The inhuman race
Subtitle: the racial grotesque in American literature and culture
By: Leonard Cassuto.
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 1997
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 289
Subjects: American literature -- History and criticism.; Racism -- United States -- History.; Stereotype (Psychology) in literature.; Difference (Psychology) in literature.; African Americans in literature.; Grotesque in literature.; Monsters in literature.; Indians in literature.; Slavery in literature.; Race in literature.
Description: While modern critics have tended to approach black and white perspectives of race in America by considering the two sides separately, Cassuto's timely book brings the two together, reconstructing a dialogue between objectifiers (American Puritans, slaveowners) and objectifieds (Native Americans, slaves).

The focus is on literature - from Puritan captivity accounts, fugitive slave narratives, and proslavery fiction to the work of writers such as Melville, Stowe, Douglass, and their contemporaries - but Cassuto also ranges from colonial prodigies to nineteenth-century freak shows and Sambo stereotyping, from horror movies to the Holocaust Museum.

The Inhuman Race challenges not so much what we think as the way we think: the way we organize information - and people - into categories. Cassuto thus links the imagination and events of colonial and antebellum Americans directly to our own troubled times.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [267]-280) and index.