Who the F… is Uncle Tom?!: Confusion, Culture Shock, and Teaching Stowe in Ankara
I have been teaching Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (UTC) for two years now. In fact, I have only been teaching for two years—meaning that 100% of my teaching experience has involved Stowe in one form or another: directly, indirectly, and sometimes just plain confusingly. Even though it’s one of the most “popular” novels in literary discussions, for both good, bad, and mildly offensive reasons, I still find myself reasonably apprehensive about teaching it. Not because the book is complicated, in fact, it’s almost shockingly simple, but because it arrives with baggage. UTC does not walk into the classroom alone; it drags behind a century and a half of moral certainty, caricature, and secondhand knowledge. This only multiplies in a non-Western classroom. “Uncle Tom” is not an insult or a cultural punchline. It is just a name—one that lands without irony in my classroom.
When I introduce the novel, I can see the moment students realize that whatever this book is, it is not what they thought it would be. Or worse, that they hadn’t thought about it at all. Ever. Their questions are immediate and unexpectedly productive. Why is this book famous? Why is it taught? Why does it seem to want something from its reader so insistently? And my personal favorite, “Why did a rich, white lady write this?”
The novel never gives a clean answer to any of these questions. Firstly, because “clean answers” are distressingly shallow. Secondly, Uncle Tom’s Cabin itself, or more so the act of studying it in the non-Western classroom, resists interpretive hygiene. The novel is desperate, evangelical, sentimental, politically blunt, and (sometimes) emotionally manipulative all at once. This tricky combination of angles makes students, simply put, suspicious. For them, Stowe does not offer a concrete way to feel. Certainly, they are strikingly aware and naturally accepting of the fact that slavery was, in fact, one of the most horrific demonstrations of institutionalized racism and violence, and that it is forever a historical stain. However, they did not learn this from Stowe. They perhaps did not have to “learn” it at all.
So where does this leave the trifecta of Stowe, my students, and me; as a newly appointed instructor? To make the answer to this vague question somewhat more approachable, I have broken down the outcome to three simple groups: “Love”, “Hate”, “Question”. All three represent the core of attitudes I have observed in my class towards Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Coincidentally (not really) all three represent my personal up’s and down’s with figuring out how to teach this giant of a novel as a non-western person to non-western pupils.
I would like to note here that I am a young instructor very close in age with my students, who graduated from the department that I currently teach at. I also have never been officially and academically taught Stowe and this novel. As a freshly graduated lecturer, I had to understand the grandeur of this work by myself and judge the case for teaching this novel outside the West. Particularly outside the US.
What About Me?: Student Me
Before I get into unpacking the wild ride that is UTC, I have to talk about my early experience with it. To do so, let me explain through my own feelings of “Love”, “Hate” and “Question”. I didn’t grow up with a sense of reverence to this book. It wasn’t in the air. It wasn’t culturally unavoidable (not my culture baby). It wasn’t something you just knew mattered. In fact, it wasn’t something you knew at all. Certainly not me. So when I came face-to-face with it, I questioned, I loved (in moments) and I hated (in general).
The first reaction, if I’m being honest, was questioning and confusion dressed up as indifference. My innocence for UTC was broken before I got to read the book. The first thing I knew about it was that I was supposed to “respect” it. This book arrives with a historic aura of importance, like “this changed history,” “this mattered,” “this did something”—and I was just sitting there like… “Okay but what is it actually doing right now? To me. On this page.”
And then there’s the love. Not a consistent, deep, soul-shifting, passionate love, let’s not get crazy, you won’t catch me loving UTC. But a compassionate attraction to certain moments. A sudden, almost annoying realisation that there are moments in this book that were important for some, when it came out in 1850. It did put slavery and racism into perspective for those who couldn’t comprehend its evil and brutality.There are pages in which the novel works exactly the way it wants to. Where the sentiment lands, where the moral clarity feels almost persuasive, where I catch myself thinking, “okay… I see it.” And then, almost immediately, I resent that feeling a little because of who wrote it and how.
