Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, in a Two-Story White House, North. Showing that Slavery’s Shadows Fall Even There. By ‘Our Nig’ 

work by Wilson

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African American literature

  • Phillis Wheatley's first book of poetry
    In African American literature: Prose, drama, and poetry

    Wilson’s Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, an autobiographical novel about the life of a working-class Black woman in the North. The Bondwoman’s Narrative (2002)—a fictionalized slave narrative based on the real-world experiences of its author, Hannah Bond (who published under…

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discussed in biography

  • In Harriet E. Wilson

    Her work, titled Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, in a Two-Story White House, North. Showing That Slavery’s Shadows Fall Even There. By “Our Nig.” (1859), treated racism in the pre-Civil War North.

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research by Gates

  • Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
    In Henry Louis Gates, Jr.: Literary archaeologist

    Wilson’s Our Nig (1859), by proving that the work was in fact written by an African American woman and not, as had been widely assumed, by a white man from the North. From the 1980s Gates edited a number of critical anthologies of African American literature,…

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