Ellen Craft’s Radical Techniques of Subversion |
Ellen Craft’s Radical Techniques of Subversion
e-misférica
Hemispheric Institute for Performance & Politics
Issue 5.2: Race and its Others (December 2008)
16 pages
Uri McMillan, Assistant Professor of English
University of California, Los Angeles
Image by Bruce Yonemoto
This paper considers the antebellum performance(s) of fugitive slave Ellen Craft. Craft, an African-American female slave from Georgia, impersonated a white male slaveholder, Mr. William Johnson, in order to escape from slavery with her husband William. I argue that through various techniques of performance—cross-racial impersonation, prosthetics, costume, hair, and gender performance, for example—Craft radically destabilized nineteenth-century social norms, particularly racial and gender mores. An antebellum subject who manipulated her body as an elastic object, Ellen Craft made costumes out of the rigid nineteenth-century identities of “blackness” and “whiteness,” particularly 19th century white masculinity. In this paper, specifically, I analyze the corporeal techniques Craft wielded in her original performance to escape in America before moving to her appearances later on the abolitionist lecture stage in England.
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Tags: e-misférica, Ellen Craft, Uri McMillan