Which is where the hate comes in. Not a dramatic, ideological rejection, but a very practical and dare I say, justified frustration. The repetition, the insistence, the emotional pressure. Mrs. Stowe, please! I get it already! But even though we’ve had (arguably) more than enough, Stowe reiterates once again;
“I did not write it. God wrote it. I merely did his dictation.”
I wrote what I did because as a woman, as a mother I was oppressed and broken-hearted, with the sorrows and injustice I saw, because as a Christian I felt the dishonor to Christianity — because as a lover of my country I trembled at the coming day of wrath.”
Yeah… God wrote it. Which would explain why it never ends. You don’t edit God. You certainly don’t tell God to wrap it up. Mrs. Stowe merely held the pen and felt the feelings and cried the tears and kept going for five hundred pages because that’s just what happens when the Almighty is dictating your novel. Here I do want to make it clear that, aside from my inherently sarcastic approach to Stowe, I do not wish to firmly state that what she did was unimportant. Misdirected? Yes. Ill-intended and careless? No. But why you gotta bring God into it? C’mon man.
It feels like the novel doesn’t trust you to arrive at its conclusions on your own which carries some generational irony. Stowe and I are certainly two different fish from two different cultural fishbowls but we do share some similarity in the fact that neither of us are black nor born into slavery. Meaning that the sentiment of “this is not her point to make” prevails. Pair that with a novel that tells you how to feel about something so obvious, and then tells you again, just in case you missed it the first time; is just, for a lack of a better word: annoying. However, unlike some people I will talk about in this paper (cough cough), Stowe does appear to care about what she’s writing.
What About Me?: Syllabus Writing, Newbie Instructor Me
One might ask, why would I choose to put UTC on my syllabus if I’m so annoyed by it. What could I have possibly been thinking (I ask this again after having taught it a second time). It wasn’t some deeply personal mission. It was partly a sense of obligation and partly curiosity. I felt obligated to teach my students about sentimentalism and obligated to teach them something “important” rather than something “good”. I told myself things like: “The course is called ‘The American Novel’. You have to put Stowe on there. That’s just how it works.” Without being entirely sure as to why. This is not to say that I had no clue why it was there. I had the parts of the sum that I couldn’t connect yet. A conversation with a professor in my department, one month before I started teaching, helped me figure out that I was personally putting the parts onto the sum.
When I asked the professor to check my syllabus as it was the first one I had ever written in my life, he gave me very very important and friendly advice about LANGUAGE. Especially the use of the N-word. Not knowing that this accidentally, indirectly, and unfortunately conditioned the expectations and anticipations I ended up placing on the students. I anticipated managing outbursts of insensitivity and trolling. When in reality I was dealing with something else. Needless to say I saw that I had some Wrong, with a capital W, expectations. I thought I knew exactly what kind of resistance I would get. Some versions of: “Türkiye’de siyahilere karşı ırkçılık yok ki?” (There’s no racism towards black people in Turkey),“Türkler siyahileri seviyor ki?” (Turks like black people), all the slightly chaotic takes students sometimes have. I was prepared to push against that, to explain, to contextualize, to correct.
Reading and Learning with Brain Rot!
Before getting too comfortable with blaming Stowe or the students, or me or anyone really, I have to address something I’m almost sure has to do with some of this: Brainrot. Short-form content, algorithmic attention spans, dopamine loops, Gen Alpha, Gen Z, and a whole bunch of words and terms that translate to “blah blah blah” in my classroom. Once during a class I weirdly had this thought that a student could be watching subway surfers gameplay on their phone, while I was standing there assigning Uncle Tom’s Cabin like it’s a completely reasonable thing to do.
I have been asked, with full sincerity: “Hocam, why do we have to read novels in the novel course?” With 0 irony. And I thought honestly, fair. Because what something like UTC asks from them is wildly out of sync with how they are used to consuming anything.This is a novel that takes pages and ages to make a point, then repeats the point, then emotionally reinforces it just in case. All the while been written by Stowe (or should I say God). Meanwhile, my students are used to content that gets to the point in under ten seconds or risks being skipped entirely. Gen Z (including me) love to press that 2x speed button baby! During a moment of in-class participation, one student made the point: “I did do the reading but it feels like it’s nothing new to me.” Which I couldn’t help but think—yes. Exactly.
