For 140 years, Mark Twain’s ultimate adventure tale has resonated deeply with children and adults alike when they accompany the protagonist, the White teenager Huck, on his search for freedom down the Mississippi with the enslaved married man and father of two, Big Jim, who is running from bondage. In the words of a renowned literary critic, “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn [is] one of the world’s great books and one of the central documents of American culture.”

But then, that’s not quite true, is it? What about all the readers, whether POC, allied White, old or young, who have an awareness of the harmfulness of racially derogatory language? While they too might want to enjoy the thrills of adventure, they feel the burn of Twain’s offhanded use of the N-word all of 219 times on the 400-page novel. Sure, one could argue that this language is simply how people of Color were widely described by White people at the time the novel was written, but the N-Word is not the be all and end all of the problem.

What about the women of Color in the novel? When they are not called “N-women,” they are described as “wenches,” the dehumanizing term for young women with all its connotations that stands alongside “girls” for White characters in Twain's work. Awareness around the racial distress caused by this language certainly explains why 'Adventures of Huckleberry Finn' continues to show up on the list of contested books.

What’s to be done? If we need to erase words from a canonical work of art for it to remain readable in our contemporary society’s understanding of the tenets the foreground racial equality – is this work, then, still worthy of being considered a classic? Can it then even still be considered to be the original work?

On the other hand, if we reject the casual manner in which Twain portrays the assumed racial superiority of White people altogether by substituting the N-word with “warrior” and the word “slave” with “dark-skinned volunteer” as Paul Beatty did in his 2015 novel 'Sell Out', are we not doing the legacy that slavery continues to have on African American communities today a great disservice? But if we don’t, how can we continue to expect (especially young) readers to expose themselves to derogatory language in this manner? Percival Everett’s answer to this question is his 2024 novel 'James', in which he rewrites Twain’s Big Jim character and gives him his own voice.

This course will explore Twain’s novel from different perspectives like Whiteness Studies, New Historicism, Critical Race Feminist and Black scholarship, among others, through an intersectional lens. We will contrast our reading of the “classic” with the Pulitzer Prize-finalist Everett’s rewriting of Jim’s story in 'James', where Everett gives this character a voice with agency in his own story in the most literal sense. The characters James’ explanation why it’s safer for Black people to say “Da mo’ betta dey feels, da mo’ safer we are” instead of “The better they feel, the safer we are,” gives us a sense into what this class will be taking a deep dive into.