Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850–1910 (review)

Reviewed by: Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850-1910 Lori Harrison-Kahan Daphne A. Brooks . Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850-1910. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006. Pp. xii+475, illustrated. $25.95 (Pb). As "spectacular" as their performances were, the subjects of Daphne A. Brooks's study, Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850-1910, rarely received positive reviews from theatre critics. In fact, more often than not, the work of performers Henry Box Brown, Adah Isaacs Menken, George Walker, Bert Williams, and Aida Overton Walker left audiences and critics nonplussed. Brooks's meticulously researched and insightful book makes sense of the elements of these performances that most confounded spectators. Brooks identifies early African American theatre as a crucial site of resistance, arguing that black cultural producers deployed spectacle to counteract the alienation experienced by diasporic bodies and thus became "agents of their own liberation" (3). In examining cultural productions from the mid-nineteenth century through the turn into the twentieth century, Brooks's book charts terrain similar to that of Saidiya V. Hartman's Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. But while Hartman warns of the dangers of applying contemporary notions of subversive performance to African Americans in ante- and post-bellum America, Brooks offers a more conciliatory — and often celebratory — view of performance as a strategy of dissent that allowed African Americans to assert the humanity that had been so severely curtailed by slavery and its aftermath. Brooks's own scholarly performance is remarkable in its range, as she shows that her subjects were engaged in heterogeneous acts that included song and dance, magic and spiritualism, drama and comedy, panorama and pantomime. Thus, Bodies in Dissent goes beyond the minstrel tradition that has been the focus of a number of valuable studies of nineteenth-century racial performance, notably Eric Lott's Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. Setting the performances of African American men and women against "the ubiquitous master narrative of minstrelsy, with its colonizing and constrictive figurations of grotesque and immobile 'blackness"' (5-6), Brooks begins her study with two texts that expressed white anxiety [End Page 284] about — and the corresponding containment of — racially ambiguous bodies: The Octoroon (1861), by Irish playwright Dion Boucicault, and the American stage adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's novel, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1887). While performances of these plays on both sides of the Atlantic may have fixed black bodies as objects of a white gaze, Brooks argues that they also opened up the theatre as a space for intervention and (re-)invention in which black performers could revise such limiting representations. In chapter two, Brooks provides explicit evidence for her broader claims that theatrical art functioned as African American activism by examining the eccentric performances of abolitionist Henry Box Brown who escaped from slavery by mailing himself in a box from a Virginia plantation to freedom in the North. Beginning with a conventional written narrative of his escape from slavery, Brown transformed his experiences into the visual medium of a moving panorama and later re-enacted his sensational escape from bondage as a Victorian magic show. Brooks's cogent inter-textual readings of these various narratives illustrate that Brown's manipulation of multiple forms and technologies allowed him to resist not only the confinement of slavery but also the circumscribed agency of escaped slaves, whose narratives are often labelled "black messages in white envelopes" (because, to certify its authenticity, the narrative was either framed by white testimony or completely written by a white amanuensis). In chapter three, Brooks takes up an issue to which she returns throughout the remainder of her book, the case of the black female body, whose corporeal representation was especially fraught given the intersection of racial and sexual subjection. While the place of Adah Isaacs Menken in African American performance history may be somewhat precarious, given the actress's uncertain racial background, Brooks makes a compelling argument for Menken's inclusion in such a genealogy, contending that she was "black(ened)" by virtue of her profession and situating her...

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