The Afterlives and Meaning of Uncle

Tom’s CabinEnglish 213 – week 9

Minstrelsy

 Miss Ophelia—Now I have a few questions to ask you before we set to work. How old are you, Topsy?Topsy (grinning)—Dunno, missis.Miss Ophelia—Don't know how old you are! Did nobody ever tell you? Who was your mother then, child?Topsy (with another grin)—Never had none.Miss Ophelia—Never had any mother! What do you mean? Where were you born?Topsy—Never was born.Miss Ophelia (sternly)—You mustn't answer me like that, child. I am not playing with you. Tell me where you were born and who were your father and mother.Topsy (emphatically)—Never was born, never had no father, nor mother, nor nothin'!Miss Ophelia—Topsy, how can you say such things! How long have you lived with your master and mistress?Topsy—Dunno, missis.Miss Ophelia—Is it a year, or more, or less? Try to answer properly, this time.Topsy—Dunno missis. Miss Ophelia—Worse and worse! Do you know nothing at all, I wonder! Have you ever heard of God, Topsy? (Topsy shakes her head.) Do you know who made you?Topsy (laughing)—Nobody as I knows on: 'spect I grow'd. Don't think nobody ever made me.

The Legacy of Uncle Tom’s Cabin?

“Just as Uncle Tom’s Cabin performances that featured dances like “Jumping Jim Crow” were purportedly observed among real black people and then caricatured, Miley Cyrus, surrounded by black women half-dressed as animals, attempted and perverted a form of black dancing called twerking. Rather than aping aristocratic pretensions, like minstrel shows did, Cyrus sent up her own past as an innocent child by embodying the good girl who nevertheless knows she wants it. But it was minstrelsy just the same.”-Holy Derr The Atlantic

Topsy from Uncle Tom’as Cabin

Crazy Eyes in Orange is the New Black

Miley Cyrus at the VMAs

“A people to be free, must necessarily be their own rulers: that is, each individual must, in himself, embody the essential ingredient – so to speak – of the sovereign principle which composes the true basis of his liberty […] No one, then, can delegate to another a power he never possessed; that is, he cannot give an agency in that which he never had a right”-Martin Delany

“the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel; the wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray his aversion to experience, his fear of life, his arid heart; and it is always, therefore, the signal of secret and violent inhumanity, the mask of cruelty”-James Baldwin

“Uncle Tom's Cabin was spectacularly persuasive in conventional political terms: it helped convince a nation to go to war and to free its slaves [ . . .] The enterprise of sentimental fiction, as Stowe's novel attests, is anything but domestic. Its mission is global and its interests identical with the interests of the race. If the fiction written in the 19th-century by women whose work sold in the hundreds of thousands has seemed narrow and parochial to the critics of the twentieth century, that narrowness and parochialism belong not to these wolds nor to the women who wrote them; they are the beholders' share”-Jane Tompkins

Speed Dating Peer Review

• Does this thesis statement have an identifiable observation and interpretation?

• Can this observation/interpretation be disagreed with or is it obvious/self evident?– i.e. what would the “opposite” of its argument be?