Book contents
- Gender in American Literature and Culture
- Cambridge Themes in American Literature and Culture
- Gender in American Literature and Culture
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part I Intimacies
- Part II Aggressions
- Chapter 8 Sexual Violence and Indigenous Women
- Chapter 9 Intergenerational Memory and the Making of Indigenous Literary Kinships
- Chapter 10 US Women Writers, Sexual Violence, and Narrative Resistance
- Chapter 11 Gender, Violence, and Accountability in Contemporary Queer Latina Writing
- Chapter 12 The Literature of Racial Uplift and White Feminist Failure
- Chapter 13 Black Male Studies and Contemporary African American Writing
- Chapter 14 Representations of White Masculinity in Veteran-Authored Iraq War Fiction
- Part III New Directions
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 12 - The Literature of Racial Uplift and White Feminist Failure
from Part II - Aggressions
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 April 2021
- Gender in American Literature and Culture
- Cambridge Themes in American Literature and Culture
- Gender in American Literature and Culture
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part I Intimacies
- Part II Aggressions
- Chapter 8 Sexual Violence and Indigenous Women
- Chapter 9 Intergenerational Memory and the Making of Indigenous Literary Kinships
- Chapter 10 US Women Writers, Sexual Violence, and Narrative Resistance
- Chapter 11 Gender, Violence, and Accountability in Contemporary Queer Latina Writing
- Chapter 12 The Literature of Racial Uplift and White Feminist Failure
- Chapter 13 Black Male Studies and Contemporary African American Writing
- Chapter 14 Representations of White Masculinity in Veteran-Authored Iraq War Fiction
- Part III New Directions
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s 1869 serialized novel Minnie’s Sacrifice offers a critique of white feminism’s failures at antiracism. This chapter reads Harper’s critiques of white feminism within the historical context of her and other black women’s intersectional activism and the larger print context of the Christian Recorder. Harper’s work within the women’s rights movement made her familiar with white feminism’s failures, in which women like Harper’s character Camilla, the antislavery daughter of an enslaver family, prioritize their own interests, claim positions of victimization, and foist labor onto Black people, all while claiming to be allies. Harper’s novel is not a narrative of white feminist progress but demise, as her mixed-race Black characters distance themselves from white feminist ideals. Harper’s novel illustrates how – even while discussing the extreme anti-Black racism of slavery, disenfranchisement, and lynching – Black women activists were not fooled by insufficient forms of allyship.
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- Gender in American Literature and Culture , pp. 188 - 203Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2021