The late British author Beatrix Potter is accused of stealing stories for her peter rabbit Publishing a book from an American slave, the awakened literature professor said Potter was guilty.The appropriation of black culture.”
recently essayEmily Zobel Marshall, who teaches postcolonial literature at Leeds Beckett University in the UK, claimed that Beatrix Potter plagiarized an oral “Brother Rabbit” folktale told by slaves working on plantations in the South. . Furthermore, she accused Potter of deliberately hiding the “source” of her own literary inspiration.
“Potter’s use of Blair Rabbit’s story as the basis for his narrative is not the main issue here…but the steps Potter has taken to keep readers away from her sources are questionable.” I have.”https://t.co/FMRHSsVWQJ
— The Conversation (@ConversationUK) May 19, 2023
“Her story owes its story to the Brera Rabbit, told by enslaved Africans working on American plantations, but it needs to be fully acknowledged,” Marshall told The Conversation this month. said in an essay published in the magazine.
Zobel Marshall claims that Potter’s early exposure to the “Brella Rabbit” story was due to her family’s roots in the cotton industry, which she explains: there isExploitative. ” She also claims that Mr. Potter learned of the “Blair Rabbit” story through a book by American journalist and folklorist Joel Chandler Harris, who created the “Uncle Remus” character.
She claimed that Potter “tried to keep the reader away from the source,” adding that her behavior was “problematic.” peter rabbit In fact, the book is about “resistance and survival strategies in the plantation life of the enslaved peoples of the Americas.”
Zobel Marshall concludes:Potter’s act of shielding readers from her sources influenced a pernicious and recurrent appropriation of black cultural forms that continues today. ”
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