JADT Vol24 n2 Spring2012 Costola Cross Kubly Sweigart-Gallagher Youker

8/12/2019 JADT Vol24 n2 Spring2012 Costola Cross Kubly Sweigart-Gallagher Youker

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TH JouRN L oF

MERIC N DR M ND THE TREVolume 24, Number 2 Spring2012

Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter MeserveCo-Editors: David Savran and James F Wilson

Guest Editor: James FisherThe University of North Carolina at Greensboro)

with the AIDS Editorial Board:Nicole Boyar The Graduate Center/CUNY; graduate student

representative), Jonathan Chambers Bowling Green StateUniversity), Dorothy Chansky Texas Tech University),Anne Fletcher Southern Illinois University, Carbondale),

Michelle Granshaw University of Washington),Amy E. Hughes Brooklyn College), im Marra University of

Iowa),John O Connor Fairmont State University), Ilka SaalGhent University), Judith Sebesta Lamar University),Bob Vorlicky New York University), Barry Witham

University of Washington)Managing Editor: Shane Breaux

Editorial Assistant: Jordan CohenCirculation Manager: Benjamin Gillespie

Circulation Assistant: Sivan GrunfeldMartin E. Segal Theatre Center

Frank Hentschker, Executive DirectorProfessor Daniel Gerould in memoriam), Director of Publications

Jan Stenzel, Director of AdministrationTHE GRADUATE S CHOOL AND UNIVERSilY CENTER

OF THE CrTY UNIVERSITY OF NEw YoRK


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EDITORIAL Bo RDPhilip AuslanderUna ChaudhuriWilliam D emastesHarry ElamJorge Huerta

Stacy Wolf

Shannon JacksonJonathan KalbJill LaneThomas PostlewaitRobert Vorlicky

The Journal o merican Drama and Theatrewelcomes submissions. Our aim is topromote research on theatre of the Americas and to encourage historical andtheoretical approaches to plays, playwrights performances, and popular theatretraditions. Manuscripts should be prepared in conformity with the ChicagoManual o Style, using footnotes (rather than endnotes). We request that articlesbe submitted as e-mail attachments, using Microsoft Word format. Please notethat all correspondence w ll be conducted by e-mail, and please allow three tofour months for a decision. Our distinguished Editorial Board w ll constitute thejury of selection. Our e-mail address is [email protected]. You may also addresseditorial inquiries to the Editors,JADT Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, CUNYGraduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10016-4309. Pleasevisit ourweb site at web.gc.cuny.edu/mestc.

The Journal o American Drama and Theatre is supported bygenerous grants from the Vera Mowry Roberts Chair inAmerican Theatre and the Sidney E. Cohn Chair in TheatreStudies at the City University of NewYork.

Martin E SegalTheatre Center© Copyright 2012The Journal o Amen can Drama and Theatre (ISSN 1044-937X) is a memberof CELJ and is published three times a year, in the Winter, Spring, and Fall.Subscriptions are 20.00 for each calendar year. Foreign subscriptions require anadditional 10.00 for postage. Inquire of Circulation Manager/Martin E. SegalTheatre Center, CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NewYork 10016-4309.

All journals are available from ProQuest Information andLearning as abstracts online via ProQuest informationservice and the International Index to the PerformingArts. All journals are indexed in the MLA InternationalBibliography and are members of the Council of Editorsof Learned Journals.


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TH JouRN L oF MERIC N DR M ND THE TRE

Volume 24, Number 2

CONTENTS

I TRODUCTION

TRIBUTE TO D ANIEL GEROULD

SERGIO CosToLAWilliam Wells Brown's Panoramic Views

LEZLIE CROSSMaking Citizens of Savages: Columbia's Roll Call at

the Hampton Institutej ENNA L KUBLY

Staging the Great War in the National Red Cross PageantANGELA S WEIGART-GALLAGHER

John Hunter Booth's Created Equal: A Federal TheatreModel for PatriotismTIMOTHY YOUKER

His Own House of Thought : Thornton Wilder'sAmerican Loneliness and the Consolation of Theatre

CONTRIBUTORS

Spring 2012

573

33

9

67

89

109


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JOURNAL OF AMERICAN D R.\MA AND ThEATRE 24, NO.2 SPRING 2012

INTRODU TION

The happy collaboration of the American Theatre and Drama Societyand the Journal o merican rama and Theatre continues with this specialissue edited by members of the ATDS. As its mission statement makesclear, the ATDS is dedicated to the study of United States theatre anddrama, its varied histories, traditions, literatures, and performances withinits cultural contexts. The ATDS also encourages the evolving debateexploring national identities and experiences through research, pedagogyand practices. The ATDS recognizes that notions of America and theU.S . encompasses migrations of peoples and cultures that overlap andinfluence one another. The parallel aims of the Journal o merican ramaand Theatre include the goal of promoting research on theatre of theAmericas and to encourage historical and theoretical approaches to plays,playwrights, performances, and popular theatre traditions.

