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"The Negro never knew"; Emily Dickinson and Racial Typology in the Nineteenth Century

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From: Legacy
Date: 20020430
Author:Bennett, Bernat

In the spring of 1992, I was teaching a graduate seminar in Dickinson. As teachers generally do, I took pleasure in reading selected poems aloud. In the middle of "The Malay - took the Pearl" (F451, late 1862), however, I stopped dead, unable to go on. I had read this poem dozens of times before and written on it as well; but this was the first time I saw it not as a Dickinson poem, but as a nineteenth-century text, one of many texts in which the denigration of people of color is treated so casually one barely registers it's there. Certainly, the racism of the lines I had just read -- "The ...

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