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The Reconstruction of Whiteness: William Wells Brown's The Escape; or, A Leap for Freedom

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

John Ernest
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Abstract

Focusing on William Wells Brown's one published play. The Escape; or, A Leap for Freedom (1858), I address Brown's decision to supplement his antislavery lectures with dramatic readings of original plays. In this effort to challenge the terms of a representative identity as a black antislavery lecturer, Brown presented a conception of social life grounded in what I term multiply contingent identity. By this formulation, one's social identity is always contingent and is always in danger of being undermined as one's performance of selfhood awaits verifying responses in the form of reciprocal performances in the field of social relations. In The Escape, Brown turned his own performance of identity on the antislavery lecture circuit into a commentary on performance itself, especially on performances both shaped and veiled by the ideology of race. In this way. Brown attempted to reposition white northern antislavery sentiment, reconstructing whiteness by emphasizing its contingent relation to a reconfigured vision of African American identity.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 113 , Issue 5 , October 1998 , pp. 1108 - 1121
Copyright
Copyright © 1998 by The Modem Language Association of America

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