Uncle Tom's Cabin: Before and After the Jim Crow Era

Abstract

Despite Uncle Tom's Cabin's “extraordinary and global importance as novel, performance, and film”, it is rarely read or taken seriously, except as a negative. But studying Uncle Tom's Cabin can provide a key to “the issues and images of black performance at the turn of the century”—and beyond.

Journey to a Land of Cotton: A Slave Plantation in Brooklyn, 1895

“…As Michelle Wallace has argued, the concrete realities of Jim Crow segregation must be located in the aesthetics, narratives, and forms of an era's cultural production. 8 By couching blackness within regressive tropes of history and thus placing it in service to contemporary industrial progress, Black America sought to solidify ideologies of race within the collective national historical memory. 9 As Susan Stewart argues, nostalgia is rooted in a denial of the present and as such more accurately represents "a collage made of presents" than "a reawakening of a past."…”