For this special issue of JADT the ATDS editorial panel choseInterrogating Patriotism as its topic, inviting essays exploring the

nature of patriotism as reflected in American theatre and drama acrossthe centuries. This seemed a particularly pertinent and timely topic forthe long year leading up to a presidential election in challenging timesfor Americans. In the aftermath of the greatest economic crisis since theGreat Depression and what, as of the early spring of 2012 is shaping up asone of the most divisive election seasons in memory, America's citizenrycontinues its centuries-long debate over its ideals, especially in regard tothe meanings of equality, liberty, and the individual pursuit of happiness.

Theatre and drama in the Americas has, from its beginnings,depicted true believers, loyal dissenters, and traitors to the ideals andrealities of national identity in all forms of theatre and drama. How dothe views and prejudices of these varied characters, and those of theirauthors, shape ideas about the ever-changing cultural landscape? Howdo diverse views and prejudices on the meaning of patriotism impactindividuals, institutions, and the theatre artists exploring them? How dothese plays and playwrights change perceptions about citizenship? Howdo performance and social rituals influence myriad views of patriotismand national myths? The contributors to this special issue of JADT haveapproached these and other questions through varied historical, critical,and performative perspectives to reveal aspects of the realities andillusions of American patriotism, inviting scholars and artists to continueto ponder the questions as new works and new forms emerge across thetwenty-first century


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6 FISHERAmerican drama has been a powerful voice for racial, ethnic, and

gender groups struggling to achieve equality across the centuries and it isthus not surprising that contributors to this volume should address theways inwhich the disenfranchised found the drama a means through whichto advocate social change. Race figures significantly in Sergio Costola sWilliam Wells Brown's Panoramic Views, revealing the subversive scopicpractices Brown employed in the mid-nineteenth century to assault theracial status quo and reveal the multiple sins of American slavery. Movinginto the late nineteenth century, Lezlie Cross examines in fascinating detailthe patriotic pageant, o l u m b i a ~ II Call a celebration of the glories ofcitizenship through a display of patriotic heroes and a reinforcement ofAmerican ideals which also stood in performative opposition to thestereotypical depictions of Native Americans as savages typical in WildWest shows and other popular culture entertainments of that time. JennaL. Kubly also examines the pageant tradition, particularly the NationalRed Cross Pageant, which in the late 191 Os offered images of the GreatWar and escaping the escapist entertainments of the time to insteadactively engage the social and political climate of its era. Moving intothe 1930s, Angela Sweigart-Gallagher turns to the Federal Theatre Projectproduction of John Hunter Booth's Created Equal.- An merican Chroniclein thirry-one scenes (1938), a vivid manifestation of the FTP's principle ofengaging national history and founding myths to 'awaken the nation'to an American national identity. Also turning to the years just priorto World War II, Timothy Youker dissects Thornton Wilder's cosmic,mythical themes which read like attempts at an American StandardBible for the stage, in which the playwright projects an abiding faith inthe power of drama to bridge the often yawning gap between individualminds and pull together disparate collections of individuals into temporarycommunities.

Readers of this special issue of ] DT will invariably applaudthe interrogation of patriotism provided by these talented scholars inthese extraordinary times for all Americans. Will the American experimentsucceed? Perhaps these scholars, and the productions and artists theyexamine, have provided a hopeful answer: Americans explore theirhistory, ideals, and varied realities through the means provided by theatreand drama, indicating that debating its ideals on American stages is anessential step toward achieving them.

James FisherGuest Editor

The University of Nor th Carolina at Greensboro


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JOURNAL OF A ffiRICAN DRA MA AND THEATRE 24, NO. 2 S R NG 2012)

A Tribute to aniel GerouldDuring preparations for this American Theatre and Drama Society-editedissue of the Journal o merican Drama and Theatre the membership ofATDS-and the academic field of theatre and drama-lost a major figure:aniel Gerould 1928-2012).

