Uncle Tom

Adena Spingarn’s Uncle Tom: From Martyr to Traitor offers a revealing new take on the cultural implications of the age-old question for Americanist scholars and students: was Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom an Uncle Tom? If the answer is “no,” as it is for this book, then how do we account for the strange disequilibrium between the literary character and the cultural type? What were the key signposts in Uncle Tom’s journey from Stowe’s hagiography in Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) to Malcolm X’s condemnation in his 1963 lecture on “The Race Problem”? When did the shift occur, by whose agency, for what purposes, and according to what timeline? Spingarn treats these questions by wringing surprisingly fresh results out of two traditional scholarly modes: literary history and opinion research. Spingarn combines what she elegantly posits as a “mixed-race” (27) literary history that traces the successive restagings and rewritings of the Uncle Tom figure from Stowe to Richard Wright, with detailed research into the history of African American opinion on what we might call “The Uncle Tom Question.” This study’s two overarching discoveries are that African American writers continued to draw on Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a literary resource for longer and with more gusto than previously thought, extending through and outlasting the New Negro Renaissance; and nineteenth-century African American opinion generally regarded Uncle Tom’s Cabin and its unbroken stream of adaptations as supportive of their struggles and reflective of their experiences. Literary and public opinion turned slowly and unevenly before African Americans arrived at the position that Uncle Tom, whether attached to Stowe’s narrative or untethered from it, had the capacity to do active damage.

Art · Art history · History of literature · Literature · Martyr · Wright · History · Race, History, and American Society