Rosa Martinez
California State University, Sacramento
Rosa Martinez is an Assistant Professor in English at California State University, Sacramento, where she specializes and teaches courses in American literary history (Early America to 1900), including Chicana/o and U.S. Latina/o Literature, American Women Writers, and Herman Melville. She received her Ph.D. in English from UC Berkeley. This position paper draws from a seminal chapter in her first book project, Extravagant Passing: Masquerade in the American Literary Imagination. An essay from this work is also under resubmission in MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the United States.
We arrived at Charleston, and I there lost sight of Mr. Johnson, an acquaintance at my elbow remarking that he was either a “woman or a genius.”
- Anonymous, “An Incident at the South” (January 17, 1849)
Sightings of runaway slaves were common in 19th century newspapers; however, this escape, which began in Macon, Georgia and ended in free Philadelphia on Christmas day, gained unique transatlantic popularity as a female version of transformation and a harrowing yet romantic leap for liberty. As the article suggests, a passenger spotted Ellen Craft while aboard a steamboat, traveling from Savannah and bound for Charleston. Even the literary imaginations of the day appropriated the her passing-plot; deliberately modeling their cross-dressing heroines (and heroes) after Ellen herself: as in the book of the century, Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly (1851-52), and the first novel by an African American, Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter (1853). Years before the publication of these fictions, the author of “An Incident at the South” had already captured the genius beneath the mask, prodded at the space between the mask and the “real,” and substantiated precisely that which Ellen’s passing achieved in specific ethno-racial terms. The genius—to borrow the term from the acquaintance—is her “invention” of a costume that transcended the binary terms of the antebellum color line. Here is a figure of dissent, of brown fugitivity, that, through an absurd representation of the master, provokes 19th categories of citizenship and national belonging. Hers is an extravagant performance of passing that signifies in multiple categories all at once: racial passing, cross-dressing, sexual ambiguity, class passing, feigning disability, and traversing transnational borders. Indeed, a surplus signification in the very performance of passing that we have missed.
For this talk, I examine my concept of extravagant passing in relation to concepts of wildness and the wild, particularly considering racial and sexual performativity across dangerous “white” climates of a racialized slave economy. A major implication derived from the sighting is that while contemporary critics project onto Ellen and her narrative a simple passing binary of black-white, they in fact occlude the blind spot and opportunity afforded by the expansionist-racist-sexist ideology that Ellen seized, in a sense recreating the opportunity for her (Spanish) masquerade and life to slip past them and us. Examining the archive—this newspaper clipping, John Disturnell’s 1847 U.S./Mexico map, her 1851 frontispiece-portrait, and Running (1860)—in her becoming civic and reproducing the “character” of citizenship to pass out of slavery, the black female subject of miscegenation (the figure masquerading in/civility) voices an outrageous and violent critique of the master and his body.
