William Wells Brown Research Articles

Fugitive Motherhood, Maroon Revisions, and Otherwise Possibilities in William Wells Brown’s Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter

Abstract: This essay contends the paratextual depiction of the eponymous heroine of William Wells Brown’s 1853 Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter invites a speculative reconsideration, grounded in Black feminist theoretical frameworks, of Brown’s exploration of the possibilities of freedom for the fugitive subject in the antebellum United States. Through this reassessment, Clotel emerges as a fugitive mother who theorizes the geographies of slavery, imagining a world for her and her child entirely different from the one that otherwise rules their possibilities.

William Wells Brown and the Form of Unfreedom

William Wells Brown and the Form of Unfreedom

Intertextual Inquiry and Interpretive Creation: Pope.L’s Experimental Staging of William Wells Brown’s The Escape

Abstract This contribution discusses Pope.L’s 2018 provocative restaging of William Wells Brown’s anti-slavery play The Escape: Or, A Leap of Freedom (1858) at the Art Institute of Chicago. Drawing on Linda Hutcheon’s theory of adaptation, it argues against a source-oriented assessment of the production, which would prioritize the original over its interpretation and delimit aesthetic evaluation to questions of fidelity. It proposes to consider Pope.L: The Escape as an interpretive creation in its own right. Engaging in a complex intertextual and intercultural dialogue with its antetext, Pope.L’s staging brings into focus particular aspects of the contemporary moment. While Brown’s play presents race as first and foremost a performative category and stresses the possibility of autopoiesis qua performance, Pope.L reduces slavery to an ontological condition. Its title and manifold multimedia performances notwithstanding, there is no escape from enslavement in Pope.L: The Escape. Performance remains contained in and prescribed by an ongoing condition of physical and psychic enslavement. With this radical adaptation, Pope.L responds to what Paul Gilroy identifies as the “ontological turn” in recent Black thought. In light of the ongoing structural and quotidian violence against People of Color, this approach insists on the central significance of the bodily experience of racializing attributions for understanding social relations as well as Black collectivity. It also provocatively asks whether the performative does indeed suffice to unsettle the structural coordinates of anti-Blackness that continue to impact and overdetermine contemporary lives.

Useful Objects: Museums, Science, & Literature in Nineteenth-Century America

Useful Objects: Museums, Science, & Literature in Nineteenth-Century America

Useful Objects: Museums, Science, & Literature in Nineteenth-Century America

Useful Objects: Museums, Science, & Literature in Nineteenth-Century America

“Liberty or Death!”

“Liberty or Death!”

The Black Badge of Courage: The Politics of Recording Black Union Army Service and the Militarization of Black History in the Civil War's Aftermath

Abstract Scholars have detailed how Black activists looked to public forums to secure Black soldiers’ valor in American memory following the Civil War. This article reveals that they were not the only operators preserving African Americans’ wartime contributions. Rather than gravitating toward orations or monuments like other prominent activists, William Wells Brown and Frances Rollin turned to the power of history during Reconstruction. Drawing together trends of antebellum historical writing and nationalism among African American intellectuals and leaders, Brown and Rollin constructed heroic, textual accounts of Black Civil War soldiers. Brown contended that the soldiers were crucial not only to abolition but also to rescuing the Union. With his The Negro in the American Rebellion (1867), Brown contributed to a more inclusive version of American nationalism. Rollin added an ethnographic argument, crafting a muscular retelling of Martin Delany's wartime service. Rollin's Life and Public Services of Martin R. Delany (1868) affirmed Black pride and annulled burgeoning racial tropes. As a result, by the 1870s, Brown and Rollin helped assure African Americans a place in the body politic and crafted an enduring symbol—the Black badge of courage—that cemented military service as a central theme of Black historical writing.

