Behind the Scenes and Inside Out: Elizabeth Keckly’s Revision of the Slave-Narrative Form

Abstract

This article examines Elizabeth Keckly’s postbellum narrative Behind the Scenes. Or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House . Attending to the narrative’s dense visual rhetoric, the essay shows how Keckly rejects the generic proposition that white authority must legitimate black experience in the slave narrative. Overturning the racial protocols which constitute the genre’s conventions of authentication, Keckly radicalizes the form, intervening in a mid-nineteenth-century epistemological conflict over race and claiming the slave narrative as a mode of cultural critique that exceeds the political mandates of abolition as well as the historical moment of the antebellum.