Space, Place, Identity: Racial Geographies in Our Nig, by Harriet E. Wilson
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17851/2317-2096.23.3.187-198Keywords:
space, slavery, race, novel, United StatesAbstract
This essay examines Our Nig, published in 1859 and considered the first novel written by a woman of African ancestry in the United States, as a critique of northern racist attitudes towards blacks in the north, a region usually depicted by southerners as sympathetic to abolitionist movements. Drawing from insights from the fields of cultural anthropology and social geography, the essay discusses how Wilson represents the dynamics of racialized spaces and places, which become handy tools of domination and exploitation of black labor. Through the abuses inflicted on the main character, the mullata Frado, Wilson meditates about the racialization of places in a particular residence, the Bellmont’s. Yet, it becomes evident in the course of the novel that the critical scope is much broader. Besides exposing nineteenth-century racial ideologies which underscored the racial demarcation of spaces and places, by using the house as a metaphor for nation, the author reveals an inherent contradiction in the abolitionist campaign: on the one hand, the abhorrence of slavery; on the other, social segregation of the black subject.
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