The Inhuman Race: The Racial Grotesque in American Literature and Culture - Hardcover

"Cassuto has written work that... examines the importance of race in American literature. Cassuto's focus is the 'the attempt to turn a person into a thing on the basis of race, 'an attempt that the author feels ultimately can never be successful. To demonstrate his point, he discusses several captivity narratives, slave narratives, and antebellum fictional works. Perhaps the most interesting section concerns the Sambo stereotype in fictional works such as Sarah Hales's "Northwood," Harriet Beecher Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin" and William Wells Brown's "Clotel"/ Cassuto has skillfully blended an array of literary and cultural sources into a learned and quite readable work." -- "Library Journal"

Reconstructs a dialogue between objectifiers (American Puritans, slaveowners) and objectifieds (Native Americans, slaves) by arguing that the literature of race in antebellum America is the continuing story of an encounter with the grotesque. The focus is on literature-from Puritan captivity accounts, fugitive slave narratives, and proslavery fiction to the work of Melville, Stowe, Douglass, and their contemporaries. But Cassuto also ranges from colonial prodigies to nineteenth-century freak shows and Sambo stereotyping, from horror movies to the Holocaust Museum.