Description
While Garner's story has famously inspired Toni Morrison's most celebrated novel, Beloved, the details of the actual events remain largely unknown. In Who Speaks for Margaret Garner? Mark Reinhardt has assembled the most important primary documents concerning the case and its aftermath-newspaper accounts of the Garner family's escape, capture, and trial; sermons; editorials; legislative debates; and literary responses-opening up a new perspective on American culture and society on the eve of the Civil War.
Immersing readers in a wealth of fascinating documentary evidence, this book offers not only a singular exploration of antebellum America's debates over such contentious issues as slavery and freedom, race and gender, party and region, and law and politics, but also an engrossing introduction to the work of historical and cultural interpretation.
About the Author
Mark Reinhardt is Class of 1956 Professor of American Civilization and chair of the Program in American Studies at Williams College. He is the author of Beautiful Suffering: Photography and the Traffic in Pain; Kara Walker: Narratives of a Negress; and The Art of Being Free: Taking Liberties with Tocqueville, Marx, and Arendt.
Reviews
"Mark Reinhardt's thoughtful presentation does American identity a tremendous favor. Although the theater may already have introduced Margaret Garner's sensational tragedy, only now can we follow her excruciating transit through competing jurisdictions and contentious representations. Reinhardt grapples honestly with the fine grain of racial subordination on the eve of the Civil War, paying attention to the silences of forgetting as well as the record of remembering." -Nell Irvin Painter, author of Sojourner Truth: A Life, a Symbol
"Of all the fugitive slave cases, the Margaret Garner case was singular. Reinhardt's comprehensive volume documents the full panoply of the public argument, in the courts and the popular media, North and South, over the meaning of Garner's actions as a freedom-seeking slave mother. Who Speaks for Margaret Garner? shows us why any effort to reclaim the ever-elusive Garner today must reckon with those who tried to speak for and against her more than 150 years ago." -William L. Andrews, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Book Information
ISBN 9780816642595
Author Mark Reinhardt
Format Paperback
Page Count 320
Imprint University of Minnesota Press
Publisher University of Minnesota Press
Dimensions(mm) 229mm * 152mm * 23mm