Journal article
"Other and More Terrible Evils": Anticapitalist Rhetoric in Harriet Wilson's Our Nig and Proslavery Propaganda
College literature, Vol.36(3), pp.116-136
06/01/2009
DOI: 10.1353/lit.0.0068
Abstract
Much more than a straightforward document supporting black uplift and condemning northern racism, showing "that slavery's shadows fall even there," Harriet Wilson's Our Nig (1859) replicates the anticapitalist rhetoric common to proslavery propaganda of the era. Wilson fully exploited proslavery's best arguments against the North for her own rhetorical purpose of exposing northern racism. She would have been attracted to such arguments not only because they aptly described her own life as a New England mulatta and indentured servant, but also because they were extremely salable in the form of popular fiction, thus supporting her objective of selling the novel to feed herself and her ailing son. I do not discredit Wilson, but show how resourceful she was in appropriating for her own antiracist polemical purpose the most potent argument the South had against the North at the time in George Fitzhugh's Sociology for the South (1854), Cannibals All, or Slaves without Masters (1857), and Caroline Rush's North and South, or Slavery and its Contrasts (1852), which bring out Our Nig's anti-market tropes.
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- "Other and More Terrible Evils": Anticapitalist Rhetoric in Harriet Wilson's Our Nig and Proslavery Propaganda
- Creators
- David Dowling
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Publication Details
- College literature, Vol.36(3), pp.116-136
- Publisher
- West Chester Univ
- DOI
- 10.1353/lit.0.0068
- ISSN
- 0093-3139
- eISSN
- 1542-4286
- Number of pages
- 22
- Language
- English
- Date published
- 06/01/2009
- Academic Unit
- Journalism and Mass Communication
- Record Identifier
- 9984307654002771
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