A Speculative Reading of Black Feminist Resistance in George Washington Cable’s The Grandissimes

Abstract:Many scholars have argued that George Washington Cable’s debut novel, The Grandissimes (1880) represents a critique of Creole Southern plantation oligarchy in favor of a liberal reform ideology as the path toward racial equality. But, as feminist scholars have shown, such interpretations of the novel require a relative obfuscation of two working-class black women who express complex critiques of American capitalism and attempt the assassination of a plantation oligarch. Building on scholarship that positions these two characters in their true place—at the heart of the narrative—this essay argues that the novel portrays active and violent political resistance to plantation oligarchy that calls into question the gradualist liberal reform efforts it supposedly promotes. The Grandissimes helps to reveal the imbrication of wealthy Southern elite property rights and the emergence of an anti-black criminal justice system that was central to what would come to be known as Jim Crow.