Spectacular Remedies to Colonial Conflicts: Tableaux Vivants, Proto-Cinema and Global Performance in Dion Boucicault's Jessie Brown

Abstract

The story of ‘Jessie Brown’ emerged within a faux eyewitness account to the so-called Indian Mutiny of 1857. Subsequently elaborated and distributed via a ‘global republic of performance’ (including journalism, ballad poetry, musical compositions, dioramas, exhibitions and stage spectacles), Jessie Brown exposed class- and ethnic-based dissonances within the British imperialist project. The culmination of this process was the elaborate ‘contemporaneous drama’ Jessie Brown; or, The Relief of Lucknow (1858), by Dion Boucicault. Due to ongoing developments in a real-world colonial conflict, Boucicault employed melodramatic elements non-formulaically, including a sonically enhanced, proto-cinematic tableau vivant in lieu of a conventional dramatic resolution. This article augments the study of nineteenth-century literature by developing a ‘global republic of performance’ model used to analyse and account for the Jessie Brown phenomenon in its various media elaborations.