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

我的项目是第一个全面研究19世纪非裔美国女性废奴主义者的记忆。在将20世纪和21世纪这些反奴隶制运动者的积极记忆置于关于在黑人自由斗争中使用历史人物的更广泛辩论的中心时，我展示了黑人女性领导力的传统观念如何塑造了黑人女性的这些代表。我关注的是哈里特·塔布曼和索杰纳·特鲁斯，她们是仅有的两位在公众记忆中获得标志性地位的黑人女性废奴主义者。我展示了作家、艺术家和活动家如何塑造自己的形象，以回应和挑战20世纪和21世纪关于种族和抵抗的思想，主要是将非暴力抗议和白人男性领导作为反种族主义行动的主要模式。我采用跨学科的方法，利用文本、雕塑、壁画和艺术品，描绘了从19世纪末到今天塔布曼和特鲁斯的表现形式的演变。在第一章分析了两位女性在重建时期如何自觉地塑造她们的废奴主义记忆之后，我研究了她们的形象在黑人激进主义的关键时期是如何演变的：19世纪90年代至30年代的反私刑运动，20世纪40年代至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2000年以来的奥巴马时代和黑人的命也是命。通过展示艺术家和活动家如何以及为什么改编塔布曼和特鲁斯的记忆来满足每个时期的需要，我更广泛地探索了20世纪和21世纪活动家将反奴隶制运动作为黑人自由斗争的缩影的方式。这个项目是从我的关于塔布曼记忆的论文演变而来的，在那篇论文中，我在儿童文学中找到了许多未经研究的塔布曼表现形式。我的博士将这项研究扩展到涵盖100年的表征，重点是活动家的记忆，增加了对塔布曼的描绘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.