Racism and Translation: Uncle Tom’s Cabin in Nineteenth-Century France

Sarah C. Maza, Professor of History at Northwestern University 

With Carolyn Dean (Department of History) and Maurice Samuels (Department of French)

Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin was a sensation upon its 1852 publication in French translation, but was even more successful as a play that reached hundreds of thousands of spectators. The French play, however, differed significantly from the novel, most notably in that it almost completely sidelined the main character, Uncle Tom. This talk opens out from the novel and play to delve into the reasons why it was impossible to represent certain types of Black characters onstage in nineteenth-century France and why certain others were lionized. It ultimately connects racism in nineteenth-century French popular culture with longstanding cultural/political patterns stretching back to the Revolution of 1789.

Sarah Maza is Jane Long Professor of History at Northwestern University. A specialist in French history from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, she has published five books, most of which concern the “social imaginary” in French history and culture and questions of historical theory and methodology. Her most recent book is Thinking About History (University of Chicago Press, 2017). 

Cosponsored by Yale Translation Initiative, Department of French, Department of History, and Whitney Humanities Center.  

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