UNCLE TOM’S CABIN BY HARRIET BEECHER STOWE: AFRICAN AMERICAN RESPONSES

The paper gives a survey of the main stages in African American interpretation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or Life Among the Lowly (1852) by Harriet Beecher Stowe. After the publication of the novel, African American periodicals in the USA and Canada were publishing a wide range of reviews, essays, poems, and sketches reacting to Stowe’s book. Frederick Douglass was praising the book in his newspaper; there appeared, however, some aggressively critical responses, such as three letters by Martin Delany, a Black radial activist, written to the Frederick Douglass’ Newspaper in 1853. The argument of Delany and Douglass became a matrix for the further polemic based on the opposition of integrationist and afrocentrist approaches to the novel. This binary opposition remains practically unchanged until the Harlem renaissance, when African American writers and scholars (J. Weldon Johnson, W. S. Braithwaite, W. Thurman) become more critical, describing the novel as full of humiliating stereotypes, and its author as totally unable to properly understand and depict the Black race. The turning point in the assessment of the novel in the 20th century was Richard Wright’s collection of short stories Uncle Tom’s Children (1938) and James A. Baldwin’s essay Everybody’s Protest Novel (1949) – a criticism of “protest fiction” from Beecher Stowe to Richard Wright. Baldwin’s essay heralded the shift towards the Sixties hostile crusade against “uncle Tomism”, when Stowe’s protagonist was referred to as a symbol of servility and race betrayal, which was a complete inversion of the cultural myth of a Black Messiah that underlies the character. The final part of the paper analyzes the situation in current African American studies and in particular H. L. Gates’s subversive “double-voiced” interpretation of the novel which is in full agreement with the tendency to revise the role of white Abolitionists in the antislavery movement and in the African American history in the 1990–2000s.