Dan was the Lucille Lortel Distinguished Professor of Theatreand Comparative Literature in the PhD Program at the City Universityof New York Graduate Center. He also held the posts of Director ofAcademic Affairs and Director of Publications at the CUNY GraduateCenter s Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. As an American scholarand translator whose work focused on among other things, Americanmelodrama, Dan may be especially remembered for his titanic efforts indirecting the attention of American theatre scholars and practitionersto the astonishing plays and productions emanating from Central andEastern European theatres.

Dan had a BA (1946), an MAin English Literature (1949), and aPhD (1959) in Comparative Literature from the Universityof Chicago, anda Diplome in French Literature from the Sorbonne (1955). Before joiningthe faculty of the CUNY Graduate Center, he taught at the Universityof Arkansas (1949-51), the University of Chicago (1955-59), and SanFrancisco State University (1959-1968), where he established and headedthe Department of World and Comparative Literature. He visited Polandin 1965 on a travel grant from the U S Office of Education InternationalStudies Project with California State Colleges, developed an interest inPolish theatre, and then taught for two years at Warsaw University as aFulbright Lecturer (1968-70). He was an exchange scholar in the FacultyResearch Program with the Soviet Union at Moscow State University in1967.

Dan was the editor of the journal Slavic and East EuropeanPerformance from 1981 and of the twelve-volume Routledge/ HarwoodPolish and Eastern European Theatre Archive (1996-2002). He translatedtwenty-one plays by Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz (Witkacy), and wroteextensively about Witkiewicz and twentieth-century avant-garde dramaand theatre. His play Candaules Commissioner has been performed in France,Germany, and America. For his translations from Polish he has receivednumerous awards, including prizes from the Polish International TheatreInstitute, Los Angeles Drama Critics, Polish Authors Agency,JurzykowskiFoundation, American Association of Teachers of Slavic and EastEuropean Languages, American Council of Polish Cultural Clubs, andMarian Kister. He was the recipient of the City University of New York


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8Award for Excellence in Teaching (Graduate Center) and was honoredby lWB Theatre Without Borders, as a Groundbreaker in internationaltheatre exchanges. Dan was also an avid jazz collector, and was marriedto the Polish scholar and translator Jadwiga Kosicka, with whom hefrequently collaborated.

Dan s truest memorial would be the accomplishments ofgenerations of his students. The following reflections and recollectionsfrom a few of his past and present students offer testimony to his manylegacies:From Kurt Taroff (Queen s University, Belfast):I had the very good fortune to be Daniel Gerould s student for sevenyears, his Managing Editor at Slavic and ast European Performance for four,and, I would dare say privileged to be his friend for the last thirteen years.While Dan was not a young man, he had a youthful bearing and remainedextremely active, cross-country skiing every winter at his second homein Woodstock, NY On the streets of New York, Dan could lay claim tohaving some of the fleetest feet in the city; often when walking with him,I would have to run to catch up to him. (This may sound like an attemptat a profound metaphor, but I assure you it is completely true.) So, whileany time would have been too soon Dan s death may well be called anuntimely one.

As the many gratifying tributes since his passing have notedDan was an exceptional scholar, one of the last of a breed who couldtruly claim to be a generalist in the best and most thorough of ways. Iworked with Dan in the early stages of compiling and editing the essaysin the recent partial collection of his work,Quick hange (Martin E. SegalTheatre Center Publications, 2011) . The breadth of work on displayin the collection offers a small glimpse at the remarkable range of hisexpertise-including melodrama, French and Russian symbolism, theGrand Guignol, and Eastern European theatre, particularly his translationsof and commentaries on Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz (whose work Danwas among the first to bring to the attention of Western scholars). Danprovided particular inspiration in pursuing his own personal interests,whatever the area, and in the satisfaction of .his unique curiosities hegreatly expanded and enhanced the body of knowledge from which weall draw.

As a teacher, in classes such as melodrama, symbolist theatre, andthe European avant-garde, Dan provided a comprehensive multi-mediaexperience that was not merely an account of the theatre relative to thattopic, but truly a cultural history of an idea. And as was the case for manyof Dan s students who would go on to be his dissertation advisees, an


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TRIBL TE TO D NIELG EROULD 9off-hand comment, delivered in Dan's characteristically playful and yetsomehow cryptic manner, planted a small seed in my mind that developedinto the focus of my work for the next decade. In my case, this seed camein the form of Nikolai Evreinov's theory of monodrama, leading me topursue the history and future applications of the concept; but Dan inspiredstudents to do work in fields as varied as his interests and knowledge.

