Reading Harriet: An Introduction to Race, Gender, and Belonging in the Antebellum United States

3.0 credits · Undergraduate

While the march toward the Civil War centers race in our recollection of the nineteenth century, the question of slavery’s abolition was deeply intertwined with issues of gender and citizenship. One challenge of narrating these interwoven movements is accounting for the embodied intersection of these debates: Black women. This introductory course approaches the complexities of antebellum America through 5 prominent figures of the period bearing the same first name—Harriet Robinson Scott, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Harriet Tubman, Harriet Jacobs, and Harriet Wilson. Read together, these women illuminate the nuances of racialized and gendered belonging in the United States. Their literary and historical traces also invite engagements with Black feminist reading and archival praxes. (ENGL-LOA, ENGL-PST)