Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s antislavery novel, was a tremendous success and the source of intense polemic when it first appeared in 1852. Since then, the novel has never entirely disappeared from the scene and has remained the locus of heated discussion on the representation of race and on race relations in the United States. This chapter will attempt to trace the role Uncle Tom’s Cabin – Stowe’s novel, but also its rewritings, tie-ins, and adaptations – has played in discussions of race in the United States since the 1850s. The first part will investigate the inception of the novel, its strategies, publishing circumstances, and immediate reception. The second part will focus on the afterlife of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, both in terms of scholarly commentary and popular appropriations.

With a focus on Brazil, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, this chapter examines the sense of belatedness in abolitionist and postabolitionist literature published between the 1860s and the 1930s. Belatedness implied an affective relationship to the global temporality of abolition – a way of feeling time as shame that shaped literature in long-lasting ways. Writers like José Martí and Machado de Assis reflected on the apparently anomalous status of their nations, where slavery was not abolished until 1886 and 1888 respectively. By analyzing canonical literature in light of the Black public spheres that emerged in the last decades of the nineteenth century, this chapter explores questions such as the rejection of African cultures, Whitening ideologies, the fantasy of the submissive slave, the myths and realities of racial democracy, Maroonage, and other forms of slave resistance. Other writers analyzed include Maria Firmina dos Reis, Antônio de Castro Alves, Alfonso Henriques de Lima Barreto, Martín Morúa Delgado, and Francisco Calcagno.

This chapter scrutinizes early frontispieces contained within books by Phillis Wheatley and Olaudah Equiano and then proceeds to examine the illustrated antislavery books of Moses Roper and Henry Bibb (both of which also contain frontispieces as well as other types of illustrations). Although Roper’s book was published in 1837 and Bibb’s in 1849, this chapter argues that both men (being born in 1815 and having participated in the antislavery movement) were responding to the abject treatment of the enslaved in earlier antislavery materials. The words of the text interact with its visual optic to interpellate the reader and envision a figurative mode of agency and self-possession for the enslaved body and the freed Black subject. The chapter concludes with a forward glance at artworks by Kara Walker and Glen Ligon that also attempt to excavate (although in a more abstract way) the trace of a resistant visual tradition within African American literature and US visual culture.