And Dan was an incomparable mentor, with a special gift fortransmitting key ideas with a subtlety that made you believe that you hadthought of them yourself. With his seemingly endless and mystifyinglycatalogued index cards, Dan was always ready to provide leads for any paththat a student's research interest might lead them down, often includingthe most obscure and fascinating material imaginable. And as I hope Ihave learned to continue with my own students, a meeting with Dan wasless a progress report than an opportunity to share discoveries and arguethe intricacies of complex ideas

In addition to his many virtues as an academic, Dan was aprofoundlygood person-gentlemanly, kind, and seemingly innately proneto brokering good will and placidity amongst colleagues and students. Danwas, and will continue to be, an enormous influence on my life. I wasrecently told that in German, the dissertation supervisor is referred to asDoktorvater. Dan certainly was my Doctor's Father, and I feel a bit

like an academic orphan today. Dan will be sorely missed.From James M. Cherry Wabash College):In the brief biographical note that precedes the selection of Horace's Thert of oetry in his theory anthology Theatre/Theory/Theatre Dan Gerould

describes the poet as a fat little arriviste who was a discriminatingtheatregoer of fastidious predilections, [and] who found Plautus crudeand overrated (68). I have always loved Dan's vivid depiction of a pudgyHorace sniffing at the occasional crassness of Roman comedy. His writinghelps frame a well-thumbed text, rendering it fresh and intimate. In Dan'shands, Horace becomes human. As a teacher, scholar, and mentor toso many students for so many years, Dan sought to make the vauntedapproachable, the forgotten seen, and the complex pleasurable. In person,he was courtly and kind, his reactions to his students' work penetratingand precise. He wore his accomplishments as lightly as he took his and hisstudents ' scholarship seriously.

Dan's eclecticism is well known; his writings range from Centraland Eastern European performance to American melodrama to Frenchpuppetry to Russian film But I have always been struck by his attitudetoward his scholarship, by his willingness to seek out and embrace textsdisregarded or discounted by others. H e mixed the meticulousness of the


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10professional scholar with the whimsy and elan of the gendeman amateur.Dan was a thinker who followed his heart.

It's a sad truth that one just doesn't get many true mentors inlife. In the days since his passing, there have been many moments thatwould have prompted me to shoot off an email to Dan a funny studentreaction to the railroad scene in Daly's Under the Gaslight, a question abouta modern adaptation of Uncle Tom s Cabin, or an observation about lifein the academy. In our last email exchange, shortly before his death, wediscussed the joys of fatherhood. His absence catches me up short, and Isuspect it always willFrom my E Hughes Brooklyn College, CUNY):Although I began doctoral studies at the CUNY Graduate Center withhazy hopes of becoming a scholar of medieval theatre, during my firstsemester I registered for Daniel G erould s course on melodrama, one ofseveral popular seminars that he taught regularly. Looking around the roomon the first day, I noted how crowded it was. I also saw many unfamiliarfaces. I soon learned that I had stumbled upon a community comprisingnot only theatre history students but also individuals studying comparativeliterature, fi lm, and other subjects. (Dan covered an astonishing array ofmaterial in his seminars, so he attracted such motley crews.)

Many strange and exhilirating adventures were in store. Wediscussed melodramas performed across the globe and across time,fro m Euripides's Medea to Pixerecourt's Le Chien de Montargis to StephenSondheim's Sweenry Todd. We wrestled constantly with the definitionof melodrama itself, reading a plethora of articles and chapters byscholars endeavoring to explain (and configure) this often-malignedbut nevertheless enduring genre. For my seminar paper, I wrote abouta Boston clergyman's possible co-authorship of The Drunkard (1844),arguably the most famous American temperance melodrama. With Dan'sencouragement, the following year I revised the paper and it became myfirst publication. My first book, which is in large part about melodrama,will be published by University of Michigan Press this fall.

