Cholera's Clock: Race, Illness, and Time in the Works of Harriet Beecher Stowe

This essay considers the various manifestations and temporalities of the choleric body in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and Dred . Stowe's novels attempt to distinguish brutal forms of resource extraction on the southern plantation from what they envision as a modern reordering of bodies and spaces based upon a standardized, forward-moving time associated with the northern US. Cholera revealed the continuities between these two systems while also remaining resistant to the novels' technologies of race and sentiment, which timed and defined the human subject. However, if the illness could threaten the temporal structures upon which life was organized and certain forms of power obtained their force, it also enabled the dominant US biopolitical imagination to heap materiality onto the Black subjects and generate hierarchies of somatic being.