Uncle Tom's Cluster : Talking Race

Abstract

Uncle Tom's Cluster:Talking Race William F. Condee (bio) Originally, this project wasn't about Barack Obama. Long before we knew that the United States would engage in a nationwide discussion of race during the summer of 2008, my goal was to create an opportunity for a diverse range of people to come together and talk about race. As a result, I led a teachers' institute that used the cluster of texts, performances, and images surrounding Uncle Tom's Cabin to examine race during the nineteenth century. Talking about race continues to be perilous in twenty-first-century America, and most people tend to slip past these discussions, both in and out of the classroom. Although many theatre professors today do incorporate aspects of race into their courses, whether in a diverse range of plays or as an aspect of theatre history, those who have not studied race issues extensively may feel anxious about appearing ignorant or insensitive while teaching a course focusing specifically on race. As a case study in the scholarship of dialogical and experiential-based work in teaching and learning focusing on Uncle Tom's Cabin, this article demonstrates some pedagogical approaches for actively engaging race in the classroom, including articulating one's own position, employing a team-taught interdisciplinary approach, historicizing the subject, engaging in experiential learning, working with contemporary artists, and interrogating issues of race. My goal is to demonstrate how these techniques can be used to create a pedagogy of talking. Talking is presented here as a performance practice, but one that cannot be directed. As a professor, one can only frame openings, create opportunities for reflection, and provide space and time for people to talk, which one hopes will foster an environment for exploration, discovery, and learning about race. This teachers' institute, named "Uncle Tom's Cabin: Race in 19th-Century Ohio," was part of a series sponsored by the Ping Institute for the Teaching of the Humanities at Ohio University (OU) for secondary-school teachers, the goal of which is to foster intellectual stimulation and invigoration, not necessarily to develop instructional materials. Uncle Tom's Cabin, first published in serial form in 1851 and as a book in 1852, revolves around a double plot: Tom's descent into the worst brutalities of slavery in the deep South, and the Harris family's (George, Eliza, and their son) escape north to Ohio and then Canada. The institute explored how the reception of Uncle Tom's Cabin changed during the course of US history, and how the novel and play changed history itself. The novel, which during the mid-nineteenth century made the case for the abolition of slavery, transformed to a play that by the end of the century was an engine of racism—from Uncle Tom's Cabin to "Uncle Tom." The novel was justifiably excoriated during the mid-twentieth century, with James Baldwin, the renowned African American author, issuing a famous denunciation in his essay "Everybody's Protest Novel": "Uncle Tom's Cabin is a very bad novel, having, in its self-righteous, virtuous sentimentality, much in common with Little Women. . . . Uncle Tom's Cabin—like its multitudinous, hard-boiled descendents—is a catalogue of violence" (11-12). The book is not widely read now, in part because of these criticisms, but it problematically remains "the most influential book ever written by an American" and "the most important book" of the nineteenth century (Tompkins 502, 504). This tension between Uncle Tom's Cabin's initial reception and its racist legacy makes it a unique lens for understanding changing race relations in the United States. [End Page 33] In order to frame this pedagogy of talking for the institute, I felt it essential to consciously position myself from the outset as a white man. I, like anyone else, do not approach the topic from an impartial, omniscient, or universal standpoint. My race, along with my gender and much else, greatly influences how I approach the material and how my teaching is received by others. While there may be no need to go into the particular facts of my life in this article, by foregrounding them I could demonstrate my process of...