The numerous revues that opened in spring 1924 reflected many different approaches to the popular and profitable genre. Five revues debuted over four days in May in New York (including I’ll Say She Is, starring the Marx Brothers; Innocent Eyes, featuring Mistinguett and on-stage nudity; and The Grand Street Follies, produced away from Times Square at the Neighborhood Playhouse). London had its own revues open that showed tremendous aesthetic contrasts, including Elsie Janis at Home starring the popular American entertainer, and two editions of major series: Ziegfeld’s Follies, which included a sequence dedicated to the memory of Victor Herbert, and George White’s Scandals, the last Scandals for which George Gershwin wrote music, premiered on Broadway.

What Rudyard Kipling called the 'campaign of lost footsteps' was the longest campaign fought by the Victorian army. Those resisting the British in an increasingly difficult guerrilla war were characterized as mere bandits or dacoits. Many, however, were former Burmese soldiers. Monks were also prominent in the resistance. The pacifcation campaign was then extended to the hill tribes who were no more willing to accept British administration than the other groups living in Burma. The extremely difficult nature of campaigning in the terrain and climate of Burma was not sufficiently appreciated, the War Office choosing to see the effort required – seen as a ‘subaltern’s war’ – largely as 'police' work. Intended regime change had not been accompanied by any consideration of the likely implications. The initial force deployed was not sufficient to ensure proper security in the aftermath of occupation. Prolonged insurgency then necessitated deploying a force far larger than originally intended or anticipated, the pacification campaign employing at peak over 31,000 troops and 32,000 police. Evolving military and civil measures eventually brought order by 1895 but proved destructive to Burmese society. British preference for the recruitment of hill tribes into police and armed forces equally sowed seeds for future divisions.

The dream as a rhetorical trope has a long history in African American literature and public discourse. Dreams and visions appear in a number of pre-1830 narratives and are characterized by the narrator’s interactions with the incredible, the divine, or the phantasmagorical. Because dreams are idiosyncratic and unreal, describing those dreams allows narrators to communicate important ideas or goals that might be heterodox or forbidden. Moreover, since it is both personal and imaginary, the dream is entirely unverifiable. This combination of imagination and narration is one reason early African American autobiographers made use of the dream vision as a rhetorical trope: the dream preserves a fictional space within a fact-based narrative. Within these fictional spaces, narrators could offer up visions of justice, morality, and faithfulness that deviated from white, European, and/or Christian norms. They could produce versions of self that were more capable, more powerful, or more insightful than the men who controlled the dominant institutions in the colonies and early United States. Ultimately, narrators could use dreams to make claims on their readers and – at the same time – to authorize their own actions in a world of prohibitions.

This chapter investigates the function of a biblically-derived rhetoric of redemption in writings by turn-of-the century Black narrators who discussed slavery in the United States of America. I focus on three key texts: Venture Smith’s A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture, A Native of Africa, But resident above seventy years in the United States of America (1798); George White’s A Brief Account of the Life, Experiences, Travels, and Gospel Labours of George White, An African (1810); and John Jea’s Life, History, and Unparalleled Sufferings of John Jea, The African Preacher. White and Jea infuse the account of their freedom from the bondage of sin and their subsequent regeneration in God with a riveting chronicle of their experiences both as slaves and as roving Atlantic freedmen, while Smith incorporates his experiences as a slave and a freedman within a Franklinesque account of personal fiscal successes and exploits. Operating as a principal and a vocabulary, the rhetoric of redemption enlarged possibilities for Black narratives to critique both the early practices of racial slavery and the historical character of freedom in the North American context. The word “redemption” carries theological and economic meanings that bore directly upon the historical character of (and possibilities for) Black liberation in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.