Our Nig

by Harriet E. Wilson

  34. See Wilson, Our Nig, ed. Foreman and Pitts, xiv.

  35. Massachusetts Deaths, 506: 95, Massachusetts Archives, Columbia Point, Boston, Mass. See also Wilson, Our Nig, ed. Foreman and Pitts, xiii-xiv; notice of Wilson’s death, Boston Globe, June 29, 1900, 12. See also appendix 3. The details of the Cobbs’ family history and family lore derive from an e-mail sent by Russell Cobb to R. J. Ellis, December 13, 2010.

  SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Baker, Houston A, Jr. “In Dubious Battle.” New Literary History: Literacy, Popular Culture, and the Writing of History 18 (Winter 1987): 363–69.

  Bassard, Katherine Clay. “Gender and Genre: Black Women’s Autobiography and the Ideology of Literacy.” African American Review 26, Women Writers Issue (Spring 1992): 119–29.

  ———. “ ‘Beyond Mortal Vision’: Harriet E. Wilson’s Our Nig and the American Racial Dream-Text.” In Female Subjects in Black and White: Race, Psychoanalysis, Feminism, edited by Elizabeth Abel, Barbara Christian, and Helene Moglen. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997, 187–200.

  Boggis, JerriAnne, Eve Allegra Raimon, and Barbara W. White, eds. Harriet Wilson’s New England: Race, Writing, and Region. Durham: University of New Hampshire Press, 2007.

  Borrego, Silvia P. Castro. “Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig: Towards the Development of the ‘Woman Question’ and the Problem of ‘The Color Line’ into XX Century America.” In Actas III Congreso de la Sociedad Espanola para el Estudio dos Estados Unidos/Spanish Association for American Studies (SAAS): Fin de Siglo: Crisis y nuevos principios/Century Ends, Crises and New Beginnings, edited by Maria Jose Alvarez Maurin, Manuel Broncano Rodrigues, Camino Fernandez Rabadan, and Cristina Garrigos Gonzalez, Leon, Spain: Universidad de Leon, 1999, 49–55.

  Breau, Elizabeth. “Identifying Satire: ‘Our Nig.’ ” Callaloo 16 (Spring 1993): 455–65.

  Carby, Hazel V. “ ‘Hear My Voice, Ye Careless Daughters’: Narratives of Slave and Free Women before Emancipation.” In Black Women’s Intellectual Traditions: Speaking Their Minds, edited by Kristin Waters and Carol B. Conaway. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2007, 91–112.

  Cole, Phyllis. “Stowe, Jacobs, Wilson: White Plots and Black Counterplots.” In New Perspectives on Gender, Pace, and Class in Society, edited by Audrey T. McCluskey. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990, 23–45.

  Davis, Cynthia J. “Speaking the Body’s Pain: Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig.” African American Review. 27, Women’s Culture Issue (Autumn 1993): 391–404.

  Doriani, Beth Maclay. “Black Womanhood in Nineteenth-Century America: Subversion and Self-Construction in Two Women’s Autobiographies.” American Quarterly 43 (June 1991): 199–222.

  Dowling, David. “ ‘Other and More Terrible Evils’: Anticapitalist Rhetoric in Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig and Proslavery Propaganda.” College Literature 36 (Summer 2009): 116–36.

  Doyle, T. Douglas. “ ‘A Two Story White House’: Our Nig and the Catechization of Northern and Southern Slaves.” MAWA Review 15 (December 2000): 22–26.

  Drews, Marie. “Catharine Beecher, Harriet E. Wilson, and Domestic Discomfort at the Northern Table.” In Culinary Aesthetics and Practices in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, edited by Monika Elbert and Marie Drews. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, 89–105.

  Ellis, R. J. “What Happened to Harriet E. Wilson, nee Adams? Was She Really Hattie Green?” Transition: An International Review 99 (2008): 62–168.

