Charles Testut’s Le Vieux Salomon: Race, Religion, Socialism, and Freemasonry (After the Empire: The Francophone World and Postcolonial France) Hardcover – July 16, 2009 9780739123706

Exploring Testut’s influences, from Masonic symbolism and principles through nineteenth-century French socialist thought, the book shows how Testut endeavors, through his construction of raced and gendered identity in his protagonists, to eradicate the association of blackness with inferiority. It finishes with a comparative study between Le Vieux Salomon and Harriett Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin to demonstrate how Testut’s perspective as a French southern local writer sets him apart from Stowe’s Northern view, further emphasizing Testut’s contribution to the formulation of a southern cultural and literary identity.