Topsy's Legacy: Imagining Uncle Tom's Cabin After the Civil War

February 8th at 6:00 pm in the Aetna Theater at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, 600 Main Street, Hartford.

As the popularity of Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1852 novel Uncle Tom's Cabin grew, so did the number of illustrations that were printed alongside the text, and as the years passed the story and characters became a part of American popular culture.  By the turn-of-the-century, Uncle Tom's Cabin was experienced visually in multiple ways, including stage plays and minstrel performances, the broadside posters that advertised these productions, photographs of actors, and early silent films. This talk explores illustrations of Topsy at the dressing table, a favorite scene from stage adaptations of the book that existed first in the theatre and then later made their way into reprints as erroneous illustrations. Why were apocryphal images such as this one so popular and how did they come to signal both the possibilities and the limits for depicting racial violence in the century that followed America's Civil War?

Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw is Associate Professor of History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania and the Visual Arts Editor for Transition.  She is the author of Seeing the Unspeakable: The Art of Kara Walker (Duke UP: 2004) and Portraits of a People: Picturing African Americans in the Nineteenth Century (Washington: 2006).  Her forthcoming book, tentatively titled Strictly a Negro Art is a bio-contextual study of work by the Harlem Renaissance-era artist Sargent Johnson.