This essay explains how blackface performance came to bear upon representations not of Othello, but of Desdemona. Here, we see a theory of race that not only registers its apparent materiality and gendered signification, but also literalizes anxieties about race’s movement through the spectacle of racial transfer. These representations of racial t…[Read more]

Edited edition of Frances Ellen Watkins (Harper)’s recently recovered ca. 1846 book of poems, _Forest Leaves_. Published through the Just Teach One: Early African American Print project, with an introduction by the coeditors.

“Taking a liberal approach to the category “African American children’s literature,” I stipulate that the placement and framing of stories in an African American literary context such as the Christian Recorder suggest that they ought to be considered among “African American children’s literature” insomuch as they were read by or to African Ameri…[Read more]

“This essay will explore the different appearances of dogs in Stowe’s novel in order to suss out the contradictions inherent in the comparisons of enslaved African Americans to dogs and their various relationships to them. Reading Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin for both its importance as an abolitionist literary phenomenon as well as…[Read more]

“I read black Atlantic circulations through the friendships between this mixed-race heroine and both her white governess and her black maid. Following Paul Gilroy’s construction of the black Atlantic as a space of movement, I consider Olivia’s movement within the frames of identification that position her relative racial privilege somewhere betwe…[Read more]

“In 1853, Mary King, the white daughter of abolitionists, was engaged to marry William G. Allen, the “Coloured Professor” of New York Central College at McGrawville.1 The engagement stirred their upstate New York community into a popular controversy, inciting letters of family disapproval, newspaper commentary, and mob violence leading to their…[Read more]

Analyzing abolitionist and neoabolitionist girlhood stories of racial pairing from the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries, this essay shows how children’s literature about interracial friendship represents differently racialized experiences of and responses to slavery. The article presents fiction by women writers such as Harriet Beecher S…[Read more]

This essay reads a little-studied, probably white-authored abolitionist children’s novel in which white parents adopt a black child and love her as much as they would a white child. Harriet and Ellen; or, The Orphan Girls by “Lois” (1856), depicts interracial kinship predicated on familial love and backed by radical abolitionist and antir…[Read more]