Race, Politics, and Nation in Albion W. Tourgée's American Historical Novels Series: The Example of Hot Plowshares

Race, Politics, and Nation in Albion W. Tourgée's American Historical Novels Series: The Example of <i>Hot Plowshares</i>

Women (Re)Writing Milton

Women (Re)Writing Milton

Introduction On the Histories and Futures of Black New England Studies

Introduction On the Histories and Futures of Black New England Studies

Provocative Eloquence: Theater, Violence, and Antislavery Speech in the Antebellum United States

Provocative Eloquence: Theater, Violence, and Antislavery Speech in the Antebellum United States

Provocative Eloquence: Theatre, Violence, and Antislavery Speech in the Antebellum United States by Laura L. Mielke

Reviewed by: Provocative Eloquence: Theatre, Violence, and Antislavery Speech in the Antebellum United States by Laura L. Mielke Gordon Alley-Young Provocative Eloquence: Theatre, Violence, and Antislavery Speech in the Antebellum United States. By Laura L. Mielke. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2019. pp. ix + 284. $75.00 hardcover. In the introduction to Provocative Eloquence: Theatre, Violence, and Antislavery Speech in the Antebellum United States, author Laura Mielke asks, "How did types from the stage, in a manner akin to the representative passages in eloquence textbooks and the culture's canon of celebrated speakers, inform the pursuit of promulgating slavery's demise?" (15). As Mielke explores, the answer to this question is not straightforward, as the era's theatrical and oratorical spheres engaged antislavery debate with plays and orations that were incendiary, progressive, placatory, and/or problematic, sometimes all at once. Thus, the goal, Mielke clarifies, is not to deem any theatrical form as pro- or antislavery, but to locate "instances of charged resemblance, citation, revision, and overlap between theatrical performance and antislavery speech in the lead up to the Civil War" (21). Mielke asks readers to look at the antebellum performative works featured in her book not with an expectation of finding political consensus within any production, character, or performer but to see a web of intertextual connections between the antebellum antislavery speech and theatrical performances that she explores. Mielke's work is organized into five chapters coalesced around the project of tracing the intertextual and interperformative connections between antebellum antislavery oratory and performance. Chapter 1 examines the July 4, 1838, oration by Edwin Forrest, one of the nation's first homegrown theatrical celebrities. Mielke traces the interplay of the fiery acting roles that had elevated Forrest into the sphere of celebrity as contrasted with his sober oration on the principles of the New York Democratic Party and their alignment with the values of rationality over violence during the American Revolution. The effect, [End Page 171] Mielke notes, is a message that urges restraint and rationality, while the association of Forrest with fierce lead characters fighting to overthrow tyranny speaks to the necessity of force in the face of those who would oppose rational deliberation. In chapter 2, Mielke explores how African American actress and orator Mary E. Webb and African American abolitionist lecturer and novelist/playwright William Wells Brown used the tool of dramatic suasion in their messages. The chapter details how Harriet Beecher Stowe could not prevent unauthorized adaptations of the previously published Uncle Tom's Cabin; however, she deployed The Christian Slave in 1855, written to be performed as a recitation by Mary E. Webb, to reclaim the abolition message that had been diluted via the injection of minstrelsy and other broad licenses taken by adaptors of her earlier work. On Wells Brown's performance of Experience or How to Give a Northern Man a Backbone in 1856, Mielke cites Wells Brown's remark that patrons who would never attend an antislavery meeting would pay to receive an abolition message embedded in a dramatic reading (56). Both performers referenced the violence prompted by abolition rhetoric to condemn the practice of slavery, and in so doing they created space in the social sphere for the eloquence of the enslaved person. Further, they positioned the slave master in opposition to principles of US democracy due to their increasing use of violence to suppress antislavery speech and its speakers. In this chapter, Mielke considers the impact of Webb's body in performance, and readers might like this chapter to delve more deeply/critically into the rhetorical space that provocative eloquence created for African American performers and indeed African American citizens of the era. Chapter 3 is contextualized around the beating of abolitionist Republican Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner by proslavery Democratic South Carolina representative Preston Brooks on the US Senate floor in 1856 after the former called out the latter's family member in a speech against slave owners. This same year, Lawrence, Kansas, was sacked when proslavery agitators attacked antislavery settlers from Massachusetts who had hoped to make the then-territory of Kansas a free state. Against this backdrop, Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Dred; A Tale of the...