My story is far from unique; many of Dan's students have similarones. We are the fortunate beneficiaries of his indefatigable curiosity,which compelled him to unearth diamonds in the rough and to sharethose treasures with others. He is most celebrated and admired for hisscholarship on Eastern European theatre, which has made a trans formativeimpact on the field. Bu t his publications on melodrama- including theanthology mericanMelodrama (1982), which sits on the books elf of manya J DT reader and his teaching of the subject has also had a significant(if perhaps less visible) impact on the study of theatre and drama in the


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TRIBUT TO D NIEL GEROULD 11US during the nineteenth century.

It seems incongruous to write a memorial about someone asesteemed as Daniel Gerould and to end up writing mostly about yourself.Yet this, in itself, reflects something vitally important about him, bothas a model and a mentor. My memories of Dan are inseparable fromthe knowledge of how he affected and shaped me-how he helped mechoose my specialty as a theatre historian; how his careful questions andcritiques of my writing continue to influence my work; how his rigorousand interdisciplinary approach to teaching subtly but profoundly informswhat I do in my classroom. For these invaluable gifts, I will be forevergrateful.From Edmund B. Lingan (The University of Toledo):Daniel Gerould taught me more than I could ever expect from a teacher,mentor, or friend-and he did so in an elegant, interesting, and compellingmanner. Dan was the first person to encourage me to pursue my interestin occultism and theatre as a dissertation project, and this guidance hasled me into the career that I now have. Dan dispelled my fears that myresearch interests were too bizarre to build an academic career upon bypointing to the groundbreaking work that he and others had done beforeme. He always encouraged his students to move into the fringes of thefield of theatre and performance studies. Nothing was too far off thebeaten track or too unusual for Dan: on the contrary, he relished art andtopics that were unique, fringe, or, as Dan sometimes said, freewheelingin style.

I am thankful to Dan for showing me that staying true to whatinterests you-even if that interest seems to defy the borders of logic-isthe secret to creating compelling work. He lived according to this policy, asis made apparent by the wide range of fascinating books and articles thathe produced throughout his career and the equally vast range of coursesthat he taught. I can only hope to stay as true to my passions as a scholarand artist as Dan did during his life. Dan provided a joyous approach tohis work as a scholar, teacher and artist that others can view as a standardto live up to while treading their own paths.And, finally, from Nicole Boyar, Sissi Liu, Shari Perkins, JessicaSilsby Brater, and Christopher Silsby, some of Dan s most recentstudents at The Graduate Center/CUNY:

Perhaps the greatest lesson that Dan taught us that it is possible tobe powerful, influential, and charismatic-even a giant in one 's field-andyet retain one's warmth and empathy. Despite his unparalleled contributionto the study of Polish avant-garde theatre and his important work on


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12melodrama and symbolism, Dan never brought up his own achievementsand always emphasized the work of others. Dan taught us by example tobe rigorous scholars with generous hearts. He also taught us to trust ourscholarly instincts, and encouraged us to engage critically with work thathas been neglected or relegated to provisional positions in the field. FromDan we learned that melodramas such as P i x e n ~ c o u r t s Alice or the ScottishGravediggers the horror entertainments of the Grand Guignol, and theforgotten nonsense theatre of Galczynski s The Little Theatre o the GreenGoose are worthy of serious study.

Dan had a profound understanding of humanity and, in the spiritof Symbolism, embraced the human desire to explore and comprehendthat which defies articulation. In Dan s seminar on the European avantgarde, we learned how individuals, wielding art as a political weapon,risked their lives for theatrical expression. In his Symbolism class, eachmeeting revealed untold wonders of artists who found inspiration in thepsychic realm. We will never forget the yellowing Sx8 index cards thatappeared to hold all the answers to Dan s very specific questions, eventhough he barely ever glanced at them. Dan had a brilliant sense of humor,an appreciation for the odd and f f ~ kilter, and an impish twinkle in his ywhen talking with students. His sly instructions for our final papers werethat they should be twenty pages long, with the caveat that if we wereinclined t work especially hard, an exceptional paper should be fifteen.

A constant presence at the Graduate Center for forty years, Dantrained generations of scholars. Without doubt, his influence will be feltaround the world for decades to come and missed daily in the halls of 365Fifth Avenue.


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jOURNAL OF AMERJCAN D RAMA ND THEATRE 24, NO.2 SPRJNG 2012)

WILLIAM WELLS BROWN'S PANORAMIC VIEWS

Sergio CostolaSlavery has never been represented; Slavery can never berepresented The slave cannot speak for himself.

