“Stories that Never Stop”: Fugitivity and Neo-Slave Performance

Abstract

This article examines contemporary black plays that both align with and depart from the neo-slave narrative, the most prominent form of contemporary literary engagement with slavery. Focusing on Lydia Diamond’s Harriet Jacobs (2008) and Nathan Alan Davis’s Nat Turner in Jerusalem, I argue that contemporary black plays on slavery constitute neo-slave performance insofar as they introduce the body, visuality, and various performance technologies to address aspects of slavery for which the written word cannot fully account. Harriet Jacobs and Nat Turner in Jerusalem demonstrate drama’s expansive capacity to represent slavery because they reframe slavery’s graphic economies and the historical depictions of captive black bodies while also intervening in the canonical narrative accounts of Harriet Jacobs and Nat Turner. These plays can be understood as performing fugitivity: they advance an artistic and political effort on the part of black subjects, past and present, to evade objectification and one-dimensional representations of slavery and blackness.