Exhibiting Race ‘under the World's Huge Glass Case’: William and Ellen Craft and William Wells Brown at the Great Exhibition in Crystal Palace, London, 1851

Abstract

This article examines the performance, representation and reception of images of American slavery prompted by fugitive slaves William Wells Brown and William and Ellen Craft's visit to the Great Exhibition in London, where they displayed themselves alongside American sculptor Hiram Powers' Greek Slave. In order to appreciate the visual rhetoric and modes of spectating-upon which the fugitive slaves drew, the author examines their performative intervention in the context of other nineteenth-century performances and displays of racialised bodies.