Performing Fugitivity: Henry Box Brown on the Nineteenth-Century British Stage
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Henry Box Brown was a fugitive US slave who, in 1849, mailed himself from slavery in Virginia to freedom in Philadelphia in a large postal crate. Brown survived and went on to perform panoramas of his experience and stage shows involving magic, mesmerism (hypnosis), phrenology, and even dark séances in the US, the UK, and Canada. In 1857 in England, he also acted in semi-autobiographical plays written specifically for him by the minor British playwright E. G. Burton. The author of this essay has now recovered and transcribed these handwritten plays. By comparing these plays to other British drama in this period about slavery, the article argues that they are important in staging a black, heroic figure who survives enslavement and arrives to freedom. Secondly, and more theoretically, the article contends that Brown’s performances in these dramas enact a challenging mode of performative fugitivity – of ‘running up against’ slavery and social death – and depict the enslaved obtaining a resistant mode of visuality. Brown therefore can be viewed as a radical performance artist who manipulates his own objectification to create a powerful onstage persona that cannot be caught within a viewer’s ethnographic gaze and thereby creates a mode of performative freedom.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".