Chapter 13 - The Strange Career of Topsy

Summary

This chapter explains how and why Topsy – a “little negro girl” featured in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) – became a symbol of artificial life during the long wake of slave emancipation in the United States. It begins by recontextualizing Stowe’s abolitionist melodrama in relation to arguments about human–machine difference in the industrial North. Because the automated Black slave girl was a perfect foil to the autonomous white man, Topsy could critique slavery while affirming the race and gender hierarchies of white bourgeois society. Turning to the material history of plush “Topsy” dolls – the handicraft of enslaved women turned into factory-made commodities – the chapter argues that Topsy as doll gained its cultural power as a reaction to fears of Black autonomy in the South and white automatization in the North. It concludes by considering Topsy’s unruly afterlife in the “technopoetics” of Black modernism in the Jazz Age.