
Contents
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The Parts and Props of Fugitive Performance Art The Parts and Props of Fugitive Performance Art
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Prosthetic Performances Prosthetic Performances
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Perambulations Perambulations
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Poses, Postures, Performances: Ellen Craft’s Escape Art Poses, Postures, Performances: Ellen Craft’s Escape Art
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4 Is This Performance about You? The Art, Activism, and Black Feminist Critique of Howardena Pindell
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2 Passing Performances: Ellen Craft’s Fugitive Selves
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Published:April 2012
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Abstract
This chapter continues reinterpreting otherwise banal nineteenth-century behaviors and fierce acts of bravery as forms of black performance art in by shifting to an examination of fugitive slave Ellen Craft’s passing performances; her radical actions succeeded in eventually freeing Craft and her husband William from chattel slavery in rural Georgia, and eventually transforming them into veteran performers in the United States and British Isles. The chapter lays bare the sundry sartorial and synthetic props of Craft’s handicapped white male avatar, “Mr. William Johnson.” It aims to reveal how Craft’s aforementioned prosthetic performances—fusing clothing-based items to faux acts of disability—succeeded in eliciting sympathy (and prompting action) from unbeknownst white spectators. This chapter also briefly turns to Craft’s cousins, Frank and Mary, to emphasize their shared use of performance-based methods in their equally perilous collaborative escape. The chapter, then, travels across the Atlantic Ocean as it moves from Craft’s improvised escape acts to her otherwise banal peregrinations at the Great Exhibition in London in 1851 and her staging of her white mulatta body as a disruptive agent. Finally, the chapter ends with a discussion of the engraving of Craft in her partial escape costume that appeared in the London Illustrated News the same year (and later as the frontispiece to Running a Thousand Miles to Freedom), urging a reading of this engraving as a unique depiction, neither of her nor of her white male avatar, but rather both simultaneously.
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