The captive stage

Description:

In The Captive Stage, Douglas A. Jones, Jr. argues that proslavery ideology remained the dominant mode of racial thought in the antebellum north, even though chattel slavery had virtually disappeared from the region by the turn of the nineteenth century--and that northerners cultivated their proslavery imagination most forcefully in their performance practices. Jones explores how multiple constituencies, ranging from early national artisans and Jacksonian wage laborers to patrician elites and bourgeois social reformers, used the stage to appropriate and refashion defenses of black bondage as means to affirm their varying and often conflicting economic, political, and social objectives. Joining performance studies with literary criticism and cultural theory, he uncovers the proslavery conceptions animating a wide array of performance texts and practices, such as the "Bobalition" series of broadsides, blackface minstrelsy, stagings of the American Revolution, reform melodrama, and abolitionist discourse. Taken together, he suggests, these works did not amount to a call for the re-enslavement of African Americans but, rather, justifications for everyday and state-sanctioned racial inequities in their post-slavery society. Throughout, The Captive Stage elucidates how the proslavery imagination of the free north emerged in direct opposition to the inclusionary claims black publics enacted in their own performance cultures. In doing so, the book offers fresh contexts and readings of several forms of black cultural production, including early black nationalist parades, slave dance, the historiography of the revolutionary era, the oratory of radical abolitionists and the black convention movement, and the autobiographical and dramatic work of ex-slave William Wells Brown.--Amazon.com

subjects: African Americans in the performing arts,  History,  Northeastern states,  Race relations,  Race discrimination,  Whites,  Blackface entertainers,  Racism in popular culture,  Slavery,  Northeastern states, politics and government,  Whites, history,  Entertainers, united states,  Slavery, united states, history,  African americans in the performing arts--history,  African americans in the performing arts--northeastern states--history--19th century,  Race discrimination--history,  Race discrimination--northeastern states--history--19th century,  Whites--history,  Whites--northeastern states--history--19th century,  Blackface entertainers--history,  Blackface entertainers--northeastern states--history--29th century,  Racism in popular culture--history,  Racism in popular culture--united states--history--19th century,  Slavery--history,  Slavery--united states--history--19th century,  Northeastern states--race relations--history,  Northeastern states--race relations--history--19th century,  Race relations--history,  Pn2270.a35 j55 2014,  812/.3093552,  White people

Places: Northeastern states,  United States

Times: 19th century,  29th century