As their instructor and most importantly as a Gen Z born in 2000, I have been accused of not paying enough attention (I stopped paying attention the day I was born pfft) because of TikTok. But I also believe accusations of brain rot are not always right. Because the same students who “can’t focus” will immediately point out patterns in the text and or contradictions and connections to our reality. They pick up on how often suffering is described in almost identical language.When the novel becomes a little too insistent, They make fun of it. Not dismissively, but thoughtfully. Because they have the ability to connect it to what we have the privilege of knowing and feeling today. They register that Stowe’s work is, maybe was, important but they also know that it’s not her story to tell. And finally, they understand why it had to be like that for the time period it came out. That’s not disengagement. That’s recognition. In fact, dare I say, it’s a highly underrated skill today. They don’t critique without trying to understand but don’t back down on their opinions and observations just because they have been told UTC is important.
This is where I start to get suspicious of the whole “brain rot” label. Because what looks like impatience is often just refusal or better yet an attempt to suggest an alternative. They are not passively receiving the text but actively negotiating with it. They don’t automatically trust authority, Stowe’s or mine. They can interrupt it, question it, sometimes even mock it a little. But that mockery isn’t empty. It’s a way of testing the text. Listen, I’m not saying brainrot doesn’t exist. Of course it does. Sometimes they just don’t read the novels because they really can’t be bothered. They don’t care. They don’t want to. Do I have students who can’t go a 50 minute lesson without scrolling? Of course I do. So yes brain rot is a thing but I don’t believe it’s being applied to students with the correct gaze or in the correct moments. It often carries an accusatory tone which is not always fair. What if, brainrot, or this inability to be patient can be turned on its head and used as a lens to be irreverent around things like UTC that we tend to praise or respect unquestioningly?
Is a novel like Uncle Tom’s Cabin supposed to fix brainrot? Is it an antidote—a way to force attention? Or does it actually make things worse by demanding a kind of reading that no longer feels natural or the reading of a material that is by all means outdated? Because the more I watch them engage with it, the less I think the issue is that they can’t read it. It’s that they won’t engage with it on its own terms or even on “authorities” terms . And maybe that’s the point…Students see the mechanism before they experience the effect. They read faster than the text expects them to. And in doing so, they turn what is supposed to be an emotional experience into an analytical one. So no, I don’t think “brain rot” makes them worse readers or that’s not what I see with my students. If anything, it makes them less patient with being told how to read. And if Stowe’s entire project depends on exactly that, separate from the issue of her, then the tension I see in the classroom is about some type of refusal.
Now with my personal and public beef with brain rot out of the way, we can return to the variety of reactions UTC elicits in the classroom. Because even with all the “but hocam”s I get, there are variations of feelings. That’s where things are specific, because it means the novel isn’t just failing but it’s also, somehow, provoking. Which brings me to the first reaction. Love.
Reaction One: Love
To be clear, I have not met a student whosaid they “love” Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Students have told me they have liked it or have enjoyed the discussions it has led up to. However, I have yet to hear of “love” for this novel. Is it because they don’t agree with Stowe’s stance? You know, Stowe’s stance being that of anti-slavery. Yet to see that happen. Is it because this approach to racism through a highly American depiction of the institution of slavery is so far off from their own cultures and countries history? No, because believe it or not, Gen-Z are capable of being historically informed and separate the personal from the material at hand. Then is it because this novel is just terrible and nobody can “love” it? Absolutely not.
It is because, even though it seems like a tentative and vague conclusion to come to, the novel has no interest in being “loved” especially by a non-western reader. It is, however, critically concerned, up until the last word, with being understood. By all readers. But this, the kind of “almost-love,”, the potential “admiration” that can come from being understood, sets the stage for something else entirely. Because the same qualities that make the novel occasionally land: its insistence, its repetition, its emotional pressure, are also exactly what push some (most) students in the opposite direction. So while the novel may not be loved, it is certainly not neutral either. For some students, that irritation is not a passing reaction. It becomes the dominant one. Which is where we move from this hesitant, fragmented “love” onto something much more direct: hate.