Alongside Slavery's Asides: Reverberations of Edward Young'sThe Revenge

In an 1847 lecture before the Female Anti-Slavery Society of Salem, William Wells Brown stated: “Were I about to tell you the evils of Slavery, to represent to you the Slave in his lowest degradation, I should wish to take you, one at a time, and whisper it to you. Slavery has never been represented; Slavery never can be represented.” In these oft-cited lines, Wells Brown makes a strong claim for the absolute impossibility of representing slavery. But I wish to pause and stay with his earlier suggestion that it might just be possible to tell about slavery in a whisper. Breaking through the fastidiousness of the audience, a whisper can bring the condition of slavery close.

Dill, Elizabeth. Erotic Citizens: Sex and the Embodied Subject in the Antebellum Novel.

Dill, Elizabeth. <i>Erotic Citizens: Sex and the Embodied Subject in the Antebellum Novel</i>.

“Not Altogether Ridiculous”

Spanning a long literary history, from 1742 to 1934, this essay argues for the military epaulette as an important material signifier through which the arbitrary nature of rank and colonial authority was revealed and challenged. This essay connects the anxieties attending the introduction of epaulettes in newly nationalized European armies to the historical and rhetorical impact of such uniforms on depictions of so-called Black chiefs, including Toussaint Louverture, Lamour Derance, and Nat Turner. In the context of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century slave revolts and imperial and colonial war fronts, this otherwise semiotic feature of the military uniform was a catalyst for a particular kind of confrontation over authority of signification in the tug-of-war between rank and race. This essay tracks a consistent rhetoric of violence and ridicule in these confrontations as they appear in histories, novels, and plays. In the work of Walter Scott, Victor Hugo, William Wells Brown, and Martin Delany, attempts to read epaulettes produce a violent form of colonial desire that is only permitted when couched in the rhetoric of ridicule and the ridiculous. The essay’s final pages turn to the first half of the twentieth century, when the still violent stakes of subverting the uniform persist through an ambivalence stemming from the literal and figural “costuming” of the Black chief.

On Freedom and the Will to Adorn: The Art of the African American EssayEmpire of Ruin: Black Classicism and American Imperial CultureReaping Something New: African American Transformations of Victorian Literature

On Freedom and the Will to Adorn: The Art of the African American EssayEmpire of Ruin: Black Classicism and American Imperial CultureReaping Something New: African American Transformations of Victorian Literature

Not Even Past: The Stories We Keep Telling about the Civil War by Cody Marrs

Reviewed by: Not Even Past: The Stories We Keep Telling about the Civil War by Cody Marrs LeeAnna Keith Not Even Past: The Stories We Keep Telling about the Civil War. By Cody Marrs. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020. Pp. xii, 226. $28.00, ISBN 978-1-4214-3665-4.) Cody Marrs serves up a feast of Civil War stories in his timely, compact, and entertaining new analysis, Not Even Past: The Stories We Keep Telling about the [End Page 528] Civil War. The book identifies four narratives, or "plots," that have recurred continually in literature and public remembrances of the American Civil War: "A Family Squabble," "A Dark and Cruel War," "The Lost Cause," and "The Great Emancipation." Considering a long range of history—from war's end to the sharp edge of the present—and taking a wonderfully broad set of texts and manifestations into account, Not Even Past presents the Civil War as "an unsettled conflict that will continue to be refought as long as American civilization exists" (p. 10). The "lack of an ending fuel[ed] these plots," Marrs argues, calling the Civil War the source of "unaccomplished, and perhaps unaccomplishable," goals (pp. 8, 171). Marrs's history unfolds in the world of belles lettres, the visual arts, films, maps, statuary, published alternative histories, television, and children's literature, although street demonstrations such as Bree Newsome's removing the Confederate battle flag from the South Carolina statehouse in 2015 and recent incidents of white supremacist violence are also included. The canon of Civil War and American literature favorites receives full consideration here, as evoked by the title's use of William Faulkner's quotable assessment that in the South, "The past is never dead. It's not even past" (Requiem for a Nun [1951]). Indeed, the book holds a special appeal for genealogists, self-identifying southerners, and other Civil War aficionados, whose familiarity with the texts creates a rich synergy. This frisson is especially available to white readers who are Generation X and older—old enough to have experienced Roots (1976) and Gone With the Wind (1939) without considering the context, but now educated in the critical perspectives that Not Even Past brings to bear. Alongside the establishment Marrs showcases Black and previously marginalized nineteenth-century voices such as memoirists William Wells Brown and Elizabeth Keckley and sculptor Edmonia Lewis. He develops W. E. B. Du Bois's Black Reconstruction (1935) as a key text in the theme of Great Emancipation, the source of the most binding commentary about the idea that the war would not be complete until all barriers between classes and races had been overcome, and he finds echoes of that argument in the words of Martin Luther King Jr., Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Natasha Trethewey. The book's narratives also draw out the shades of those whose retrograde ideas caused them to be forgotten or banished from the canon: Jefferson Davis as memoirist; the novelists Thomas Dixon Jr. and Margaret Mitchell; and the writer Shelby Foote. Best of all in some passages, Marrs finds Civil War mainstays in offbeat and niche expressions: among the wrongheaded Literary Agrarians, for example, and in alternative and science fiction accounts in which Confederates did not lose the Civil War but abolished slavery anyway, fulfilling some contemporary Lost Cause fantasies. In a scene that was too perfect to omit, Marrs describes a character embedded in a fictional inversion of U.S. history after the war who finds a "true" counterfactual history that showed the Union as the victor. Because the Civil War is not even past, Marrs finds cause to consider the lessons of his plots and memes for the turbulent present. Literature "aids us in creating stories for the world to come and figuring out how to live within it," he argues, envisioning a dawning equality when "the Civil War will finally come to a close and another story will emerge" (pp. 183, 185). [End Page 529] LeeAnna Keith Collegiate School, New York City Copyright © 2021 Southern Historical Association

