Can Literature Come to the Rescue when History is Under Siege? How One Novel Can Be a Trojan Horse to Engage Questions Some Politicians Don’t Want Us to Ask?


An-chi Wang｜Professor Emeritus, Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, National Taiwan University

Jade Tsui-yu Lee｜Professor, Department of English, National Kaohsiung Normal University & President of the English and American Literature Association

Abstract

Teaching America’s past and present in all its complexity has never been an easy task—but this challenge itself is increasingly under attack in American schools. More than half of U.S. states have passed measures against the teaching of critical race theory—measures designed to discourage teachers from teaching their students about the role that racism has played in America. Art, however, can illuminate the truths that politicians who passed these laws prefer to bury—if we let it. Mark  Twain’s novel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn can be a Trojan Horse able to open our classrooms to issues the politicians don’t want discussed. It offers a critical lens on America’s complex history, challenging readers to confront uncomfortable truths about racism and societal norms, and engaging them in profound discussions of race, morality, and empathy. Welcomed in the curriculum as a classic text by a canonical white American author, this searing satire on racism can bring the history of race in America into the classroom in engaging and powerful ways. But the book remains under constant threat of being banned by those who misread it as bolstering the racism that it attacks. Those who want the book banned view Jim, its central Black character,  as irredeemably inflected by minstrelsy—an emblem of the author’s alleged racism. But my forthcoming book argues that Jim is a compelling challenge to minstrel stereotypes and racism itself, a shrewd and self-aware enslaved man seeking his freedom in a world determined to keep him enslaved and one of the first Black fathers in American fiction—someone we need to keep in our classrooms. My talk will draw on arguments I make in Jim: The Life and Afterlives of Huckleberry Finn’s Comrade, forthcoming (April 2025) in Yale University Press’s “Black Lives” biography series edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., David Blight, and Jacqueline Goldsby. It will explore how engaging this text in fresh and creative ways and how probing its global travels (it has been translated into 67 languages) can help students understand the dynamics of racism—not just in the US but around the world, as well. 


Speaker's Short Biography

Shelley Fisher Fishkin is the Joseph S. Atha Professor of Humanities, Professor of English, and (by courtesy) Professor of African and African American Studies at Stanford University, where she directed the American Studies Program for 21 years. Fishkin, who holds a Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale, is the award-winning author, editor or co-editor of 50 books, most recently, Jim: Huckleberry Finn’s Comrade, published in April 2025 in Yale’s “Black Lives” biography series. Other books include Was Huck Black? Mark Twain and African-American Voices; The 29-volume Oxford Mark Twain; the Encyclopedia of Civil Rights in America;  Writing America: Literary Landmarks from Walden Pond to Wounded Knee;  and The Chinese and the Iron Road: Building the Transcontinental Railroad. She is past president of the American Studies Association, and a co-founder of the Journal of Transnational American Studies. She was awarded the Carl Bode-Norman Holmes Pearson Prize for Lifetime Achievement and Outstanding Contribution to American Studies from the American Studies Association, and the Olivia Langdon Clemens Award for Scholarly Innovation and Creativity by the Mark Twain Circle of America. In 2019, the American Studies Association created the Shelley Fisher Fishkin Prize for International Scholarship in Transnational American Studies to honor her “outstanding dedication to the field.”


Organizers

Farm for Change: Climate, Eco-poetics, Earth Justice｜Humanities for the Environment (HfE) —Asia Pacific Observatory｜English and American Literature Association