Reaction Two: Hate
But before I reduce “hate” to a type of student or a lack of interest, I have to admit something slightly inconvenient: the same mechanisms that make the novel “work” in those rare moments are exactly what produce frustration. The repetition that clarifies also exhausts. The emotional insistence that persuades also pressures. The moral clarity that once made the novel powerful now reads, like over-explanation. So when students say it’s “too much,” “too long,” or “keeps saying the same thing,” they are not necessarily failing but are reacting precisely to how it is built. In that sense, “hate” is not just a matter of disengagement or attitude; it is, at least in part, structurally produced by the text itself. Separate from the realities of the author
Let me tell you what type of student “hates” this novel. Students who do not like reading, students who are not big fans of the department they picked, students who do not like the course, and students who just don’t care. And again, to their credit and as I have explained above via the concept of brain rot, they can still get into it if they are asked directly. You know what I have never seen? A student who hates this novel because they are racist and fundamentally disagree with Stowe about slavery. I’m not saying they don’t exist, in fact it may be remarkable that I haven’t encountered any, having taught the novel to close to a hundred of them. The argument is almost always, “It was too wordy, too long, too dense” or the best one “I didn’t do the reading, hocam.” As if it wasn’t already obvious from their response to the assignment. The meaning of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in this context comes less from what it makes students feel and more from what it doesn’t. As a non-western, middle class, young instructor, it would not have been remotely surprising to me if their approach to the novel were indifference or detachment. But instead of dissociating from the novel for its emotional distance from their reality, they were able to critique it by asking questions
Reaction Three (the best one): Question
I have to be honest about my part in all of this. The first time I taught this novel, I don’t think I did a very good job. Perhaps it was decent considering it was my first time as an instructor. In fact I got some good feedback from the students. One of them even told me they liked the novel! What I had not realized was that even though I’m the instructor, the boss, the one in charge, I too, as I have stressed before, was trying to figure out how I feel about it and what it means to me.
Teaching Uncle Tom’s Cabin for the first time felt a bit like punching water. All of the assumptions I had about how I would teach it, how they would question the ethics of the book, turned out to be misguided. It is not an inherently terrible thing as a student to not want to do every single reading you are assigned. I’m sorry but as an ex-student, I don’t think not doing some readings is a cardinal sin.
Just to clarify, my first group of students were not particularly lazy, uninterested or reckless. In fact they had moments where they were not only coming up with respectable arguments, but were actually learning. Learning! What a concept. It was more about how we as a class and Stowe as a subject were just so foundationally different from each other. I found myself trying to explain, “we don’t have to like it, but we do have to understand its importance.” Meanwhile I too was trying to remember why it was important. Why is it important to understand this book outside the content it was written in and what do we feel about a white author writing about such a topic? Not to spoil the ending of this tale but, ultimately we collectively realized that the answers to these questions are just questions asked from different and overlooked perspectives.
One of the principal problems the students picked up about the novel is its insistence that moral clarity is universal and independent of position.They asked if Stowe knew what she was doing. If she understood the implications of who she was and her position in writing about slavery. One of my favorite questions was from a student who was doing a presentation comparing UTC with Childish Gambino’s This is America (2018) (a clever comparison). They asked their classmates “Is emotional manipulation acceptable if it’s done for good?” The question raises important points about the nature of emotional manipulation.Firstly, the question of how familiar do we have to be with context to register something as such?For my students, who are geographically and historically removed from antebellum United States, the sentimental foundation of the novel is not immediate but visible, even graspable. They can see when they are being asked to feel something. And that visibility produces suspicion not with the intention to surrender to a feeling but to break apart its parts and reconsider the sum.
Secondly, the question reveals a discomfort with moral authority that does not necessarily belong to the American nineteenth-century context but very to ours. What does it mean that one of the most influential texts about American slavery is written by a white woman? And perhaps more importantly for them.Why is this text reaching us in a non-Western classroom as representative of a certain canon?
