At Salon, historian David Reynolds talks about the varied political meanings of Uncle Tom’s Cabin over time. Apply it to Israel/Palestine, and you see that Mustafa Barghouti, still marginalized in our country, is a majestic progressive figure, so are Jonathan Pollak, Omar Barghouthi, anyone who might try and save Israel and Palestine from civil war. I believe Reynolds misuses the word “nonresistance” here. It’s nonviolent resistance, and remember that in our country today John Brown is a hero, ok a complicated one, but in the 1850s he was thought a madman. So why not embrace nonviolent resistance to oppression now? (Thanks to Brian Dana Akers). Reynolds:
I was struck by what a pivotal figure Harriet Beecher Stowe really was. In your book, she comes off as a mother of American liberalism.
Yes, in a way she is. She tries to domesticate radical thought — and this was one reason she was so popular. She tries to appeal to common, everyday feelings of human devotion. These elements can seem sentimental, but they’re also universal … And it was so popular throughout the world that [“Uncle Tom’s Cabin”] was actually used for different kinds of causes. It was one of the forces behind the emancipation of the serfs in Russia in 1861, and it was Lenin’s favorite childhood book — he said that it gave him “a charge to last an entire lifetime.”…
I mean, traditionally, most modern readers see it as kind of an old-fashioned and sentimental book, and we think of the Uncle Tom character as being sort of a sellout and a weak, spineless creature. In the book, though, Tom actually reads very strong — he’s in his 40s, he’s muscular, he has three children. He’s a very compassionate man and Christian man, and he believes in nonresistance. I think the whole record of what happens to the novel [and its reputation] over time really impressed me, because a lot of the people who were once called Uncle Toms — Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks — were the victors in the end. In a way, Uncle Tom won. [They were] true to this very firm, nonviolent [form of] protest.
That’s a pretty provocative claim. Isn’t there some validity to the more modern, critical reading of Uncle Tom’s character?
The trouble is that you can’t apply today’s views on [the time in which] the book appeared. In the South, Harriet Beecher Stowe was [considered] a demonic, satanic lover of African-Americans — they threw her book in the fire, they imprisoned people who owned it. It was far, far too radical and progressive throughout much of the South. So we can’t just call her a limousine liberal or something like that.
Now, there were some militant blacks like James Baldwin, Richard Wright and others who, with the rise of the “New Negro Movement” and the Harlem Renaissance, wanted a more militant voice. And so they used the Uncle Tom stereotype in a negative way. But at the same time we should recognize people like Langston Hughes, who was a great defender of the novel, and he saw how progressive it really was
