2024年Trouble Begins Lecture Series: Genealogies of Mothering and Mammying in Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson

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Presented by Briditte Fielder, University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Roxy, the mixed-race Black mother of Pudd 'nhead威尔逊, changes her child’s place with the child of her enslaver. She achieves this swap by performing the roles of mother and mammy, 分别, projecting race onto each child by virtue of their racialized relationships to her. Representations of the mother (overwhelmingly imagined as white in white-authored literature) and the racist minstrel trope of the mammy (overwhelmingly overshadowing Black motherhood in white-authored literature) converge in Twain’s novel. This reveals their co-construction: the mammy’s surrogacy is dependent upon her own mother-relation, even as this relation is impeded by the legal mechanisms of slavery. Twain’s novel hereby illustrates how race is not simply constructed within individual bodies or identities but via racialized relationships.

碧姬外野手 is an Associate Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. 她是……的作者 Relative Races: Genealogies of Interracial Kinship in Nineteenth-Century America (2020) and co-author (with Jonathan Senchyne) of Against a Sharp White Background: Infrastructures of African American Print (2019). Her essays have appeared in journals including 非裔美国人评论, American Literary 历史, American Quarterly, 内战历史, J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, Journal of the 历史 of Childhood and Youth, Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers, 狮子和独角兽, Research on Diversity in Youth Literature, TSWL: Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, and various edited collections.

The 2024年Trouble Begins Lecture Series and Park Church 夏天 Lecture Series are made possible by the generous support of The Mark Twain Foundation.