The Captive Stage: Performance and the Proslavery Imagination of the Antebellum North (Theater: Theory/Text/Performance) - Softcover

Jones, Douglas A.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0472052268 ISBN 13: 9780472052264

Publisher: University of Michigan Press, 2014

Synopsis

In The Captive Stage, Douglas A. Jones, Jr. argues that proslavery ideology remained the dominant mode of racial thought in the antebellum north, even though chattel slavery had virtually disappeared from the region by the turn of the nineteenth century—and that northerners cultivated their proslavery imagination most forcefully in their performance practices. Jones explores how multiple constituencies, ranging from early national artisans and Jacksonian wage laborers to patrician elites and bourgeois social reformers, used the stage to appropriate and refashion defenses of black bondage as means to affirm their varying and often conflicting economic, political, and social objectives. Joining performance studies with literary criticism and cultural theory, he uncovers the proslavery conceptions animating a wide array of performance texts and practices, such as the “Bobalition” series of broadsides, blackface minstrelsy, stagings of the American Revolution, reform melodrama, and abolitionist discourse. Taken together, he suggests, these works did not amount to a call for the re-enslavement of African Americans but, rather, justifications for everyday and state-sanctioned racial inequities in their post-slavery society. Throughout, The Captive Stage elucidates how the proslavery imagination of the free north emerged in direct opposition to the inclusionary claims black publics enacted in their own performance cultures. In doing so, the book offers fresh contexts and readings of several forms of black cultural production, including early black nationalist parades, slave dance, the historiography of the revolutionary era, the oratory of radical abolitionists and the black convention movement, and the autobiographical and dramatic work of ex-slave William Wells Brown.

About this title

About the Author

Douglas A. Jones, Jr. is Assistant Professor of English, Rutgers University.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Captive Stage

Performance and The Proslavery Imagination of The Antebellum North

By Douglas A. Jones Jr.

The University of Michigan Press

Copyright © 2014 University of Michigan
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-472-05226-4

Contents

Introduction: The "Common Sense" of Slavery in the Free Antebellum North, 
ONE Setting the Stage of Black Freedom: Parades and "Presence" in the New Nation, 
TWO Black Politics but Not Black People: Early Minstrelsy, "White Slavery," and the Wedge of "Blackness", 
THREE Washington and the Slave: Black Deformations, Proslavery Domesticity, and Re-Staging the Birth of the Nation, 
FOUR The Theatocracy of Antebellum Social Reform: "Monkeyism" and the Mode of Romantic Racialism, 
FIVE Melodrama and the Performance of Slave Testimony; or, William Wells Brown's Inability to Escape, 
Epilogue: No Exit, but a New Stage, 
Notes, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Setting the Stage of Black Freedom

Parades and "Presence" in the New Nation

In the aftermath of the armed conflicts of the American War of Independence, a series of "quiet" structural revolutions commenced. The United States had to instate an untested system of democratic governance called republicanism; implement new economies of capital, exchange, and labor predicated on the individual's absolute right to property; and readjust to the large-scale demographic shifts the war produced. The role of slaves and free people of color in the emergent polity surfaced as a markedly fraught question. On the one hand, dominant civic discourses rendered whiteness the precondition of citizenship. On the other, the prevalence of the rhetoric of egalitarianism threatened the permanence of such race-based civil circumscriptions. That many slaves and free people of color had distinguished themselves in the Revolutionary cause and demanded full citizenship in return made questions of civil inclusion all the more pressing.

These demands helped quicken antislavery sentiment in the period, when many already doubted the viability of slavery in a new nation founded on principles of democratic freedom. Indeed, northern state legislatures enacted gradual emancipation statutes, and slaveholders in all regions (most notably the Upper South) manumitted slaves in vast numbers. The increasing masses of free black people did not attempt to isolate themselves from their former masters; rather, they sought to expand the polity in such a way that included them as equal participants. In this effort they crafted a protest culture that merged (inherited) African notions of community, institution-building, and personal obligation to Enlightenment discourses and political practices. These doings, along with the patterns of black migration throughout the North American continent that emancipation instigated, laid the groundwork for what would become African America.

Throughout the early national period, African Americans continued to stress that their efforts toward the formation of the U.S. were at the core of their identity. As literary historian John Ernest writes, "In the pages of the early [black] historical texts, one encounters frequently both the history and prehistory of African American contributions to American military and political history." The most venerated and recurring historical figure in this literature is runaway slave Crispus Attucks. Attucks was one of the first men British soldiers killed in the Boston Massacre, an initiating event of the American Revolution, and he quickly became the iconic signifier of selfless black patriotism. His story appealed to early bla

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Michigan Press
• Publication date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0472052268
• ISBN 13: 9780472052264
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 232