Philip Kadish

This article argues that the staggered British and American publication of American novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe’s second novel, Dred, or A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856), that resulted from her pursuit of British copyright unintentionally facilitated Stowe’s rebellion against gendered expectations of women authors; the previously unrecognized extent of Stowe’s gender rebellion around Dred emerges in the differences between Stowe’s introduction to the novel’s British edition, which has heretofore escaped critical notice, and her very different introduction to the American edition upon which previous criticism of the novel has been predicated. Stowe’s gender rebellion can be seen in both the subject and language of the respective introductions, particularly in the bellicose tone and frankly political topics in her British introduction, as well as in her assertion of commercial and legal rights around the novel’s publication.  Stowe had contracted to publish her second novel in London before the United States after having been denied any royalties from the tremendous British and European sales of her first novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), due to a provision of British law that required authors to be present on British soil at the moment of publication to receive a British copyright, falling victim to the ongoing trade war over copyright between Europe and America.  I place Stowe’s personal negotiation of her contract with the British publisher, despite her husband’s legal right to control her intellectual property, in the context of Stowe’s more well known (and failed) U.S. court battle against unauthorized publication of adaptations of her work.  Stowe was operating in a transatlantic American-British culture that condemned as “unsexed” women authors who wrote about issues in the masculine sphere of politics and who “unnaturally” asserted themselves in the masculine realms of commerce and law.  An upsurge in violence against abolitionists in the U.S. that occurred during the composition of this novel famously resulted in Stowe’s loss of faith in non-violent means to end slavery and her revision of the novel to include a slave revolt subplot.  Much of slave revolt storyline, which upended her previous gendering of African Americans as feminine forgiving to masculine and vengeful, was composed during Stowe’s transoceanic journey to London to meet her publication deadline in a liminal transatlantic physical and psychic space which, I argue, facilitated her rebellion against racial and gender discursive limits in American culture.  The introduction that Stowe penned in London is a thundering condemnation of slaveholder violence that calls for Northern whites to make war on the South and condemns British commerce with the slave South, breaking numerous taboos on proper subject matter and language for women in this period.  The introduction that Stowe published with Dred’s American edition months later is utterly transformed in its demure and apologetic tone and its omission of any discussion of violence, referencing neither Northern war against the South nor even the slave rebellion after whose leader she had named the novel.  I argue that the opportunity to first address herself to a British audience brought about by Stowe’s pursuit of British copyright freed her to express herself more openly and with greater gender heterodoxy, and that the subsequent American introduction demonstrates the reassertion of American cultural constraints regarding both race and gender.

African American Review, special issue on Blackness and Disability [pending final approval of post-peer-review revision].
William Henry Johnson, an African American "pinhead" performer in American freak shows, was the most popular African American performer in the nation from the 1870s through to his death in 1926, and he has become a fixture of disabilities and critical race theory studies of American freak show culture.

Outline of a previously undetected transatlantic racial discourse that I have dubbed "Mandingo-Saxonism," which attributes to the Mandingo ethnic group of West Africa most of the character traits which the discourse of Saxonism claims are the sole possession of Saxons (British and their American cousins) and which supposedly establish Saxon supremacy and justify Saxon hegemony.  The traits are pride, energy, masculinity, and intelligence.  Mandingo-Saxonism's primary rhetorical purpose has been to explain away black excellence by calling it a fluke possessed by a rare racial sub-group.  I have traced the discourse from eighteenth century explorer, slaveholder, and colonial texts through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and right up to present day culture, of which Quentin Tarrantino's film Django Unchained is the most famous recent example.  This conference presentation at SUNY Binghamton in 2014 was my first attempt to articulate this nascent discovery to a public audience.