Minor Moves

Black Girls and Unruly Performance in Antebellum Narratives

Scholars and critics have long understood the writing of nineteenth-century Black women as critiquing the figure of Topsy—an enslaved girl in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s influential novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Many interpret the works of authors such as Harriet Jacobs, Harriet Wilson, and Hannah Crafts as rejecting Topsy and providing their own corrective representations of Black girls. Through close readings, Allison S. Curseen revisits some of these works to argue otherwise. Instead, she contends that Black girls' physical movements emerge in their narratives not as rejections but as critical reenactments of Topsy.

Minor Moves draws on performance studies, literary studies, and childhood studies to offer provocative and incisive readings of Black girls' movements in nineteenth-century US literature. Curseen challenges readers to pay attention to “minor” movements that appear fleeting, inconsequential, and easy to overlook. Attending to these movements, Curseen argues, is urgent to the project of imagining Black girl life amid the anti-Blackness embedded in American culture. These movements reveal modes of being that work to elude dominant structures and gesture to the abundance of Black life: to growing bodies, fugitive Black female desires, queer geographies, and unruly, childish plotting.

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