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.

摘要

亨利·博克斯·布朗 (Henry Box Brown) 是一名逃亡的美国奴隶，他于 1849 年将自己从弗吉尼亚州的奴隶制邮寄到费城的一个大邮政箱里。布朗幸存下来，继续在美国、英国和加拿大表演他的经历和舞台表演的全景图，包括魔术、催眠术（催眠）、颅相学，甚至是黑暗降神会。1857 年在英国，他还出演了英国小剧作家 EG Burton 专门为他写的半自传体戏剧。这篇文章的作者现在已经恢复并转录了这些手写剧本。通过将这些戏剧与这一时期关于奴隶制的其他英国戏剧进行比较，文章认为它们对于塑造一个在奴役中幸存下来并获得自由的黑人英雄人物很重要。其次，从理论上来说，文章认为，布朗在这些戏剧中的表演展现了一种具有挑战性的表演逃亡模式——“对抗”奴隶制和社会死亡——并描绘了被奴役者获得一种抗拒的视觉模式。因此，布朗可以被视为一位激进的表演艺术家，他操纵自己的客观化来创造一个强大的舞台角色，无法被观众的民族志凝视所吸引，从而创造了一种表演自由的模式。