-William Wells Brown1The concept of progress must be grounded in theidea of catastrophe. That things are status quo is thecatastrophe. It is not an ever-present possibility but whatin each case is given. Thus Strindberg (in To Damascus):hell is not something that awaits us, but this life here andnow.

-Walter Benjamin2Author of poems, novels, autobiographies, travel narratives, historicalstudies, and plays, William Wells Brown created an eclectic body of workthat made him, as Saunders Redding argued, historically more importantin the development of Negro literature than any of his contemporaries. 3Nonetheless, as John E rnest notes, it is particularly surprising thatBrown has received little critical attention 4 and that his Original PanoramicViews-first performed in 1850 and published more than twenty yearsago in The Black AbolitionistPaperJ- has received virtually none. Following

1 William Wells Brown, A Lecture delivered Before the Female Anti-SlaverySociety of Salem At Lyceum Hall, Nov. 14, 1847, in Four Fugitive Slave Na atives, ed. LarryGara (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1969), 81-2.

2 Walter Benjamin, Selected Wn'tings 1927-1934, ed. Howard Eiland and MichaelWJennings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), Vol. 2: 184-185.

3 I would like to thank BeverlyJ Robinson (1946-2002) for her inspired teachingand guidance. I am also grateful to Michael Saenger, Julia Johnson, Erica Stevens-Abbitt,and Kathleen Juhl for their advice.

For a detailed account of Brown's life sec William Edward Farrison, WilliamWells Brown: Author and Reformer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969).

4John Ernest, The Reconstruction of Whiteness: William Wells Brown's TheEscape; or, A Leap for Freedom, PMLA 113.5 (October 1998): 1109.

5 William Wells Brown, A Description o William Wells Browns Original PanoramicViews o the Scenes in the Lje o an American Slave, from His Birth in Slavery to His Death or HisEscape to His First Home o Fr dom on British Soil, in TheBlack Abolitionist Papers, ed. C. PeterRipley Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1985-1992),I:190-224.


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14 CosToLAthe lead of Charles D avis and Henry Louis Gates, the main concern ofthis essay is to investigate Brown's Original Panoramic Views as a narrativediscourse as important for its structural and formal characteristics as itis important for the truths it reveals about the peculiar institution. 6In his moving panorama, Brown employed some of those distinctiveattributes of black cultural forms whose special power derives as PaulGilroy states, from a doubleness, their unsteady location simultaneouslyinside and outside the conventions, assumptions, and aesthetic valueswhich distinguish and periodise modernity. By restoring slavery andthe enslaved bodies within the frame, Brown was not only queryingrepresentative modes not traditionally inclined to consider the other(s) ofhistory, but was also attending to a counter-culture by creating dialecticalimages that could bring present and past into collision, thus advocating forother stories, other modernities and trajectories. With the term dialecticalimages I am appropriating a concept developed by Walter Benjamin in thelate 1920s and 30s. My contention is that, as we shall see, William WellsBrown developed with his panoramic views an approach to history thatpresents striking similarities to the one proposed by the German-Jewishphilosopher in his Arcades Project.

The need to re-present what was visible but not seen and uncovera complexity that rejected the unilateral truth of the traditional pictureframe- the idea of the window on the world 8-became a necessity forBrown as soon as he became aware of the impossibility of representingthe real condition of the slave:

I may try to represent to you Slavery as 1t 1s . . . yetwe shall all fail to represent the real condition of theslave. . Slavery has never been represented; Slaverycan never be represented .The slave cannot speak forhimself.96 The Slave; Narratives ed. Charles T. Davis and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Oxford

and New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), XII.7 Paul Gilroy The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge:

Harvard University Press, 1993), 73.8 The window on the world, as lain Chambers reminds us, is of course a

technologically updated version of the perspective that has continually been elaborated byoccidental humanism. The reduction of time and space to the flat surface of a canvas ordigital monitor, despite the five centuries that separate them, is the common child of anepistemological desire to translate the external world into a unique vision controlled by theuniversal subject, a subject invariably white, male and Western. lain Chambers, Beyondthe Dream, Third Text 19 .6 (November 2005): respectively 603 and 600.