For American readers, the novel is entangled with national history, inherited guilt (or sometimes a rejection of it). For my students, it is not ancestral but imported. That does not make it irrelevant, but it does make it external. They feel permitted to interrogate it in ways that might seem irreverent elsewhere. Even though during my first semester I had a difficult time expressing it, I did want them to question this choice. Of course, I am expected to teach what is deemed “important”. But there simply isn’t a right way to read a novel, let alone teach one. So in fact when they ask whether emotional manipulation is acceptable if it is done for good, they are not simply asking about “feeling”. They are figuring out a way to read this novel. And as they learn how to read it, they are also showing me how to teach it. To give myself a little credit, it helps that I’m a good teacher.. Stowe is both radical and limited. And that is precisely why the novel works. Because it makes sense, at least for us, only through questions rather than answers and resolutions. In a non-Western classroom, Uncle Tom is a prompt. My students are not historically bound to defend, inherit or reject its meaning. They are free to examine its construction. The novel survives in our context because it is removed from Stowe’s intentions
How Do You Solve a Problem Like Stowe?
Now I want to talk about something. The biggest thing. The thing that is connected to every single part of what I have said and every reaction I have experienced and explained: Authorship. The “who’s saying this” of it all. Before I get back to Stowe, I want to make a case about authorship. And to do that we must talk about Lead Belly. Lead Belly was an African American blues/folk singer and guitarist born in the late 19th century with a really distinctive 12-string guitar sound and a massive repertoire of songs that came out of lived experience. Chain gang songs, Southern folk songs, and songs about being black. For me, he didn’t just “write” in a clean, author-genius way. He was more like a carrier of material that already existed in experience and expressed them just as messily and harshly as he lived them.
I bring him up because not only is he, by all means, fantastic, he too is a part of the bigger picture Stowe’s approach cannot convey. Lead Belly, through time and race, has been refracted through various lenses and mirrors. Not only is Lead Belly a prolific and profound storyteller through his songs, but he is also the OG singer of one of my favorite songs, “Midnight Special” (1934). The song itself originated among prisoners in the American South in the early 1900s, is about a train passing a prison-most likely the Sugar Land prison in Texas- whose light symbolized hope, freedom, and salvation for inmates. Although not directly written by Lead Belly, the context is surely enhanced by the fact that he was imprisoned multiple times throughout his life and often discussed the black experience via music. Later, in 1969, the song was covered by Creedence Clearwater Revival, which does slightly raise eyebrows. But then, oh then, you have a 1976 ABBA cover of the same song. Yeah. ABBA.There is nothing wrong with ABBA and ABBA doing covers. I like me some Super Trouper. However do the lines “ If you ever go to Houston, oh you better walk right. And you better not squabble and you better not fight. Sheriff Rocko will arrest you, Eddie Boone will take you down. You can bet your bottom dollar, penitentiary bound…” really need to be in a rock-disco party tone? I really don’t want to bop my head to a song about how awful it is to be hopelessly incarcerated. While both these covers and both these bands are musically speaking nothing shy of great, they beg the questions: “does it mean the same thing when they say it?”
This particular case of Lead Belly gets even more dramatic the more you dig. Seeing how many of his, and others experiences were told by people out of those experiences. Nirvana’s famous cover of “Where Did You Sleep Last Night” once again dramatized and originally recorded by Lead Belly is an example of this. Again, Kurt Cobain singing “Her husband was a hard working man. Just about a mile from here. His head was found in a driving wheel. But his body never was found” is just organically going to yield a different meaning to when Lead Belly sings it. Led Zeppelin and their cover/iteration, “Gallows Pole” (1970) heavily influenced by and essentially taken from Lead Belly’s “Gallis Pole” (1939). Lastly, the only example from these that really has me SHOOK, is the song “Pick a Bale of Cotton”. While it's a traditional American song with no single author, it is associated with Belly and most importantly, the history of black slavery. So what does that mean when in 1972, Johnny Cash sang this song? When he sings like Belly did once: "Jump down, turn around, pick a bale of cotton. Jump down, turn around, pick a bale a day.” (1972) is he singing of an action, an experience or is he telling someone to do it?
