Circulating the Black Rapist
Sketches of the Life of Joseph Mountain and Early American Networks of Print
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 16311584 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Brian Baaki (Brian Baaki received his PhD in English from the City University of New York, Graduate Center in 2016. His dissertation, which considers the importance of criminal discourse in the development of an early African American literary project, was awarded “The Melvin Dixon Prize for the Best Dissertation in African American Studies” at the CUNY Graduate Center. He is currently a lecturer in the English department at the University of California, Davis, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2017 |
| Volume | 90 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 36-68 |
| Publication date | 2017-03-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The New England Quarterly (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0028-4866 • E-ISSN: 1937-2213 |
| Publisher | MIT Press - Journals (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1162/tneq_a_00584 |
| OpenAlex | W2605807170 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 3 |
This article examines texts produced in response to the criminal trial of Joseph Mountain to illuminate the early construction of the black rapist in American print. The central text in its analysis is Mountain's own “criminal confession,” Sketches of the Life of Joseph Mountain (1790). This article views Mountain's text as a response to a different set of concerns than later narratives of African Americans convicted of rape and positions Mountain's biography as a response not merely to concerns over black slave revolt alone, but to a related, if more immediate threat of cross-racial, proletarian revolution
Archaeology · Art · Art history · Biography · Confession (law · Criminal trial · Criminology · Literature · Narrative · Political science · Proletariat · Sociology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · History · Law · Race, History, and American Society
| Highly cited | No |
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