also uses science to explain African spirituality that can be seen through the novel's mystic undertones by simplifying concepts of fate that a sceptic audience would otherwise not believe.

[12] Her argument, which ran counter to many histories of that time, was that the ancient cultures of the Nile Valley were African in origin, not imported to the area from elsewhere.