Cuban Literature in the Age of Black Insurrection: Manzano, Plácido, and Afro-Latino Religion by Matthew Pettway

Reviewed by: Cuban Literature in the Age of Black Insurrection: Manzano, Plácido, and Afro-Latino Religion by Matthew Pettway Reggie Bess Cuban Literature in the Age of Black Insurrection: Manzano, Plácido, and Afro-Latino Religion. By Matthew Pettway. University of Mississippi Press, 2020, p. 325, $30.00. In six well-researched and well-crafted chapters, Matthew Pettway presents the life and times of two of Cuba’s most interesting and productive Afro-Cuban literarians. The book covers the years between Juan Francisco Manzano’s birth (1797–1854)) to Gabriel de la Concepción Valdés’s (also known and referred throughout the book as Plácido) death by firing squad (1809–1844). Both made very significant contributions to Cuban literature during the colonial period. Borrowing from the great Toni Morrison, Pettway “engage[s] this body of work as a sort of ‘literary archaeology’ to borrow a phrase from Toni Morrison. Jenny Sharpe explains that Morrison relied on historical knowledge and an ‘imaginative recreation of the past’ to write great works of fiction like her novel Beloved. But I perceive archaeology as apropos for the unearthing of black Cuban texts characterized by double-voicing, ostensible contradictions, silences, and the subservice use of Catholic, Romantic, and Neoclassical symbology. This book is literary analysis and part cultural history; so, I too am ‘piercing together a world that exists only in the archives.’” (37) In the Introduction, Pettway asks the following questions: “How could writers with no formal humanistic training, no military expertise to speak of, and no experience in the diplomatic corps pose a political threat to one of the greatest empires in the world? What subversive writing practices did Plácido and Manzano employ in their poetry and prose? What role did religious discourse play in the creation of anticolonial literature? And what did they hope to accomplish by writing against the Spanish empire?” (6) Pettway then tells the reader the significance of this book to the field: “Cuban Literature contributes to Latin American Studies in several ways. This is the first book-length study of Juan Francisco Manzano and Gabriel de la Concepción Valdés, perhaps the most important writers of African descent in colonial Spanish American history. Moreover, my emphasis on African-inspired spirituality as a source of knowledge and a means to sacred authority for black Cuban writers contributes to our understanding of Manzano and Plácido not as mere imitators but as aesthetic and Political innovators. Finally, by reworking theories of transculturation from the angle of African epistemology,” Pettway “seek[s] to demonstrate that some of the processes of social transformation that cultural anthropologists have examined were also at work in literature in ways heretofore unknown.” (43) [End Page 169] As important as these contributions are, equally significant is the way in which Pettway’s work “represents a paradigm shift in our thinking about black writers in colonial Latin America because it analyzes how they reconstructed Africa in America through an epistemological engagement with Bakongo- and Yoruba-inspired spiritualities.” Pettway argues that “it is an African Atlantic system of religious knowledge—not the strictures of Catholic doctrine—that provided Plácido and Manzano with the tools, both political and meta-physical, to conceive what African-descended liberation might look like.” (43) Finally, Pettway notes: “Cuban ‘Literature contributes to the fields of Latin American Studies, Hispanic Cultural Studies, religious studies, Cuban and Caribbean History, and Africana Studies by suggesting a paradigm shift for the way scholars analyze Afro-Latin American colonial literature.” (44) In the book Pettway lists the writers’ singular accomplishments. For example, Manzano’s Poesías líricas, published in 1821, marked “the first collection of Cuban verse published by anyone, black or white. (12) The reader also learns that in 1836, Juan Francisco Manzano was writing the only known autobiographical account (slave narrative) of slavery in Spanish America, his Autobiografía de un esclavo, originally titled La verdadera historia de mi vida. Pettway makes note of the fact that Manzano;s Cuban slave narrative preceded the work of black Abolitionists Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, published in 1845, and William Wells Brown’s Narrative of...

