In the last ten years, as nineteenth-century Americanists have turned their attention to disability as an analytical category for their own field, they have used and developed new tools and modes of analysis to map a much more complex disability landscape. In this chapter, I turn to Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig (1859) to ask what a fictionalized autobiography written from the experience of a disabled Black woman can show us about the complexity and limitations of our critical understandings of disability in the period. Whereas we have been trained to look for disability in nineteenth-century American literature as represented flatly and relegated to the margins, Wilson keeps disability at the center of her narrative. Such a reading employs the method of historical cripistemology – that is, it begins from the experiences and knowledge of disabled people in the past – here, Harriet Wilson’s – to reframe our understanding of literature and culture. In Our Nig, Wilson uses her own experience to break with familiar Black and white forms for narrating disability in the antebellum period. Taking up Our Nig from this perspective demonstrates how careful attention to disability in nineteenth-century American literature and culture – particularly literature written by disabled people – can help us recover the broader scope and greater variety of disability representation in the period, as well as its import for helping us reenvision how we read literature in the period more broadly.

This chapter provides background information about the literary mode known as regionalism and explains what is queer about New England regionalism. It analyzes White-authored New England regionalist fiction from the 1865-1915 period, using Sarah Orne Jewett’s novel Deephaven as its primary example, to argue that White-authored New England regionalism imagines independent, queer lives for White women characters, living outside of the heteronuclear family. The chapter then turns to examine the underacknowledged African-American women’s tradition of New England regionalism, a tradition that reworks conventions of the earlier, White-dominated one. This African-American tradition begins in the nineteenth century and extends well into the twentieth: Harriet Wilson, Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, Dorothy West, and Ann Petry all limn the contours of New England life for Black women, engaging and claiming an inheritance of defiant, queer New England character while exploring the limitations and violence of that inheritance when understood as only available to White people.