Very quickly into episode 7, we encounter a veiled reference to an American racist institution. Included in the newspaper is a page called “Uncle Toby’s Page for Tiny Tots.” (7.94-95). As illustrated in Ulysses Annotated, this is a play on a children’s activities page in an Irish newspaper called The Weekly Freeman called “Uncle Remus’ Address to his Nieces and Nephews. Uncle Remus was a book of African American folktales for children published in the late 19th century, using the stereotype of an old former slave passing on stories romanticizing his past as a slave, serving as a testament to the myth of the kind and gentle slave owner. I tried to find a photo online of one of these pages to confirm that it is intended to be the same Uncle Remus that gained popularity in Reconstruction Era America, but that proved harder than I thought. Assuming it is the same though, it seems to be a fairly decent summary of what blackness in Ulysses has seemed to be thus far: mentions of blackness and racist language seem to come from a romanticizing of, or fantasizing about, an imaginary exotic other, in this case the other being the old, gentle, American slave, the “Uncle Tom” figure. We have not encountered the exotic other explicitly in the form of blackface and minstrel performance yet, but in this reference to Uncle Remus, Joyce is making a connection to an American institution of racism in pop culture. It is one that while not unknown to the Irish, carries entirely different meaning in Joyce’s country. The sight of Uncle Remus does not carry with it a sort of Old South Nostalgia as it would in America, but rather the same sort of curiosity that caused people to flock to freak shows and circuses to see Africans as though they were animals in the zoo. It is interesting to me that even though Ulysses takes place across an ocean, that a wholly American form of racism has taken a hold there in the form of this newspaper column.