  ———. Harriet Wilson’s “Our Nig”: A Cultural Biography of a “ ‘Two-Story” African American Novel. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003.

  ———. “Our Nig: Fetters of an American Farmgirl.” In Special Relationships: Anglo-American Affinities and Antagonisms, 1854–1936, edited by Janet Beer and Bridget Bennett. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002, 65–88.

  ———. “Traps Slyly Laid: Professing Autobiography in Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig.” In Representing Lives: Women and Auto/Biography, edited by Alison Donnell and Pauline Polkey. Basingstoke, England, and New York: Macmillan, St. Martin’s Press, 2000, 65–76.

  ———. “Body Politics and the Body Politic in William Wells Brown’s Clotel and Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig.” In Soft Canons: American Women Writers and Masculine Tradition, edited by Karen L. Kilcup. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999, 99–122.

  Elwood-Farber, Lisa. “Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig: A Look at the Historical Significance of a Novel That Exposes a Century’s Worth of Hypocritical Ideology.” Women’s Studies: An Inter-disciplinary Journal 39 (2010): 470–89.

  Ernest, John. Shadowing Slavery: Five African American Autobiographical Narratives. Acton, Mass.: Copley Publishing Group, 2002.

  ———. “Economies of Identity: Harriet E. Wilson’s Our Nig.” PMLA 109 (May 1994): 424–38.

  Foreman, P. Gabrielle. Activist Sentiments: Reading Black Women in the Nineteenth Century. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009.

  ———. “The Spoken and the Silenced in Incidents in The Life of a Slave Girl and Our Nig.” Callaloo 13 (Spring 1990): 313–24.

  Foreman, P. Gabrielle, and Katherine Flynn. “Mrs. H. E. Wilson, Mogul?” Boston Globe, February 15, 2009.

  Foster, Frances Smith. Written by Herself: Literacy Production by African American Women 1746–1892. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993.

  Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth. “ ‘To Weave It into the Literature of the Country’: Epic and the Fictions of African American Women.” In Poetics of the Americas: Race, Founding, and Textuality, edited by Bainard Cowan and Jefferson Humphries. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997, 31–45.

  Gardner, Eric. “Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black.” African American Review 38 (Winter 2004): 715–18.

  —–. “ ‘This Attempt of Their Sister’: Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig from Printer to Readers.” New England Quarterly 66 (June 1993): 226–46.

  Grasso, Linda. The Artistry of Anger: Black and White Women’s Literature in America, 1820–1860. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002.

  Henderson, Carol E. “Shades of Blackness: Race, Religion and Single Parenthood in Harriet E. Wilson’s Our Nig.” MAWA Review 14 (June 1999): 31–42.

  Ibarrola-Armendariz, Aitor. “Harriet E. Wilson’s Our Nig: An Idiosyncratic Attempt to Locate the Color Line in Terms of Class, Gender and Geography.” In Literature and Ethnicity in the Cultural Borderlands, edited by Jesus Benito and Anna Maria Manzanas. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002, 23–33.

  James, Jennifer C., and Cynthia Wu. “Editors’ Introduction: Race, Ethnicity, Disability, and Literature: Intersections and Interventions.” MELUS 31, Race, Ethnicity, Disability, and Literature Issue (Fall 2006): 3–13.

  Jefferson, Margo. “Down & Out & Black in Boston.” Nation 236 (May 28, 1983): 675–77.

  Johnson, Ronna C. “Said but Not Spoken: Elision and the Representation of Rape, Race, and Gender in Harriet E. Wilson’s Our Nig.” In Speaking the Other Self: American Women Writers, edited by Jeanne Campbell Reesman. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997, 96–116.

  Jones, Jill. “The Disappearing ‘I’ in Our Nig.” Legacy 13 (1996): 38–53.

  Joyce, Joyce A. “ ‘Who the Cap Fit’: Unconsciousness and Unconscionableness in the Criticism of Houston A. Baker, Jr., and Henry Louis Gates, Jr.” New Literary History 18, Literacy, Popular Culture, and the Writing of History Issue 18 (Winter 1987): 371–84.

