'Heroic Souls': The Activist Memory of Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth

我的项目是对19世纪世纪非洲裔美国女性废奴主义者记忆的第一次全面研究。在放置这些反奴隶制运动在20世纪和21stcenturies在一个更广泛的辩论中心使用的历史人物在黑人freedomstruggle的活动家的记忆，我展示了如何黑人女性领导的传统观念塑造了这些representationsof黑人妇女。我专注于哈里特塔布曼和索杰纳真理，只有两个黑人女性废奴主义者，以实现在公众记忆中的标志性地位。我展示了作家、艺术家和活动家如何塑造他们的形象，以回应和挑战20世纪和21世纪世纪关于种族和抵抗的思想，主要是把非暴力抗议和白色男性领导作为反种族主义活动的主导模式。使用一个跨学科的方法，借鉴文本，雕塑，壁画和艺术品，我图表的演变塔布曼和真理的陈述从世纪末到今天。在第一章分析了两位女性如何在重建时期有意识地塑造了她们对废奴主义的记忆之后，我考察了她们的形象是如何在黑人激进主义的关键时期演变的：19世纪90 - 30年代的反私刑运动，1940- 60年代的经典民权时代，20世纪60年代至90年代的黑人权力和后民权运动以及奥巴马时代和2000年以来的黑人生命问题。通过展示艺术家和活动家如何以及为什么改编塔布曼和真理的记忆来满足每个时期的需求，我更广泛地探讨了20世纪和21世纪世纪的活动家们如何将反奴隶制运动作为黑人自由斗争的缩影。这个项目是从我的关于塔布曼记忆的硕士论文发展而来的，在这篇论文中，我恢复了许多儿童文学中未经检验的塔布曼的表现。我的博士学位扩展了这项研究，涵盖了100年的陈述，重点是活动家的记忆，增加了塔布曼的回忆和许多鲜为人知的真相描绘。

My project is the first comprehensive study of the memory of 19th century African American femaleabolitionists. In placing activist memories of these antislavery campaigners during the 20th and 21stcenturies at the centre of a wider debate about the use of historical figures in the black freedomstruggle, I show how traditional notions of black female leadership have shaped these representationsof black women. I focus on Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth, the only two black female abolitioniststo achieve iconic status in public memory. I show how writers, artists and activists shaped their imagesto both echo and challenge 20th and 21st century ideas on race and resistance, mainly regarding nonviolentprotest and white male leadership as the dominant modes of anti-racist activism. Using aninterdisciplinary methodology that draws on texts, sculptures, murals and artwork, I chart the evolutionof Tubman and Truth's representations from the late 19th century to today. After chapter one's analysisof how both women self-consciously shaped the memories of their abolitionism in the Reconstructionperiod, I examine how their images evolved over key periods of black activism: the anti-lynchingmovement of the 1890s-1930s, the classic civil rights era of the 1940-60s, Black Power and post-civilrights activism in the 1960-90s and the Obama era and Black Lives Matter from 2000 on. Bydemonstrating how and why artists and campaigners adapted Tubman and Truth's memory to servethe needs of each period, I explore more broadly the ways that 20th and 21st century activists used theantislavery movement as a microcosm of the black freedom struggle. This project evolved from my MAdissertation on the memory of Tubman, wherein I recovered many unexamined representations ofTubman in children's literature. My PhD extends this research to cover 100 years of representations,with a focus on activist memory, added depictions of Tubman and numerous little-known portrayals ofTruth.