Serialization and Schooling in Julia C. Collins's The Curse of Caste (1865)
Nazera Sadiq Wright
University of Kentucky
Nazera Sadiq Wright is Associate Professor of English at the University of Kentucky, specializing in nineteenth and twentieth-century African American literature, print culture, and black girlhood studies. Her research is supported by fellowships through the Ford Foundation, the NEH, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. She is the author of Black Girlhood in the Nineteenth Century (University of Illinois Press, 2016). During 2017-2018, she will be in residence at the Library Company of Philadelphia as a National Endowment of the Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow and an Andrew W. Mellon Program in African American History Postdoctoral Fellow to advance her second book.
Abstract
Nazera Wright’s, “Serialization and Schooling in Julia C. Collins’s The Curse of Caste (1865),” places Collins’s novel in conversation with her earlier serial work: a series of Christian Recorder essays. The... [ view full abstract ]
Nazera Wright’s, “Serialization and Schooling in Julia C. Collins’s The Curse of Caste (1865),” places Collins’s novel in conversation with her earlier serial work: a series of Christian Recorder essays. The novel, argues Wright, uses a black girl’s recent graduation from seminary school and schooling scenes with edifying language to teach racial and class hierarchies. One year prior, Collins promotes formal education in “Mental Improvement” (April 16, 1864), one of five serialized essays for the Recorder. Here she argues, “Among all persons distinguished for refinement and cultivation of the mind, the art of reading is the most prevalent and important.” In Curse, however, Collins prioritizes alternative ways of “reading” to navigate Black Reconstructions’ racial climates. The protagonist, Claire Neville, must “school” herself to withstand the prejudices she faces. Despite her education, Claire’s options for employment are limited, so she travels south to work as a governess in the home of Colonel Tracy, a white man. Collins’s reevaluation of institutions of learning continues as Tracy’s library becomes a violent site where untold truths and racial secrets are shared, a twist on visions of libraries as positive, peaceful learning institutions. Collins joins black women writers, such as Harper and Anna Julia Cooper, who reexamine institutionalized education to suggest that knowledge does little to protect against the evils that mankind enacts upon others through violence.
Authors
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Nazera Sadiq Wright
(University of Kentucky)
Topic Area
Panel
Session
P27 » Serial Blackness: Seriality the Fragment and Nineteenth-Century African American Literary History (15:45 - Thursday, 22nd March, Fiesta III-IV)
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