5/24/2023 0 Comments Our Nig by Harriet E. Wilson![]() ![]() Gates sees it as a mix of the “sentimental novel” and “slave narrative.” The protagonist, a child named Frado, is the daughter of a white woman and a black man. As novels go, “Our Nig” is a bit unorthodox. Scholars have debated whether it should properly be called a novel at all since it seems to be quite clearly the story of Harriet Wilson herself. Gates in his introduction refers to “Our Nig” as an autobiographical novel. ![]() ![]() That alone would make it worth the read, but further historical research on Harriet Wilson reveals that the story behind the publication of the novel is every bit as interesting and revelatory about racism in the United States as Wilson’s story itself. Thus, “Our Nig” is the first novel published by an African American and the first by an African American woman in the US. Previously, it had been assumed that the story was written by a white woman but after poring over historical documents and putting the pieces together, Gates found evidence that Harriet Wilson, who had lived in New Hampshire and Massachusetts, was an impoverished African American woman who published her own novel as a way to support herself and her child. In the early 1980s, the eminent scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr., established that the 1859 novel entitled “Our Nig” was in fact written by an African American woman named Harriet E. Showing That Slavery’s Shadow Falls Even ThereĮdited by Henry Louse Gates, Jr. Full title: Our Nig or Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, in a Two-Story House, North. ![]()
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