LITR 4338 American Minority Literature UHCL lecture notes

11.28 starting point of new existence, now my own master, such was the strength of prejudice

How did the authors of the slave narratives make their readers care? (Many if not most of their readers would have been whites, not slaves.) [HJ P3; 3.7, 6.20]

Discussion Question for both texts: How does slavery "dehumanize" both blacks and whites? How may literature teach us what is human?

1. How surprising is the sexual component of slavery? Why isn't it acknowledged and discussed? What are the impacts of mixed-race births? Their impact on racial identity? What implications for America as a "classless society" that instead organizes itself as separate races?

2. What does Jacobs say about being not just a slave, but a woman slave? Can minority as gender be related or analogous to minority as race, ethnicity, or culture?

6.20 I was touched by her grief; incapable of feeling, not very refined (class difference)

Objective 2a. Gender: Is the status of women, lesbians, and homosexuals analogous to that of ethnic minorities in terms of voice and choice? Do "women of color" become "double minorities?" HJ 5.4 law; 6.20 mistress;

1. Discuss the use of science fiction / time travel as a literary device for discussing a historical event like slavery.

2. How does understanding slavery as a foundation of American history help understand not just black America but white America?

P3 Uncle Tom’s Cabin 10 years earlier

P3 gothic pit

Child

4 Indecorum

1.2 mulattoes, merchandise

1.3 maternal grandmother, daughter of a planter, freed, returned

1.5 bake crackers at night

1.6 Anglo-Saxon ancestors

1.7 slave, being property, can hold no property (cf. women)

1.12 future . . . what they would do with me

1.13 taught me to read and spell

3.6 happy free women

3.7 children torn from her

5.2 subdue = seduce?

5.3 vile monster, sacred commandments of nature

5.4 no shadow of law

5.5 beauty as greatest curse; admiration > degradation

5.7 silence or death

5.9 [private influence of grandmother; cf. Fuller]

5.11 two beautiful children playing together

6.1 [family dynamics disrupted]

6.3 literacy as trap

Ch. 6 as jealous mistress, but little women’s bonding

6.20 I was touched by her grief; incapable of feeling, not very refined (class difference)

6.22 color of his soul! (color code)

6.22 rejoice to live in town; contrast supposedly romantic plantation

6.23 whispers

6.26 romantic notions of a sunny clime

6.27 children as property, marketable as pigs

6.29 deadens moral sense in white women

7.3 laws no sanction to marriage

7.16 romantic codes of honor

7.20-21 rights?

7.31 marriage no protection

7.32 get to the north

10.6 confuses all principles of morality, different standards

10.7 different standards

14.5 gothic (pit)

14.6 double minority

14.8 no claim to a name

14.11 genealogies of slavery (skeins metaphor)

14.12 chains metaphor

21.1 gothic? Attic

21.4 all must be done in darkness

21.5 verisimilitude x romanticism

41.9 domesticity—home of my own