  King, Debra Walker. “Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig.” In Recovered Writers/Recovered Texts, edited by Dolan Hubbard. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1997, 31–45.

  Krah, Barbara. “Tracking Frado: The Challenge of Harriet E. Wilson’s Our Nig to Nineteenth-Century Conventions of Writing Womanhood.” Amerikastudien/American Studies 49 (2004): 465–82.

  Larson, Jennifer. “Renovating Domesticity in Ruth Hall, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, and Our Nig.” Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journals (July–August 2009): 538–58.

  Lester, Neal A. “Play(writing)
and En(acting) Consciousness: Theater as Rhetoric in Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig.” Western Journal of Black Studies 34 (Fall 2010): 347–57.

  Leveen, Lois. “Dwelling in the House of Oppression: The Spatial, Racial, and Textual Dynamics of Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig.” African American Review 35 (Winter 2001): 561–80.

  Lindgren, Margaret. “Harriet Jacobs, Harriet Wilson and the Redoubled Voice in Black Autobiography.” Obsidian II: Black Literature in Review 8 (Spring-Summer 1993): 18–38.

  Lovell, Thomas B. “By Dint of Labor and Economy: Harriet Jacobs, Harriet Wilson, and the Salutary View of Wage Labor.” Arizona Quarterly 52 (Autumn 1996): 1–32.

  Marfo, Florence. “Marks of the Slave Lash: Black Women’s Writing of the 19th Century Anti-Slavery Novel.” Diaspora: Journal of the Annual Afro-Hispanic Literature and Culture Conference 11 (2001): 80–86.

  Mitchell, Angelyn. “Her Side of His Story: A Feminist Analysis of Two Nineteenth-Century Antebellum Novels—William Wells Brown’s Clotel and Harriet E. Wilson’s Our Nig.” American Literary Realism, 1870–1910. Special Issue on African-American Fiction (Spring 1992): 7–21.

  Mullen, Harryette. “Runaway Tongue: Resistant Orality in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Our Nig, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, and Beloved.” In The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in Nineteenth-Century America, edited by Shirley Samuels. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992, 244–64.

  Peterson, Carla L. “Capitalism, Black (Under) Development, and the Production of the African-American Novel in the 1850s.” American Literary History 4 (Winter 1992): 559–83.

  Piep, Karsten H. “ ‘Nothing New under the Sun’: Postsentimental Conflict in Harriet E. Wilson’s Our Nig.” Colloquy: Text Theory Critique 11 (May 2006): 178–94.

  Pratofiorito, Ellen. “ ‘To Demand Your Sympathy and Aid’: Our Nig and the Problem of No Audience.” Journal of American & Comparative Cultures 24 (Spring-Summer 2001): 31–48.

  Raimon, Eve Allegra. The “Tragic Mulatta” Revisited: Race and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Antislavery Fiction. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2004.

  Santamarina, Xiomara. Belabored Professions: Narratives of African American Working Womanhood. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005.

  Short, Gretchen. “Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig and the Labor of Citizenship.” Arizona Quarterly 57 (Autumn 2001): 1–27.

  Stern, Julia. “Excavating Genre in Our Nig.” American Literature 67 (September 1995): 439–66.

  Stover, Johnnie M. Rhetoric and Resistance in Black Women’s Autobiography. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003.

  Tompkins, Kyla Wazana. “ ‘Everything ’Cept Eat Us’: The Antebellum Black Body Portrayed as Edible Body.” Callaloo 30 (Winter 2007): 201–24.

  Warren, Joyce W. “Performativity and the Repositioning of American Literary Realism.” In Challenging Boundaries: Gender and Periodization, edited by Joyce W. Warren and Margaret Dickie. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000, 3–25.

  West, Elizabeth J. “Reworking the Conversion Narrative: Race and Christianity in Our Nig.” MELUS 24 (Summer 1999): 3–27.

