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In chapter 10, for example, his superstition reaches its climax when he is bitten by a rattlesnake: “And he said that handling a snake-skin was such awful bad luck that maybe we hadn’t got to the end of it yet. On the one hand, Jim is modelled on the stereotypes associated with the African-American minority in 19th-century racist discourse: he is presented as somewhat ‘subhuman’, feeble-minded, immoral and lazy. In the course of the action, it turns out that Jim possesses a strong sense of love and humanity when he is willing to sacrifice himself for others and displays an unselfish love for his wife and children, whom he wants to buy out of slavery. He runs away when he finds out that his owner, Miss Watson, intends to sell him down south, and travels along the river with Huck. At the beginning, he is presented as a superstitious person, who does not articulate his grievances and identifies with his role as a hard-working slave. It is Jim who represents the African-American slaves in Mark Twain’s text. For the purpose of a closer analysis, these aspects will first be considered individually and then integrated in an interpretation of the novel as a whole. There are four levels on which the novel is concerned with issues of race: the characters, the language and the narrative structure. This point will be discussed in the final section of this paper. Nevertheless, this narrative strategy, which differs from focalization only in its use of the past tense, has led to a controversy about whether the novel is racist, anti-racist, or both. According to Quirk, this has the advantage that “through the satirical latitude Huck’s perspective on events permitted him, Twain could deal scathingly with his several hatreds and annoyances – racial bigotry, mob violence, self-righteousness, aristocratic pretense, venality, and duplicity” (Quirk 146-147). Not only are race and racism prominent issues in the novel, but they are also dealt with in a specific manner as Huck is the narrator whose eyes everything is seen through and whose language everything is presented in the text. Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn is an intriguing case in point. Ultimately, slavery was the main cause of a bloody political and military struggle, at the end of which the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery everywhere in the United States after it had been in effect for two and a half centuries. After all, slaves were treated in an outrageous manner: they had extremely poor food and housing, slaveholders had Negro women for concubines, and families of slaves were separated to be sold off individually and at higher profit. It is not surprising that American literature in the period of slavery and the Civil War deals with issues of race and that it is the realist texts which do so in a particularly critical manner. However, the ideas associated with these more recent concepts of race are by no means new. In contrast to biological notions of race, which – particularly in the past – tended to be essentialist in that they invariably linked specific ‘objectively’ given races with specific characteristics and thus represented the different races as simple and undeniable facts of nature, current concepts of race in cultural studies stress and examine the modes in which race is constructed discursively and exploited in various cultures in order to preserve and exercise cultural power. The ‘other’ is no longer merely a theoretical concept but groups and peoples written out of history, subjected to slavery, insult, mystification, genocide. The decentring and deconstruction of categories and identities assume fresh urgency in a context of racism, ethnic conflict, neo-colonial denomination. It looms large in various discourses, among which the postcolonialist with its reference to the psychoanalytical concept of the ‘other’ and its critique of western imperialism is of particular importance: Race – often considered alongside class and gender – is one of the most influential theoretical concepts in cultural studies. Introduction: Cultural studies, American realism and race Conclusion: Huckleberry Finn – a racist novel?Ĥ. Introduction: Cultural studies, American realism and raceģ.