How popular theater, including blackface characters, reflected and influenced attitudes toward race, the slave trade, and ideas of liberty in early America. Jenna M. Gibbs explores the world of theatrical and related print production on both sides of the Atlantic in an age of remarkable political and social change. Her deeply researched study of working-class and middling entertainment covers the period of the American Revolution through the first half of the nineteenth century, examining controversies over the place of black people in the Anglo-American moral imagination. Taking a transatlantic and nearly century-long view, Performing the Temple of Liberty draws on a wide range of performed texts as well as ephemera—broadsides, ballads, and cartoons—and traces changes in white racial attitudes. Gibbs asks how popular entertainment incorporated and helped define concepts of liberty, natural rights, the nature of blackness, and the evils of slavery while also generating widespread acceptance, in America and in Great Britain, of blackface performance as a form of racial ridicule. Readers follow the migration of theatrical texts, images, and performers between London and Philadelphia. The story is not flattering to either the United States or Great Britain. Gibbs's account demonstrates how British portrayals of Africans ran to the sympathetic and to a definition of liberty that produced slave manumission in 1833 yet reflected an increasingly racialized sense of cultural superiority. On the American stage, the treatment of blacks devolved into a denigrating, patronizing view embedded both in blackface burlesque and in the idea of "Liberty," the figure of the white goddess. Performing the Temple of Liberty will appeal to readers across disciplinary lines of history, literature, theater history, and culture studies. Scholars and students interested in slavery and abolition, British and American politics and culture, and Atlantic history will also take an interest in this provocative work.

This international analysis of theatrical case studies illustrates the ways that theater was an arena both of protest and, simultaneously, racist and imperialist exploitations of the colonized and enslaved body. By bringing together performances and discussions of theater culture from various colonial powers and orbits—ranging from Denmark and France to Great Britain and Brazil—this book explores the ways that slavery and hierarchical notions of "race" and "civilization" manifested around the world. At the same time, against the backdrop of colonial violence, the theater was a space that also facilitated reformist protest and served as evidence of the agency of Black people in revolt. Staging Slavery considers the implications of both white-penned productions of race and slavery performed by white actors in blackface makeup and Black counter-theater performances and productions that resisted racist structures, on and off the stage. With unique geographical perspectives, this volume is a useful resource for undergraduates, graduates, and researchers in the history of theater, nationalism and imperialism, race and slavery, and literature.

Leading biblical scholars tell the story of how Samson, a controversial biblical character, became a celebrated icon in African American literature and how Black Samson was used to address race in America.

Transatlantic Revolutionary Cultures, 1789-1861 argues that the revolutionary era constituted a coherent chapter in transatlantic history and that individual revolutions were connected to a broader, transatlantic and transnational frame. As a composite, the essays place instances of political upheaval during the long nineteenth century in Europe and the Americas in a common narrative and offer a new interpretation on their seeming asynchrony. In the age of revolutions the formation of political communities and cultural interactions were closely connected over time and space. Reciprocal connections arose from discussions on the nature of history, deliberations about constitutional models, as well as the reception of revolutions in popular culture. These various levels of cultural and intellectual interchange we term “transatlantic revolutionary cultures.” Contributors are: Ulrike Bock, Anne Bruch, Peter Fischer, Mischa Honeck, Raphael Hörmann, Charlotte A. Lerg, Marc H. Lerner, Michael L. Miller, Timothy Mason Roberts, and Heléna Tóth.

The War of 1812 was one of a cluster of events that left unsettled what is often referred to as the Revolutionary settlement. At once postcolonial and neoimperial, the America of 1812 was still in need of definition. As the imminence of war intensified the political, economic, and social tensions endemic to the new nation, Americans of all kinds fought for country on the battleground of culture. The War of 1812 increased interest in the American democratic project and elicited calls for national unity, yet the essays collected in this volume suggest that the United States did not emerge from war in 1815 having resolved the Revolution's fundamental challenges or achieved a stable national identity. The cultural rifts of the early republican period remained vast and unbridged. Contributors: Brian Connolly, University of South Florida Anna Mae Duane, University of Connecticut Duncan Faherty, Queens College, CUNY James M. Greene, Pittsburg State University Matthew Rainbow Hale, Goucher College Jonathan Hancock, Hendrix College Tim Lanzendoerfer, University of Mainz Karen Marrero, Wayne State University Nathaniel Millett, St. Louis University Christen Mucher, Smith College Dawn Peterson, Emory University Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, University of Michigan David Waldstreicher, The Graduate Center, CUNY Eric Wertheimer, Arizona State University

Cutting across academic boundaries, this volume brings together scholars from different disciplines who have explored together the richness and complexity of colonial-era Caribbean theatre. The volume offers a series of original essays that showcase individual expertise in light of broader group discussions. Asking how we can research effectively and write responsibly about colonial-era Caribbean theatre today, our primary concern is methodology. Key questions are examined via new research into individual case studies on topics ranging from Cuban blackface, commedia dell’arte in Suriname and Jamaican oratorio to travelling performers and the influence of the military and of enslaved people on theatre in Saint-Domingue. Specifically, we ask what particular methodological challenges we as scholars of colonial-era Caribbean theatre face and what methodological solutions we can find to meet those challenges. Areas addressed include our linguistic limitations in the face of Caribbean multilingualism; issues raised by national, geographical or imperial approaches to the field; the vexed relationship between metropole and colony; and, crucially, gaps in the archive. We also ask what implications our findings have for theatre performance today – a question that has led to the creation of a new work set in a colonial theatre and outlined in the volume’s concluding chapter.

