Performing the temple of liberty: Slavery, rights, and revolution in transatlantic theatricality (1760s--1830s).

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

The project demonstrates the critical role of theatrical culture in shaping the debates about slavery, abolition and emancipation in London and Philadelphia, debates unleashed by the revolutions of the eighteenth-century and enmeshed in the larger issues of democracy, citizenship, and rights. Theatrical notions of race, rights, and slavery were "performed" not only on stage in plays, pantomimes, and burlesque but also off stage in political cartoons, broadsides, ephemera, poems, and ballads featuring theatrical characters, conceptions, and images. The study is organized around four pivotal axes of transatlantic disputation: the American revolutionary years, 1760s to 1780s; the French and Haitian revolutionary era, 1780s to 1804; slave trade abolition and African colonization and mission schemes, 1807 to 1820s; and, finally, reactions in the 1830s to black freedom in Philadelphia and its beginnings in the British West Indies.
The study addresses the development of popular abolitionism and constructs of "race" in Great Britain and the United States and the circulation of these ideas in the Atlantic world. The transnational analysis illustrates how political and cultural exchange between London and Philadelphia helped galvanize key changes in the politics and socio-aesthetics of slavery and freedom, thus offering not only a comparative but also an interactive examination of the Atlantic circulation of ideas. Most historians agree that a moral transformation in public opinion about slavery took place in the late eighteenth century, and some have demonstrated how abolitionists rallied popular feeling through books, pamphlets, prints, and artifacts. But historians have neglected the relationship between Anglo-American antislavery and theatrical culture, which, as I show, contributed to this sea-change. The transatlantic diffusion of blackface imaginings of slavery and freedom in stage performances by white actors in burnt cork, political cartoons, and broadsides was critical to the congealing of racial categories in the nineteenth century. While scholars have investigated the relationship of nineteenth-century American blackface minstrelsy to the development of American racism, this study exposes how eighteenth-century revolutionary and antislavery discourse stimulated British as well as American blackface performance, and hence contributed to the creation of an Atlantic socio-aesthetic of race.