Re-Producing the Meaning of the Geography of Enslavement: Henry Box Brown’s Subversive Geographical Resistance

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article applies insight from the field of Black geography to the performance work of Henry Box Brown, a man who in 1849 mailed himself in a large postal crate from slavery in Richmond, Virginia to freedom in Philadelphia, PA. As a mobile subject, Brown had a unique purchase on how space and place could be sources of psychological and physical enslavement but also how they offered speculative geographies of liberation. During the (nearly) half century in which Brown performed, he sought to create an oppositional geography through four specific sites deployed during his performance work in England: the box in which he escaped; the slave ship he reproduced in his performance work; the panoramas he enacted in England until 1863 (with special attention to Brown’s Civil War panorama and its veiled indictment of the UK’s support for the Confederate Army); and the auction block he performed in his stage work during 1857. Geographical reconfiguration was, then, vital to the ways in which Brown manipulated and performed enslavement and to his strategies of performative resistance. Even as Brown demonstrated the omnipresence of enslavement, his geographical wake work struggled to create speculative, potentiate spaces where his fugitivity might be reconfigured.