Old Print Media, Radical Ideas, and Vernacular Performance in the Life and Work of Robert Wedderburn and Henry Box Brown

Abstract

In Cities of the Dead, Joseph Roach observes that “[t]exts obscure what performance tends to reveal; memory challenges history in the construction of circum-Atlantic cultures, and it revises the yet unwritten epic of their fabulous co-creation” (286). His astute comment highlights the importance of performance and performativity in African Atlantic culture in the years 1789-1865, i.e., between the beginning of the French Revolution and the end of the American Civil War. This can be seen in the stellar career of Ira Aldridge (1807-1867), the American-born “African Roscius” who bestrode the stage throughout Europe from Liverpool to Lodz and was the first black actor to play Othello on a British stage. His transatlantic presence has historically been downplayed in comparison to African Atlantic writers (Rice, “Tracing Roots” 16). For, although the slave narrative genre has been instrumental in the development of a thoroughgoing account of the conditions endured by enslaved Africans across the Black Atlantic in this period, political speeches, dramatic interventions, and performance pieces were also key to African Atlantic expression in the period. The slave narrative has dominated a range of disciplines. Especially in literary and cultural studies, it has served as the primary evidential base for discussions about slavery and abolition. This has meant that African Atlantic expression that is not enveloped within this discourse is often ignored or downplayed. William Wells Brown’s act of guerrilla theatre in the Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851 disrupted the American exhibit of Hiram Powers’s Greek Slave by juxtaposing it with a cartoon image to highlight American slavery, Lisa Merrill reminds us that “[t]he popular cultural as well as the political landscape need be examined together as significant venues for the staging and ameliorating the horrors of chattel slavery” (335).