Slavery and Class in the American South: A Generation of Slave Narrative Testimony, 1840–1865 by William L. Andrews

Reviewed by: Slavery and Class in the American South: A Generation of Slave Narrative Testimony, 1840–1865 by William L. Andrews Brigitte Fielder Slavery and Class in the American South: A Generation of Slave Narrative Testimony, 1840–1865. By William L. Andrews. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. Pp. xvi, 389. $36.95, ISBN 978-0-19-090838-6.) Compiled over decades of research and spanning an impressive archive, William L. Andrews's study of the social and economic distinctions among enslaved people provides an important contribution to the study of life under slavery. This accounting of class attends to distinctions of both labor and access to resources and social benefits, as well as to the complex relations of privilege and power to which class contributed. Differences in labor conditions and in the social and material advantages and allowances that were more regularly denied to enslaved people produced social differentiations of rank among enslaved people and complicated relations to white people of various ranks and classes. Andrews reads class beyond its resonances with Black freedom and gives texture to the breadth of conditions under enslavement. The book extends discussions of class beyond the clichéd reduction of relations between field and house slaves to reveal not a simple hierarchy but a precarious set of relations that nevertheless influenced day-to-day lives and structured experiences of slavery. The slave narrative is an expert genre for the study of Black life as well as a key genre for reading the intertwining of class with identity construction. These narratives reveal the workings of class, which produced complex relationships among enslaved people and also with white people. Such narratives show, in part, "narrators' awareness of class as both a prop for and a potential weapon against entrenched white power" (p. 18). Importantly, Andrews does not lose sight of what any differences in these conditions of class could not do: alleviate slavery. He notes, "A privilege granted to a slave was not a legal or human right," and rarely an outright gift, but more often a quid pro quo that could be revoked at will (p. 6). This arrangement distinguished relative advantages of position among enslaved people even while it revealed the differences between these kinds of class advantage and privileges attached to whiteness. Class distinctions were not merely aspirational but could be wielded and withdrawn at will. The distinctions did not approximate freedom, although they posed a danger to slavery by sometimes making freedom more attainable. Andrews treats slave narratives published between 1840 and 1865, a "generation" of testimony that includes well-known narratives by writers such as William Wells Brown, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Jacobs, as well as still understudied autobiographies. This peak array of the genre includes narratives of enslaved workers in settings from the industrial to the agricultural to the domestic. Even as he defines the advantages and limitations of focusing on this [End Page 522] period, Andrews makes a case for reading broadly within the genre. Yet, as Andrews acknowledges, these selected narratives are not necessarily representative. For example, a scan of the sixty-one narratives and fifty-two narrators in the appendix of works included in this study reveals that only a handful of these bear names traditionally given to women. Although Andrews does treat women's experiences beyond this position of author, here we only glimpse the complex relationships between material and social privilege, reproductive labor, and sexual assault in the examples he discusses from this archive. At its crux, however, Andrews offers a renewed look into some of the most prominent (and relatively elite) narratives of the genre, while also urging readers to consider these alongside the genre's much broader depth. Because class has overwhelmingly been discussed in light of both paid labor and free forms of sociality, this study leaves readers with the opportunity to also reconsider the implications that class under slavery had for class in various contexts for Black freedom. Readers will leave this book with a keen eye for enslaved writers' attunement to class amid their discourses on race, slavery, and freedom. Brigitte Fielder University of Wisconsin–Madison Copyright © 2021 Southern Historical Association

