Category: 2024 Spring Issue

Brandon Roberts In tracing the theoretical mind of James Baldwin, Melvin Rogers shows a particular interest in the nature and function of guilt: how it manifests in the American mind and how it paralyzes (white-)America in the face of necessary action. Baldwin’s biting critique of American “moral monsters” often engenders this exact sort of guilt,…

Allie Konopelski In her preface to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe claims that:  This statement exemplifies ‘romantic racialism,’ a popular doctrine in 19th-century America that, while still acknowledging “permanent racial differences,” projected a more flattering image of the African-American, now seen as typically passive, gentle— in short, a natural Christian (Stowe 3). Romantic racialism…

Jessica Whalen Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself is unique in the history of the American slave narrative. Only in the late 20th century was a cache of letters discovered that confirmed Harriet Jacobs’s authorship of the work and the factual basis of her history, a history that…