The first collection of its kind, Chartist Drama makes available four plays written or performed by members of the Chartist movement of the 1840s. Emerging from the lively counter-culture of this protest campaign for democratic rights, these plays challenged cultural as well as political hierarchies by adapting such recognisable genres as melodrama, history plays, and tragedy for performance in radically new settings. They include poet-activist John Watkins’s John Frost, which dramatises the gripping events of the Newport rising, in which twenty-two Chartists lost their lives in what was probably a misfired attempt to spark a nationwide rebellion. Gregory Vargo’s introduction and notes elucidate the previously unexplored world of Chartist dramatic culture, a context that promises to reshape what we know about early Victorian popular politics and theatre.

The first full-length study of Frederick Douglass' visit to Scotland in 1846Frederick Douglass (1818-95) was not the only fugitive from American slavery to visit Scotland before the Civil War, but he was the best known and his impact was far-reaching. This book shows that addressing crowded halls from Ayr to Aberdeen, he gained the confidence, mastered the skills and fashioned the distinctive voice that transformed him as a campaigner. It tells how Douglass challenged the Free Church over its ties with the Southern plantocracy; how he exploited his knowledge of Walter Scott and Robert Burns to brilliant effect; and how he asserted control over his own image at a time when racial science and blackface minstrel shows were beginning to shape his audiences' perceptions. He arrived as a subordinate envoy of white abolitionists, legally still enslaved. He returned home as a free man ready to embark on a new stage of his career, as editor and proprietor of his own newspaper and a leader in his own right.Key Features:First full-length study of Frederick Douglass' visit to Scotland in 1846Reveals fresh information about, and deepens our understanding of, a major 19th-century intellectual at a crucial stage in his political and professional developmentSubjects Douglass' speeches and letters to close readings and situates them in the immediate context of their delivery and compositionDemonstrates the extent to which Douglass was closely acquainted with Scottish literature, history and current affairsEnhances our knowledge of Douglass as a performer, his ability to read audiences, and how he moved and influenced them

With the Ta-Nehisi Coates–authored Black Panther comic book series (2016); recent films Django Unchained (2012) and The Birth of a Nation (2016); Nate Parker’s cinematic imagining of the Nat Turner rebellion; and screen adaptations of Marvel’s Luke Cage (2016) and Black Panther (2018); violent black redeemers have rarely been so present in mainstream Western culture. Grégory Pierrot argues, however, that the black avenger has always been with us: the trope has fired the news and imaginations of the United States and the larger Atlantic World for three centuries. The black avenger channeled fresh anxieties about slave uprisings and racial belonging occasioned by European colonization in the Americas. Even as he is portrayed as a heathen and a barbarian, his values—honor, loyalty, love—reflect his ties to the West. Yet being racially different, he cannot belong, and his qualities in turn make him an anomaly among black people. The black avenger is thus a liminal figure defining racial borders. Where his body lies, lies the color line. Regularly throughout the modern era and to this day, variations on the trope have contributed to defining race in the Atlantic World and thwarting the constitution of a black polity. Pierrot’s The Black Avenger in Atlantic Culture studies this cultural history, examining a multicultural and cross-historical network of print material including fiction, drama, poetry, news, and historical writing as well as visual culture. It tracks the black avenger trope from its inception in the seventeenth century to the U.S. occupation of Haiti in 1915. Pierrot argues that this Western archetype plays an essential role in helping exclusive, hostile understandings of racial belonging become normalized in the collective consciousness of Atlantic nations. His study follows important articulations of the figure and how it has shifted based on historical and cultural contexts.

American publishing in the long nineteenth century was flooded with readers, primers, teaching-training manuals, children’s literature, and popular periodicals aimed at families. These publications attest to an abiding faith in the power of pedagogy that has its roots in transatlantic Romantic conceptions of pedagogy and literacy. The essays in this collection examine the on-going influence of Romanticism in the long nineteenth century on American thinking about education, as depicted in literary texts, in historical accounts of classroom dynamics, or in pedagogical treatises. They also point out that though this influence was generally progressive, the benefits of this social change did not reach many parts of American society. This book is therefore an important reference for scholars of Romantic studies, American studies, historical pedagogy and education.