Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review"Brown’s ingenious escape from slavery in Richmond, Virginia, by mailing himself in a wooden postal crate to abolitionists in Philadelphia, was unique and well documented. But that is not the story that most interests the author of this elegant cultural history. Cutter focuses on how Brown turned his experience in slavery into performance art on various tracks in many different locales" * Pennsylvania Heritage *
Table of ContentsContents
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations for Archives Consulted
Introduction. The Many Resurrections of Henry Box Brown, the Man Who Mailed Himself to Freedom
Chapter 1. Slavery and Freedom in US Visual Culture: The Performative Personae of William Wells Brown, William and Ellen Craft, Frederick Douglass, and Sojourner Truth
Chapter 2. Becoming Box Brown, 1815–1857
Chapter 3. Performing Fugitivity: Henry Box Brown on the Nineteenth-Century British Stage, 1857
Chapter 4. Performing New Panoramas, Mesmerism, Spiritualism, and Second Sight, England, 1857–1875
Chapter 5. Canada, the United States, and Beyond: Performing Slavery and Freedom, 1875–1897
Chapter 6. The Absent Presence: Henry Box Brown in Contemporary Museums, Memorials, and Visual Art
Chapter 7. Playing in the Archives: Box Brown in Contemporary Children’s Literature and Visual Poetry
Coda. The Resilience of Box Brown and the Afterlives of Slavery
Appendix. Selected Contemporary Creative Works About Henry Box Brown Notes
Index
