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Cover of The inhuman race

The inhuman race

the racial grotesque in American literature and culture

By Leonard Cassuto

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Publish Date

1997

Publisher

Columbia University Press

Language

eng

Pages

289

Description:

While modern critics have tended to approach black and white perspectives of race in America by considering the two sides separately, Cassuto's timely book brings the two together, reconstructing a dialogue between objectifiers (American Puritans, slaveowners) and objectifieds (Native Americans, slaves). The focus is on literature - from Puritan captivity accounts, fugitive slave narratives, and proslavery fiction to the work of writers such as Melville, Stowe, Douglass, and their contemporaries - but Cassuto also ranges from colonial prodigies to nineteenth-century freak shows and Sambo stereotyping, from horror movies to the Holocaust Museum. The Inhuman Race challenges not so much what we think as the way we think: the way we organize information - and people - into categories. Cassuto thus links the imagination and events of colonial and antebellum Americans directly to our own troubled times.