The Sketch, the Tale, and the Beginnings of American Literature by Lydia G. Fash

Reviewed by: The Sketch, the Tale, and the Beginnings of American Literature by Lydia G. Fash Desirée Henderson The Sketch, the Tale, and the Beginnings of American Literature. By Lydia G. Fash. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2020. x + 316 pp. $65.00 cloth/$37.50 paper/$37.50 e-book. Lydia G. Fash’s The Sketch, the Tale, and the Beginnings of American Literature is defined by substantial claims about three main topics, two of which are highlighted in the book’s title. First, Fash presents an argument about genre, challenging the predominance of the novel in nineteenth-century America and instead proposing that two short prose forms, the tale and the sketch, deserve recognition for their foundational role in literary history. Fash states that the tale and the sketch have their own defining genre characteristics that should not be subsumed under the umbrella category of the short story, because doing so obscures the particular contribution that tales and sketches have made to American literary nationalism. In addition, Fash brings a critical eye to the generic containers through which these short texts were published, circulated, and collected (the miscellany, the periodical, the literary annual or gift book) or into which they were incorporated as supporting structures (the novel). Second, her book follows the temporal turn in literary studies by examining how the tale and the sketch were employed to represent a specific moment in time: the origins of the American nation. Her focus on what she terms “the culture of beginnings” enables Fash to track how the unique temporal orientations of the tale and the sketch made them ideal vehicles for authors concerned with [End Page 165] imagining national origins, sometimes as grandiose myths but more often as complicated timescapes that put different experiences and identities in conflict (8). Third, Fash explores how tales and sketches recounting America’s beginnings contributed to a national narrative of “white fictive ethnicity” (142). Although, according to Fash, stories about American history could be adapted to accommodate women’s voices and thereby critique the phallocentrism of national origin stories, such flexibility did not extend to race or ethnicity. For the most part, nineteenth-century tales and sketches promoted a vision of America as ideally white, employing Native Americans as mere props and eliding the role of slavery and white supremacy in nation formation and expansion. If a critique can be offered of Fash’s book, it would be that these three large and worthy arguments jostle for attention. At times, certain topics rise in prominence while the others recede into the background. For example, sometimes when discussing the representation of time within certain texts, the question of whether those texts are tales or sketches drops out. Of the three topics, it is the last—the role of race and, specifically, whiteness—that most consistently disappears from view. When it surfaces, it brings valuable dimensions to Fash’s analysis, but it does not always stay in focus. Fash’s book addresses a range of literary figures, some long associated with tales and sketches (Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe) and others whose relationship to short prose might not be as well known (Harriet Beecher Stowe, William Wells Brown). It is in her chapters on Sarah Josepha Hale and Catharine Maria Sedgwick that Fash most clearly indicates what a focus on the tale and sketch has to contribute to the study of American women writers. That Hale and Sedgwick—and most other women writers of the nineteenth century—were prolific authors of short fiction and narrative is a recognized fact, but one frequently passed over in accounts of their literary careers in favor of other achievements (most commonly, the publication of novels). Fash is correct that centering tales, sketches, and other short forms has the potential to render a more accurate understanding of how the conventions and demands of nineteenth-century publishing shaped how—and in what form—women writers could express their relationship to the nation-state. Hale offers an interesting case study because she was the author of numerous sketches and, as editor of Ladies’ Magazine (the focus of Fash’s analysis) and later Godey’s Lady’s Book, was also...