Uncle Tom's Cabins: the Transnational History of America's Most Mutable BOOK ed. by Tracy C. Davis and Stefka Mihaylova (review)

There is a transit stop on Berlin's U-Bahn system called Onkel Toms Hütte. The station is named after a district, a street, and ultimately a beer garden on the edge of the Grunewald forest, built in the 1880s and demolished only in 1979, that was designed to evoke nostalgia for the idyllic days in which happily enslaved people gathered in rustic tranquility under the benevolent gaze of kindly nineteenth-century American masters. It would seem as though many German readers of Harriet Beecher Stowe's sprawling classic novel Uncle Tom's Cabin never got past chapter 4. This is just one of the anomalous "uses" to which the novel has been put around the world, as revealed by the contributors to Tracy Davis and Stefka Mihaylova's transnational reception history of what they call "America's most mutable book." The same chapter in which this "racist pastoralization of slavery" is discussed (210), Heike Paul's "Schwarze Sklaven, Weiße Sklaven," characterizes the nineteenth-century German reception of the novel as relegating African Americans to the margins of a discussion of slavery that privileges white German workers: "Our slavery," argues one white ballet dancer in Friedrich Wilhelm Hackländer's 1854 novelistic response to Stowe's book, Europäisches Sklavenblen (European Slave Life), "is much harder, much longer, much crueler" (198). "Slavery," Paul observes, "(whatever kind of oppression it may signify) is considered more of a social evil when it affects white people" (198).

But Uncle Tom's Cabin has been put to many and varied uses all around the world, uses that the contributors to Uncle Tom's Cabins document assiduously. In the Middle East, for example, Jeffrey Einboden, charting excisions of and alterations to Stowe's most passionate Protestant evangelism, demonstrates the ways in which twentieth-century Arabic and Persian translators diverted her zeal away from Christianity and toward Islam. Elsewhere, coeditor Mihaylova records a history of reception in Bulgaria that from the 1850s through the Soviet era transforms Stowe's sentimental novel into Soviet-style socialist realism documenting the perfidy, hypocrisy, and racism of a dangerously imperialist America. In another chapter, conversely, Kahlil Chaar-Pérez shows how Andrés Avelino de Orihuela's 1852 translation helped form a Cuban counterpublic that both identified with American republicanism and promoted unification with (or rather annexation by) a receptive United States. These constitute only a few examples of the book's rich panoply of global reception histories.

Structurally, after an introduction by the editors in which they theorize "Local Readings" and articulate the volume's interest in "the political effects that Uncle Tom's Cabin and works produced in its name have had across the globe" (14), Uncle Tom's Cabins is divided into three parts. The first consists of two chapters focusing on Canada and Liberia as the "Destination Points" of the novel's enslaved characters. They offer comparisons of the idealized utopian images, respectively, of the new northern Canaan and the independent nation in glorious Africa that the character George Harris dreams of, with the material, social, and political realities of those nascent nations. Part 2, "Freedom's Pathways," focuses on nineteenth-century (re)productions of the novel in France, Spain, Cuba, what is now Romania, and Germany. Part 3 is concerned with "Recirculating Currents" emanating from Brazil, Southeast Asia, Poland, Bulgaria, and the Middle East, mainly in the twentieth century.

Readers of Theatre Journal may be most interested in the chapters that deal with theatrical adaptations. These include: Emily Sahakian's tracing of the "transatlantic paternalism" of three French melodramas first produced in Paris in 1853, in which childlike Black characters are aided by fatherly white heroes; Lisa Surwillo's account of Haley, ó, El traficante de negros (Haley; or The Slave Trafficker), which, adroitly avoiding Spanish censorship, proffered a critique of the slave trade to Cuba when it was...