Our Nig as an Archival Study in Class, Gender, and Race

Here are the instructions for Thursday's class day on the blog. This blogging exercise will count as a "fourth post" for the week of October 5. It must be completed by 12:00 p.m. (noon) on October 8. Please make a new post for your work.

Good luck, and have fun with this!

-Dr. Graban

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Let's say we are archival researchers, and Our Nig is an archive. There are several different methods we might use to examine this archive (a.k.a. "read this text") for critical assumptions about class, gender, and race. I'd like you to pick any 2 of the following 3 methods, share the brief but comprehensive results of your examination, and then compose a longer response to the question below. Then, I'd like you to respond to a classmate's response as one of your three posts for the week.

Archival Methodologies (choose 2 of 3 and discuss your results)
1) Read “chronology I” in the beginning of Our Nig (pp. vii-xvii); count the number of moves, abandonments, or instances of neglect that Hattie Wilson experiences in the course of this timeline. Look closely at the causes, consequences, and frequency of events to see what patterns you can note, i.e., did they happen every year or every 10 years, and did certain events happen at certain intervals of time?

2) Look up 2 unfamiliar terms (they can be familiar words that are used in an unfamiliar way in the book) in the Oxford English Dictionary Online and provide your own brief definition of each term that helps us to understand how it is used in the context of a specific passage in the story. Be sure to pick terms that you think have some significance to the narration.

3) Study the title page of the original text (p. 1 in our Penguin Classics edition). Allow yourself some time to simply study its contents. Do a close reading of all the text on the page, reading for literal as well as figurative or ironic meaning. Discuss the results and describe how you think they are significant to your or someone else’s reading of the book.

Discussion Question (compose a longer response)
The careful archival work you have done above should enable you to answer this question from a fairly unique perspective--call it your "lens."

Q: Based on how the characters are portrayed, what critical assumptions can be made about either race, class, or gender in the first 34 pages of the novel? These may be explicit, or they may be implied in the way that Wilson describes relationships between slave and free, black and white, male and female, or rich and poor.