Black Textual Performance from Dred Scott to Emancipation

On March 5, 1858 the black historian William Cooper Nell organized a “commemorative festival” at Boston’s Faneuil Hall to observe the eighty-eighth anniversary of the Boston Massacre and to protest the recent Supreme... [ view full abstract ]

On March 5, 1858 the black historian William Cooper Nell organized a “commemorative festival” at Boston’s Faneuil Hall to observe the eighty-eighth anniversary of the Boston Massacre and to protest the recent Supreme Court decision in the Dred Scott case. The first event represented the claims of people of color to the heritage of the American Revolution. The second event represented the denial of those claims by a white supremacist government. In addition to oratory and music, the festival featured “tableaux” and an “exhibition of relics.” The event, as Tavia Nyong’o recounts it, had “an air that was equal parts stage spectacle, parlor soiree, and political rally” (64). It was, as John Ernest argues, “a collective performance” (220). It was an event, as Elizabeth Rauh Bethel notes, that was “organized and carried out by African Americans” (4). For these reasons, I argue, the event embodies the abolitionist movement itself. The movement’s texts, like the songs by Frances Ellen Watkins and Charlotte L. Forten that were performed at the 1858 event, are texts whose publication histories are also performance histories. In this seminar paper, I take inspiration from Meredith McGill’s work on bibliographic format and Robin Bernstein’s work on scriptive things in order to examine the print ephemera that advertised and animated a series of events that continued through the Civil War.

Works Cited

Bethel, Elizabeth Rauh. The Roots of African-American Identity: Memory and History in Free

Antebellum Communities. St. Martin’s, 1997.

Ernest, John. Liberation Historiography: African American Writers and the Challenge of

History, 1794-1861. University of North Carolina, 2004.

Nyong’o, Tavia. The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory.

University of Minnesota, 2009.