Gestures Against Movements: Henry Box Brown and Economies of Narrative Performance

This chapter traces the various circuits—economic, narrative, performative—that structure black abolitionist textual production through the cultural work of Henry Box Brown. Building on Daphne Brooks’s analysis of Brown’s texts in particular, this chapter argues that we should consider black abolitionist performance in tandem with narrative performance: the unruly narrative gestures uncontained by the slave narrative form or the expectations of its primarily white readership. While Brown’s use of illustration and panorama allow us to read the slave narrative anew, the chapter claims that ex-slave narrators utilized a similar recognition of the iconicity of the black body and visual savvy in their narratives, producing rhetorical performances that challenge the ideological containment of the slave narrative. In attending to the textual aspects of visual culture, the chapter brings to light Brown’s insurgent iconoclasm which emerges to disrupt the “discursively claustrophobic tone and form” of even his most constrained 1849 narrative.

Optical Allusions: Textual Visuality in Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom

This chapter reads William Craft’s Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom (1860) as an emblematic text that depends upon a series of complex interactions between the Crafts’ cultivation of their image and their use of dialogue and narration in different contexts. Examining how the visual image Ellen cultivates is juxtaposed with the couple’s use of double entendre, the chapter argues that William Craft places the ambivalence of language and the ambivalent language of skin color side by side to unsettle popular notions of racial identity and identification. The narrative illustrates that phenotypical characteristics such as complexion are not facts with fixed meanings, but, rather, are discursively defined social symbols that can be manipulated to various ends. I argue that Craft turns this revelation back on the authenticating requirements of the slave narrative, offering interpersonal recognition as a mode of visuality which counters the objectifying gaze of slavery.

Sight Unseen: Contemporary Visual Slave Narratives

Establishing and examining an archive of contemporary visual slave narratives—including Glenn Ligon’s Narratives and Runaways series (1993), Kara Walker’s Slavery! Slavery! (1997) and Narratives of a Negress (2003), and Ellen Driscoll’s The Loophole of Retreat (1991)—this chapter reframes critical debates on the slave narrative around the visual stakes of the form and advances a new model of reading the slave narrative founded on attention to the historical and aesthetic dislocations and disjunctions accentuated in contemporary visual slave narratives. Concluding with an analysis of Frederick Douglass’s visual intervention in his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, specifically, his metaphorical assertion, “You have seen how a man was made a slave, you shall see how a slave was made a man,” the chapter argues that both contemporary artists and 19th-century ex-slave narrators produce representational static to evade the racial constraints on their artistic production.

“The Shadow of the Cloud”: Racial Speculation and Cultural Vision in Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave

This chapter argues that as a narrative of kidnap rather than birth into slavery, Solomon Northup’s historical predicament dramatizes the rhetorical predicament of all ex-slave narrators. Northup is a free man who has been mistaken for a slave. This is, in existential terms, the condition of all ex-slave narrators: although they have been treated as objects, they must prove to their readers that this is a fundamental misrecognition, that they have been subjects all along. The chapter argues that Northup challenges this visual mistake by producing two contradictory strains within his narrative: he meticulously executes the authenticating requirements that restore his freedom and fulfill the literary expectations of authenticity, while evacuating those conventions of racial meaning through a series of visual metaphors and scenes of witnessing that reveal the absurdity of the racial logic motivating the conventions of authentication.

Behind the Scenes and Inside Out: Elizabeth Keckly’s Use of the Slave Narrative Form

Advancing a formal reading of Behind the Scenes; or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House (1868), this chapter shows how Elizabeth Keckly undermines the ideological presumptions that link blackness with enslavement and whiteness with literacy and truth by inverting the racial protocols underlying slave narratives’ conventions of authentication. In Behind the Scenes it is Keckly’s letters that authenticate Mary Lincoln’s version of events, Tad Lincoln’s reading lesson which is included in place of her own, and the narrative gaze is primarily on the white bodies within the text as they take shape in her vocation, dress-making. In overturning these race rituals, which rely on fixed notions of “black” and “white,” Keckly challenges the racial protocols of the slave narrative and exposes how the form itself has been organized by the visual logic of racial slavery.

Introduction: Representational Static

Using contemporary artwork as a lens onto the textual visuality of 19th-century slave narratives, this introduction to Fugitive Testimony works backwards historically to excavate ex-slave narrators’ challenge to authenticating conventions, and therefore their challenge to the assumptions motivating racial classification itself. The introduction argues that the book’s unique focus on the recursive nature of the slave narrative form unifies what have been three distinct phases of the genre’s criticism within the academy—historical, literary, and cultural studies approaches—and contributes to the historiographical contours of Atlantic studies. Drawing on literary analysis, art history, and visual and performance theory, the book connects vital early literary critical accounts of the slave narrative that examine the genre’s conventions of authentication and issues of literacy with later cultural studies approaches, including those advanced by Lindon Barrett, Saidiya Hartman, Fred Moten, Daphne Brooks, and Michael Chaney.

Racial Violence, Racial Capitalism, and Reading Revolution: Harriet Jacobs, John Jones, Kerry James Marshall, and Kyle Baker

Meditating on the continued racial speculation on black bodies in our contemporary moment, the epilogue brings the link between racial violence, capitalism, and evidentiary epistemology into sharper focus. Drawing on Harriet Jacobs’s insights into the role racial violence-as-spectacle plays in the construction of wealth, the epilogue considers what ex-slave narrators bring to contemporary debates around racial violence, such as the debate over whether or not police body cameras will resolve or lessen unremitting episodes of police brutality on people of color. While the book opens with an analysis of contemporary visual slave narratives at the end of the 20th century, the epilogue ends with a consideration of the slave narrative form in the 21st century, considering works that contribute to contemporary figurations of slavery but are not all strictly within the slave narrative tradition I have defined, including John Jones, Kerry James Marshall, and Kyle Baker.