The Sweet Truth of Slavery

Abstract:This article performs a case study of the post-truth phenomenon in American literature. The discourse around post-truth has gained prominence as a means to explain recent political upheavals and media innovations; arguments about the topic frequently proceed from the assumption that post-truth rhetoric is adjunct to new mass media technologies and thus is novel. This article studies a set of pro-slavery novels that borrow from slave narratives and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin— “anti-Tom” novels—to demonstrate a much earlier instance of the phenomenon. One goal of this article is to question the periodization assigned to post-truth as a means to begin to contend with post-truth’s enduring relationship to how race is constructed on the page. The larger goal of this argument is to consider the radical in/visibilization of black suffering “anti-Tom” novels perform which destabilizes the racial claims these texts seek to make.