Hollis Robbins: evaluation

Transcript context

…Now, you’re a white woman studying African American literature. You have a kind of outsider perspective of your own. What does that help you see that maybe is obscured by other parts of people working in your field? I got into the field accidentally because I had read excerpts of a slave narrative that Skip Gates had found in 2001 called The Bondwoman’s Narrative and had excerpted it. He found it at an auction, or he bought it at an auction. It was a manuscript called The Bondwoman’s Narrative by Hannah Crafts. We didn’t know anything about the author. We didn’t know anything about its date. We didn’t know anything about its provenance. He went to work, trying to find it through things like what was the ink it was written in? What were the allusions? Were there allusions to Uncle Tom? Did it fit in with a slave narrative genre launched by Frederick Douglass? Anyway, he had excerpted it in the New Yorker magazine, and I immediately recognized some of the borrowings or some of the excerpts as borrowings from Charles Dickens’s Bleak House. I had been trained as a Dickens scholar at Princeton, or 19th-century American and British literature. Most of the scholars that he had shown this book to hadn’t recognized those echoes. From the very beginning, Skip thought what I brought to the field when I started working with him, and when I began to transition from an American literature scholar to an African American literature scholar, was that I was trained in the very books that most African American writers in the 19th century were themselves reading. In fact, if you are really going to take 19th-century African American literature seriously, you need to read the books that they were reading. They were reading Dickens, and they were reading Tennyson, and they were reading Carlyle and Wordsworth. And sonnets also, right?…

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