And this is where authorship starts to matter less as “origin” and more as position. Because in Lead Belly’s case, the song is never just detachable content. It carries the conditions it comes from in a way that makes later performances feel structurally different, not just stylistically different. The meaning shifts depending on how close or far the singer is from the experience being narrated, and that distance changes what the song, the story is doing. The same lyrics can become testimony in one and aesthetic performance in another. Which is why this matters for Stowe. Uncle Tom’s Cabin is also built on a claim to speak about experience from a position outside of it, unlike ABBA or Johnny Cash, it tries to resolve that distance through emotional saturation. The problem my students keep circling is not just what Stowe says, but what her position allows her to turn suffering into.
This is where Lead Belly starts to matter in a slightly different way than just as an example of cultural circulation or “who sings what.” Because what his case actually highlights is not just the movement of songs across time, but the way authorship itself is translated, covered, re-performed, or re-framed by someone who is no longer inside the original conditions of that experience. The song, like the text, becomes something that must now work for a listener who is no longer located inside it. If this question of irritation, distance, and “who is this even for?” feels familiar in my classroom, it’s because it’s not actually unique to my students or even to teaching Stowe in a non-Western context. It is already embedded in American culture and evidently with UTC, American literary criticism itself.
James Baldwin, for example, in Notes of a Native Son (1955), is basically already doing this work with Uncle Tom’s Cabin. To clarify, the 1955 book is about Richard Wright’s novel Native Son (1940) but there is a strong intersection where his critiques of that novel come through for UTC. His issue with Stowe is not only that she is sentimental or “too emotional,” but that sentimentality becomes a mechanism through which slavery is made readable rather than fully confronted or better yet, it is made to be digestible for WHITE PEOPLE. In his own, fantastically striking words:
“Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a very bad novel, having, in its self-righteous, virtuous sentimentality, much in common with Little Women. Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel; the wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray his aversion to experience, his fear of life, his arid heart; and it is always, therefore, the signal of secret and violent inhumanity, the mask of cruelty. Uncle Tom’s Cabin—like its multitudinous, hard-boiled descendants—is a catalogue of violence. This is explained by the nature of Mrs. Stowe’s subject matter, her laudable determination to flinch from nothing in presenting the complete picture; an explanation which falters only if we pause to ask whether or not her picture is indeed complete; and what constriction or failure of perception forced her to so depend on the description of brutality—unmotivated, senseless—and to leave unanswered and unnoticed the only important question: what it was, after all, that moved her people to such deeds”
The violence is translated into scenes that are carefully constructed to produce feeling, and that feeling becomes a kind of substitute for structural understanding. From Baldwin, what Stowe is doing is not just representing slavery, but actively producing a form of emotional legibility that allows the reader to encounter brutality at a safe, protected distance. The problem, then, is not simply representation, but the way representation becomes a tool of emotional management: it turns human suffering into something that can be processed, and maybe ultimately resolved through just feeling. And the most critical element of this is that it is for and serves the white reader. My students in Turkey had no issue clocking this.
For instance, let us consider what Stowe actually does with the death of the novel’s own title character. She does not simply kill Uncle Tom. She manages his dying. She curates it into something the reader can absorb without remainder. Because mind you, Uncle Tom doesn't JUST die. No no no no. He is beaten and whipped endlessly by his master for refusing to betray the whereabouts of two women who had escaped the cruel hands of Simon Legree. He doesn't JUST die. He dies a martyr.
”‘Oh, Mas’r George, ye’re too late. The Lord has bought me, and is going to take me home.’ ‘Oh, don’t. It breaks my heart to think of what you’ve suffered—lying in this old shed, too.’ ‘You mustn’t, now, tell Chloe, poor soul, how ye found me,’ said Tom, taking George by the hand. ‘It would seem so dreadful to her. Only tell her ye found me going into glory, and that I couldn’t stay for no one. And oh, the poor chil’en, and the baby—my old heart’s been most broke for them. Tell them to follow me. Give my love to mas’r, and dear, good missis, and everybody in the place. I love them all.’ He closed his eyes, and with a smile he fell asleep. Uncle Tom too was free.”
