http://www.racetraitor.org/huckfinn.html
Seeing Gangs got me to reading How the Irish Became White
by Noel Ignatiev, which I like a lot. He also edits the
"Race Traitor" mag/web site (see above). In the book he
proposes that Huck Finn is modeled after slave narratives, which
by then had been published by abolitionists and become part of
the popular, albeit violently contested culture.
In the book, the miserable lot of immigrant Irish Catholic peasants
in many respects is common to free blacks in the North. From this
standpoint, the Irish-identification of H. Finn is code for
Negro. This strikes me as much more interesting than Leslie
Fiedler's sexual take ("come back to the raft, Huck honey").
I always thought a little bit too much had been made of
Huck Finn, and not quite enough of Puddinhead Wilson. It's
been decades since I read either, but I have a clear recollection
of the latter as much more subversive of the times. Ditto for
A Connecticut Yankee. Perhaps both were less amenable to
commodification in the way Yoshie depicts, w/regard to the
Hannibal, MO representation of Twain's work. I nearly wrote
a Senior honors thesis on Yankee, before being completely swept
up in revolutionary mania.
mbs
