ABSTRACT
The fifth chapter of American Literature and American Identity turns to the relations between European and African Americans, examining Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a work that is often viewed as racist. The condemnation of Stowe’s novel is both understandable and (partially) mistaken. It is understandable because Stowe does take up a cognitive model of childhood to characterize Africans. However, she complicates that model and develops its implications in ways that lead to antiracist conclusions. Moreover, unusually for the writers considered in this book, Stowe challenges—perhaps even rejects—U.S. nationalism and American identity itself, when she is faced with slavery’s terrible negation of universal, democratic egalitarianism.
