The Inhuman Race: The Racial Grotesque in American Literature and Culture

Front Cover
Columbia University Press, 1997 - 289 pages
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.

Other editions - View all

About the author (1997)

Leonard Cassuto is associate professor of English and American literature at Fordham University.

Bibliographic information