— Chapter XLI, Uncle Tom’s Cabin
He is dying in a shed from a beating. And his last concern is making sure nobody tells his wife how bad it was. And that everyone follows him to glory. And that Legree maybe repents and makes it to heaven too actually. With a smile. He fell asleep with a smile. This is exactly what Baldwin means. The suffering is so thoroughly processed through sentiment, so carefully arranged into grace and forgiveness and going into glory, that the shed disappears. The beating disappears. What remains is a beautiful death that lets the reader feel moved rather than implicated. The violence was real. The smile is Stowe’s.
There is something even more fundamental at stake underneath Baldwin’s critique, which is the question of humanization itself. Since when do we feel the need to convince each other that people are people? I’m sorry Stowe but not even Depeche Mode can do that. Her project, in one sense, is overtly about proving personhood, about making enslaved people recognizable as human (like duh?) within a system that refuses that recognition. However, what Baldwin is sensitive to is the cost of that process: humanity has to be continuously produced through emotional excess accepted by those who have not experienced the event/s that have led to such emotions. The novel does not simply depict people as human. It must repeatedly perform their humanity through heightened sentiment and insistence. Personhood, in this sense, becomes something that is only granted if authorship allows. Once humanity becomes something that MUST be demonstrated through emotional intensity, it is no longer a given condition but a rhetorical effect. This is where Baldwin’s discomfort deepens: not only is suffering mediated, but even recognition itself becomes dependent on narrative performance.
Baldwin, however, is not outside this system in any simple way. He is writing from inside a long and historically overdetermined American discourse in which Blackness has always already been forced into visibility through representation—often distorted, often excessive, often conditional. His critique of Stowe is therefore not a detached aesthetic judgment but part of a broader struggle over who gets to define the terms under which humanity is recognized in the first place. This is why the movement from Uncle Tom’s Cabin to something like Native Son is not just a shift in literary style, but a shift in representational pressure. From sentimental humanization to a more confrontational refusal of emotional containment. Where violence and structure can no longer be resolved into feeling.This is also where my students start to see something very clearly and where we get back to the whole love-hate-question triangle.
A student will say “hocam, this point is already clear,” or better yet say “ok and what?” (because they already know) not because the subject matter is distant, but because the persuasion is too visible and to be honest, not necessary. At my institution, students are trained in a history-heavy curriculum to approach canonical texts as already filtered through layers of interpretation. Meaning is rarely encountered as immediate presence; it is encountered as something that accumulates in layers. So when Stowe intensifies emotion to secure recognition, it doesn’t disappear into a cloud of feeling. It stands out as a strategy. And that is the key difference. The result is that Uncle Tom’s Cabin stops functioning as a moral “experience” and becomes something closer to a readable construction to make suffering legible to a white audience who are assumed to be outside.
And we come back to the question of authorship which doesn’t stop with Baldwin or my students. It repeats itself across American cultural production in different but structurally related ways. In the novel American Fiction, for example, you see this pressure staged directly: Black authors are positioned within institutional and market systems that demand very specific forms of “authenticity.” Writing becomes less about expression than calibration. You are constantly adjusting tone, narrative, and even subject matter depending on what kind of Black life is considered legible, marketable, or emotionally consumable. Authorship becomes a negotiated performance between self-expression and external expectation.
This is where Myriam Gurba’s critique of American Dirt becomes useful, because it exposes how this logic persists even in texts that market themselves as socially conscious. In Pendeja, You Ain’t Steinbeck: My Bronca with Fake-Ass Social Justice Literature, Gurba is not simply criticising aesthetic quality. She is exposing the way “social justice” narratives can still be absorbed into familiar institutional structures that reward very specific versions of suffering. As she points out, the justification for this kind of writing often comes through a language of “giving voice.” As she notes, migrants are described as a “‘faceless brown mass’” that the author then claims she wants to humanize—“to give these people a face.” Even when a text claims to center marginalized voices, it can still be shaped by the demand that those voices remain legible, consumable, and appropriately formatted for a dominant readership. Gurba’s reaction to this framing is immediate and telling: “The phrase ‘these people’ pissed me off so bad my blood became carbonated.” The result is that suffering becomes something that is not only represented, but curated.
