Review: “To Tell the Kitchen Version”: Architectural Figurations of Race and Gender in Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and Harriet Wilson's Our Nig

In lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of the review: I propose to engage the spatial dimension of antebellum domesticity by exploring architectural figurations in two texts by African American women authors. This reading, first of all, seeks to challenge prevailing assumption about the antebellum American home as a culturally coherent and cohesive space that finds its conflicts with the world outside rather than within its own. Quite to the contrary, the structures of domestic architecture allow writers to engage complex systems of social ordering, the spatial signification and enforcement of as well as the resistance against socio-cultural hierarchies. In the context of thus interrogating architecture as a system of cultural signification, I focus on the kitchen as the room that most centrally hosts narratives of gender and racial difference.