9 Brown, Lecture delivered Before the Female Anti-Slavery Society, 81 -2.


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WrLUAM WELLS BROWN'S PANORAMIC VrEWS

It can scarcely be expected, however, that thoseof us who understand the workings of slavery in theSouthern states will bring before you the wrongs of theslave as we could wish. Language will not allow us; andif we had the language, the fastidiousness of the peoplewould not permit our portraying them.1

15

Brown, in these two speeches, does not only state, as many other exslaves did, that the horrors of slavery defy expression in language, butalso that, granted an apt language, the resulting depiction of slavery wouldclash with the dominant system of representation- the window on theworld -which required a unique and unambiguous vision controlled bya (universal) viewing subject. As Paul Gilmore notes,

in the early 1850s, to depict a black man as a man requiredeither painting him white-as with mulatto heroes-orstripping off his blackness to reveal a white interior.But both solutions replicated the racial distinctions theyattempted to question-whiteness made one a man,blackness, by itself, left one less than a man.In fact, Brown's positive traits-gentility, eloquence, oratorical

techniques, etc.-were often justified by critics as coming from his AngloSaxon blood. Since the slave, as Gates observes, by definition, possessedat most a liminal status within the human community, 12 considered as thelowest of the human races on the Great Chain Of Being, Brown's solutionwas then to posit himself at the crossroad, the liminal space where Esuresides, thus Signifyin(g) upon the figure of the Great Chain Of Beingitself:

Wm. Wells Brown was then introduced to the audience.10 William Wells Brown, Speech by William Wells Brown Delivered at the City

Assembly Rooms. New York, New York 8 May 1856, in Ripley, The Black AbolitionistPapers, IV:339.

11 Paul Gilmore, De GenewineArtekil: William Wells Brown, Blackface Minstrelsy,and Abolitionism, American Uterature, 69.4 (December 1997): 764.

12 Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Signibing Monkey: A Theory o African-AmericanUterary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 128. Regarding the GreatChain of Being, see William Stanton, The Leopard s Spots: Scientific Attitudes Toward Race inAmerica, 1815-1859 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960). Esu or Eshu is oneof the most important deities of the Yoruba mythology. He is among other things, theprotector of crossroads and a trickster-god.


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16He commenced by saying that we were here to commenton the doings of our fathers. f his audience thought hereferred to black fathers they were mistaken-neither didhe refer to white fathers. We were a mixed people.13

COSTOLA

By presenting himself as a mixed person, Brown characterized himselfas a member of the family of undecidables and thus resisted anddisorganized simple binary oppositions: he brought the outside into theinside, and poisoned the comfort of order with suspicion and chaos. Onecannot knock on a door unless one is outside; and it is the act of knockingon the door which alerts the residents to the fact that one who knocks isindeed outside. 4 Instead of knocking and ask for acceptance to the worldthat had denied him citizenship since the beginning, Brown opposed all thatthe established order strived to be and fashioned himself as simultaneouslyneitherblack norwhite, eitherwhite or black. As Zygmunt Bauman points out,

The horror of mixing reflects the obsession withseparating The central frame of both modern intellectand modern practice is opposition-more precisely,dichotomy In dichotomies crucial for the practice andthe vision of social order the differentiating power hidesas a rule behind one of the members of the opposition.The second member is but the other of the first, theopposite (degraded, suppressed, exiled) side of the firstand its creation.15In addition, by referring to both his white and black ancestors

and thus displacing his audience's assumptions and expectations, Brownforegrounded the possibility of adopting racial identities while at the sametime called attention to the impossibility of eradicating the racial body:

Why do I stand before you, Mr. Chairman, tonight, notan African nor an Anglo-Saxon, but of mixed blood? t sattributable to the infernal system of American slavery.1613William Wells Brown, Speech by William Wells Brown. Delivered at Cincinnati

Anti-Slavery Convention, Cincinnati, Ohio, 25 April 1855, in Ripley, The Black bolitionistPapers IV:287.

14 I am referring here to Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence (lthaca:Cornell University Press, 1991), 78

15 Ibid., 14 (italics in original).16 William Wells Brown, Speech by William Wells Brown. Delivered at the


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WILLIAM WELLS BROWN's PANORAMIC VIEWS 17Brown was thus anticipating Franz Fanon's claim that The Negro is not.Any more than the white man, 17 suggesting that race is defined more byeconomic, moral, social, symbolic, and even linguistic reasons rather thansimply biological ones.

