From Uncle Tom's Cabin to The Help (PDF)

Alisha Gaines, Florida State University, USA
Luminita Dragulescu, Virginia Union University, USA

Julia Jordan-Zachery, Providence College, USA

Sarah Leah Santíllanes, University of New Mexico, USA
Jenise Hudson, Florida State University, USA
Karen A. Johnson, University of Utah, USA
Ebony Lumumba, University of Mississippi, USA
Josephine Metcalf, University of Hull, UK
Shana Russell, Rutgers University-Newark, USA
Paula Marie Seniors, Virginia Tech University, USA
Pearlie Strother-Adams, Western Illinois University, USA
Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, Williams College, USA
Robert T. Tally, Jr., Texas State University, USA
Katrina D. Thompson, Saint Louis University, USA
Elizabeth J. West, Georgia State University, USA

"A timely examination of 'racial ventriloquism' in the United States." - Southern World Arts News

"Using as an incisive point of interrogation numerous essays on the controversial book and film, The Help, Garcia, Pimentel, and Young have assembled a diverse range of essays that interrogate the political, social, class and gender assumptions cogent to 21st-Century representations of black identity. Engaging several exemplary texts by white authors, this book provides valuable perspectives on the virtues and limitations of fictional Otherness." - Alan Nadel, William T. Bryan Professor of American Studies, University of Kentucky, USA and author of Invisible Criticism: Ralph Ellison and the American Canon

"From Uncle Tom's Cabin to The Help is a penetrating examination of the fictive pervasiveness of white authorial narratives that obfuscate the complexity of Black folks and their humanity. It does so by exposing the way these dominant authorial narratives reify whiteness by making it the symbolic center through which writers misconfigure Blackness and race in the literary and popular imagination. This interdisciplinary volume moves the conversation on race and cultural production forward, while imagining how readers and spectators might develop a critical consciousness about the racialized scripts many of us fall prey to or perpetuate in our everyday lives." - Deborah Elizabeth Whaley, Associate Professor of American Studies, University of Iowa, USA

"Historical hindsight allows us to see the critical role that twentieth century image-marketing of 'Aunt Jemimas' and 'Uncle Bens' played in constituting a new, white middle class family and, thereby, nation. What became commonly known as a 'slave in a box,' that seemingly benign box of pancake and/or rice mix signified the labor of black servants and the endurance of white superiority. White families, especially white housewives, could buy these products and with them, the fantasy of being a