ABSTRACT
The history of the reception of Uncle Tom’s Cabin has been thoroughly documented, highlighting the novel’s status as both an historical benchmark and a social barometer.2 Countless articles and monographs have been devoted to the analysis of the various issues raised by the novel, and the work itself has frequently been adapted and rewritten. When it comes to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, rewritings (a hallmark of literary classics) frequently suggest that that the work has been found wanting, and must therefore be “corrected.” For example, in his 1990 work, Last Supper at Uncle Tom’s Cabin/The Promised Land, African-American choreographer Bill T. Jones provocatively chose Stowe’s novel as the starting point for an exploration of race, gender and faith in late-twentieth century America. The novel was made to enter into a Bakhtinian dialogue with many other texts, including but not limited to, Scripture, speeches (Sojourner Truth, Martin Luther King), plays (Amiri Baraka’s The Dutchman), and songs, all in a postmodern dialogue among different genres and times. Jones’s selection of Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a subtext acknowledged the centrality of the novel to discussions of race, among other topics, while the parodic rendering of Uncle Tom’s Cabin suggested that it was no longer acceptable as a representation of African Americans or as a valued touchstone of American history. In Jones’s piece, the standard ending-the death of Uncle Tom for refusing to betray the hiding place
1 Ben Brantley, “Stowe’s ‘Cabin,’ Reshaped as a Multistory Literary Home,” New York Times, 12 December 1997: E3.