Across Baldwin, Gurba, and American Fiction, what emerges is not a shared argument but a shared pressure point: representation is never neutral, because it is always structured by an imagined audience. And that imagined audience determines not only what is said, but how it must be said. Authorship, in this sense, is not simply the act of producing language, but the act of positioning that language toward a receiver whose expectations are already shaping its form.
If this sounds familiar in my classroom, it is because it reappears there in a much more immediate and untheorized way. Students very quickly arrive at the question of address: “who is this for?” But importantly, this is not coming from Baldwin, Gurba, or any formal theoretical framework. It is an instinctive response to structure. They notice, almost immediately, that the text is always oriented toward someone outside itself, always staging its meaning in relation to an implied reader. This is where their reading diverges from traditional literary analysis, because before they even begin to interpret meaning, they are already registering positioning.
It is also important not to collapse this instinct into Baldwin’s or Gurba’s critique. Baldwin is writing from within a deeply specific historical and national struggle over racial representation and literary authority. Gurba is responding to publishing economies that package identity into consumable narratives. My students are not inside those systems in the same way. They are not trying to correct Stowe from within an American literary tradition, nor are they responding to institutional pressures that require them to produce certain kinds of narratives about themselves. Instead, they are encountering authorship from the outside, where it is not inherited as a tradition but immediately perceived as construction. Because of that distance, what becomes visible first is not meaning, but mediation.
And that is why the first question is never simply “what does this mean?” but something closer to “why is this written like this, and who is supposed to receive it in this form?” This is not an abstract theoretical move. It is a reading practice that emerges from recognising that texts are always already directed. Meaning is not encountered as a stable object but as something that is shaped by its orientation toward an audience.This is where everything ultimately loops back to Stowe. Uncle Tom’s Cabin is not only a novel about slavery; it is also a novel deeply invested in producing a particular kind of reader response, one that is sentimental, moral, and legible within a specific cultural framework. Which is precisely why it continues to generate the reactions it does in the classroom. The irritation, the suspicion, the analytical distance, and the refusal are not external to the text. They are produced by its own structure of authorship. The novel does not simply describe suffering. It organizes how that suffering is meant to be seen, felt, and understood by someone positioned outside of it. And in doing so, it makes authorship itself the central problem rather than a background condition.
Conclusion
Maybe that is the real reason Uncle Tom’s Cabin still survives in my classroom, thousands of miles away from the world that produced it. Not because my students “love” it. God no. Not because Stowe solves anything. She may have even caused more problems, to be honest. More problems for me, that’s for sure. And certainly not because nineteenth-century American sentimentalism magically transcends time, culture, language, and the almighty TikTok.
The novel survives because it irritates people into thinking. It survives because my students refuse to surrender to it politely. I’m not too sure how aware they are of the fact that the effort they put into rejecting it is actually impressive and can be recognised as something the diagnostic class would recognise as intelligence. They question it, interrupt it, mock it, dismantle it, and then somehow, through all that resistance, they end up engaging with it more honestly than blind reverence ever could. UTC enters as a problem. And honestly? Good. Literature should sometimes be a problem.
Because at the end of all this, the biggest question was never “Is Uncle Tom’s Cabin a good novel?” I genuinely do not think that is the interesting part anymore (I also don’t think it’s a very good novel). The real question is why this book still demands to be taught, defended, criticised, memeified, and dragged around and into conversations it was never built to survive. Why, after all these years, does this emotionally exhausting, historically messy, structurally manipulative novel still refuse to quietly die?
And unfortunately for all of us, including my students, Stowe, and me, god especially me, the answer is probably because it still works. Just not in the way its author ever intended.
