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On Roald Dahl’s “Black Charlie”

Interview with Catherine Keyser in New York Times


What if Charlie Bucket, of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, were Black? Recently, Roald Dahl’s widow announced to the BBC that he had been in an early draft of Dahl’s novel. In an interview by the New York Times, English professor Catherine Keyser, who has written about that earlier story and its relationship to the one we all know, discusses the implications for our understanding of Dahl and his work, the history of chocolate, and white fantasies of race.


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