While modern critics have tended to approach black and white perspectives of race in America by considering the two sides separately, Cassuto's timely book brings the two together,
reconstructing a dialogue between objectifiers (American Puritans, slaveowners) and objectifieds (Native Americans, slaves). The focus is on literature - from Puritan captivity accounts,
fugitive slave narratives, and proslavery fiction to the work of writers such as Melville, Stowe, Douglass, and their contemporaries - but Cassuto also ranges from colonial prodigies to
nineteenth-century freak shows and Sambo stereotyping, from horror movies to the Holocaust Museum.
The Inhuman Race challenges not so much what we think as the way we think: the way we organize information - and people - into categories. Cassuto thus links the imagination and events of
colonial and antebellum Americans directly to our own troubled times.