  White, Barbara A. “ ‘Our Nig’ and the She-Devil: New Information about Harriet Wilson and the ‘Bellmont’ Family.” American Literature 65 (March 1993): 19–52.

  Willey, Nicole L. “Mothering in Slavery: A Revision of African Feminist Principles.” Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering 9 (Fall-Winter 2007): 191–207.

  ———. Creating a New Ideal of Masculinity for American Men: The Achievement of Sentimental Women Writers in the Mid-Nineteenth Century. Lewiston: Edwin Mellon Press, 2007.

  Wilson, Harriet E. Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, in a Two-Story White House, North. Showing that Slavery’s Shadows Fall Even There. Boston: printed by George C. Rand & Avery, 1859.

  ———. Our Nig. In Three Great African-American Novels, edited by John Ernest. Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Publications, 2005.

  ———. Our Nig. Edited with an introduction by P. Gabrielle Foreman and Reginald H. Pitts. New York: Penguin Books, 2005.

  ———. Our Nig. Edited with Introduction by P. Gabrielle Foreman and Reginald H. Pitts. Second edition. New York: Penguin Books, 2009.

  —–. Our Nig. In Classic African American Women’s Narratives, edited by William L. Andrews. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.

  ———. Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, in a Two-Story White House, North. Showing that Slavery’s Shadows Fall Even There. Edited with Introduction by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York: Vintage Books, 1983, 2002.

  ———. Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, in a Two-Story White House, North. Showing that Slavery’s Shadows Fall Even There. Edited with Introduction by R. J. Ellis. Nottingham: Trent Editions, 1998.

  Dissertations

  Bell, Sophia R. “Naughty Child: The Racial Politics of Sentimental Discipline in Selected U.S. Antebellum Texts.” Ph.D. dissertation, Tufts University, 2008.

  Creighton, Jane Margaret. “The Bordering Nation: Problems of American Identity in Selected Novels from Our Nig to George Washington Gomez.” Ph.D. dissertation, Rice University, 1997.

  Francis, Allison E. “When the ‘Unprotected’ Body Speaks: The Narratives of Nineteenth-Century Black Females in the Caribbean and the United States.” Ph.D. dissertation, Washington University, 2005.

  Gardner, Eric Scott. “After Uncle Tom: The Domestic Dialogue on Slavery and Race, 1852–1859.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1996.

  Green-Barteet, Miranda A. “Neither Wholly Public, nor Wholly Private: Interstitial Spaces in Works by Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers.” Ph.D. dissertation, Texas A&M University, 2009.

  Jefferson, Lynne T. “The Emergence of a Pioneer: The Manipulation of Hagar in Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Novels.” Ph.D. dissertation, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, 2008.

  Jones, Jill Colvin. “ ‘You Don’t Know about Me’: The Disenfranchised Narrator in Nineteenth-Century United States Fiction.” Ph.D. dissertation, Tufts University, 1995.

  Lidinsky, April. “Working Figures: Discourses of Race and Class in Nineteenth-Century Working Women’s Self-Representations.” Ph.D. dissertation, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, 2000.

  Murphy, Jessica Alexandra Maeve. “Nation, Miscegenation, and the Myth of the Mulatta/o Monster 1859–1886.” Ph.D. dissertation, Université de Montréal, 2009.

  O’Connell, Catherine Elizabeth. “Chastening the Rod: Sentimental Strategies in Three Antebellum Novels by Women.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Michigan, 1992.

  Pratofiorito, Ellen C. “Selling the Vision: Marketability and Audience in Antebellum American Literature.” Ph.D. dissertation, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, 1998.

  Seldon, Tyra Lynnette. “Defining Free America: Reading Black Women’s Novels as Counter, Contending, and Contested Narratives.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Rochester, 2002.

  Wright, Nazera Sadiq. “Girlhood in African American literature, 1827–1949.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Maryland, College Park, 2010.