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Economies of Identity: Harriet E. Wilson's Our Nig

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

John Ernest
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Abstract

In Our Nig (1859), Harriet E. Wilson offered the story of her life for sale to save her son's life. In her appeal for patronage, however, Wilson looked not for charity but rather for an economic exchange by which the cultural value of her critique of the mid-nineteenth-century northern states could be acknowledged. The narrative defines this exchange as an entrance into a moral economy — a new system of social relations based not on an ideal of cooperation but on the recognition that conflict and distrust among and within culturally defined social groups are inevitable. In this way, Our Nig responds to proslavery forces that found ready arguments in the injustices of capitalism and calls attention to the ethical motivations behind economic relations. (JE)

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 109 , Issue 3 , May 1994 , pp. 424 - 438
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1994

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