Contact us on (02) 8445 2300
For all customer service and order enquiries

Woodslane Online Catalogues

9781469694191 Academic Inspection Copy

Minor Moves

Black Girls and Unruly Performance in Antebellum Narratives
Description
Author
Biography
Reviews
Google
Preview
Scholars and critics have long understood the writing of nineteenth-century Black women as critiquing the figure of Topsy-an enslaved girl in Harriet Beecher Stowe's influential novel Uncle Tom's Cabin. Many interpret the works of authors such as Harriet Jacobs, Harriet Wilson, and Hannah Crafts as rejecting Topsy and providing their own corrective representations of Black girls. Through close readings, Allison S. Curseen revisits some of these works to argue otherwise. Instead, she contends that Black girls' physical movements emerge in their narratives not as rejections but as critical reenactments of Topsy. Minor Moves draws on performance studies, literary studies, and childhood studies to offer provocative and incisive readings of Black girls' movements in nineteenth-century US literature. Curseen challenges readers to pay attention to "minor" movements that appear fleeting, inconsequential, and easy to overlook. Attending to these movements, Curseen argues, is urgent to the project of imagining Black girl life amid the anti-Blackness embedded in American culture. These movements reveal modes of being that work to elude dominant structures and gesture to the abundance of Black life: to growing bodies, fugitive Black female desires, queer geographies, and unruly, childish plotting.
Allison S. Curseen is Cooney Family Assistant Professor of English at Boston College.
"Allison Curseen's wonderfully playful interpretations of 'minor' scenes in antebellum literature are uniformly stunning. Readers who have spent years teaching and studying these texts will find rich, new insights."-Karen Sanchez-Eppler, author of Dependent States: The Child's Part in Nineteenth-Century American Culture
Google Preview content