To Signif(y) upon the figure of the Great Chain of Being alsotranslated, forBrown, into a critique of classical mimesis with its hierarchicalstructure, which reinforced all identity claims. In his panorama, as weshall see, Brown's intent was to show intersections between identity andidentification, as it was in his speeches: I speak not as an Anglo-Saxon, asI have a right to speak, but as an African. 18 It is thus possible to investigateBrown's work from a transnational and intercultural perspective-i .e. , interms of the modern political and cultural formation that Paul Gilroyhas called the Black Atlantic. The specificity of this formation can bedefined through the desire to transcend both the structures of the nationstate and the constraints of ethnicity and national particularity, in orderto embrace the more difficult option arising from the theorisation ofcreolisation, metissage, mestizaje, and hybridity. 17

According to William Farrison, Brown became a lecturing agentfor the Western NewYork Anti-Slavery Society late in the fall of 1843, andby the summer of 1845 he was already generally known as a leader amongNegroes in Western New York. 19 The lectures delivered by this eloquentadvocate of liberty were often described as thrilling performances thatcould hold the large audience in almost breathless silence for nearly twohours. 20 The idea of creating a more effective performance is one of theHorticultural Hall, West Chester, Pennsylvania, 23 October 1854, in Ripley, The BlackAbolitionist Papers IV:247.

7 Franz Fanon, Black Skin White Masks trans. Charles Lam Markmann (NewYork: Grove Press, 1967), 231 .18 William Wells Brown, Speech by William Wells Brown. Delivered at the

Horticultural Hall, West Chester, Pennsylvania, 23 October 1854, in Ripley, The BlackAbolitionist Papers IV:249. As Elin Diamond argues, identity is imagined to be the truthfulorigin or model that grounds the subject, shapes the subject, and endows her with acontinuous sense of self-sameness or being Identification, on the other hand, is apassionate mimesis, a fantasy assimilation not locatable in time or responsive to politicalethics. . . . Drawing another into oneself, projecting oneself onto another, identificationcreates sameness not with the self but another: you are like) me, I am (like.) See ElinDiamond, Unmaking Mimesis. Essays on Feminism and Theatre (London and New York:Roudedge, 1997), 106 (italics in original).

19 Farrison, William We/Lr Brown 81 and 96.20 Liberator 4 September 1847, quoted in Farrison, William Wells Brou;n 116.

Instead of relying on techniques that were typical of the embellished rhetorical stylethat characterized contemporary speakers, Brown was conforming his speeches to themodel of the black preachers. In fact, as Beverly Robinson has noted, Many preachers


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18 CosToLAmain reasons why Brown, around 1850, at the time of his tour in England,decided to experiment with the moving panorama. In the "Preface" tohis Original Panoramic Views Brown states that in 1847 he had visited anexhibition of a panorama of the Mississippi River in Boston and thathe had remained somewhat amazed at the very mild manner in whichthe 'Peculiar Institution' of the Southern States was there represented."21What William Wells Brown had seen was probably the most famous ofall American moving panoramas of the time, John Banvard's Mississippifrom the Mouth o the Missouri to New Orleans. Inaugurated in Louisville in1846, this canvas toured Boston and New York before being hung in theEgyptian Hall in London at the end of 1848.22 In addition, Brown alsosaw the exhibit of the panoramas London by Night and Paris y Night whenthey were shown for the reopening of the Colosseum in London in thelate 1840s.23

Bernard Comment has argued that the panorama was one ofthe most popular and most typical phenomena of the nineteenth century,of which it is in a way a signature."24 Many scholars have observed howthe panorama might be considered the first mass medium, in the sensethat while it lured its spectators with the belief in the possibility of bothordering and controlling the rapidly changing landscape of an industrialEurope or that of newly discovered and conquered distant, exotic places,at the same time it was replacing that chaotic and contradictory realityand forcing people to see it otherwise.25 As Angela Miller has pointed out,

could not read conventional English, so they developed their sermons orally and deliveredrhem from memory. The pulpit gave rise t many eloquent men, who influenced rheircongregations through rhe power of rhe voice as well as through invigorating music andmovement." Beverly J Robinson, The Sense of Self in Ritualizing New PerformanceSpace for Survival," in Black Theatre: Ritual Performan e in theAfrican Diapora (Philadelphia:Temple University Press, 2002), 338.

21 Ripley, The Black Abolitionist Papers :191.Bernard Comment, The Painted Panorama (New York: Harry N Abrams, Inc.,

Publishers, 2000), 63-64.23 See William Wells Brown, American Fugitive in Europe: Sketches o Places and

People Abroad (Bosron: J P Jewett, 1855), 255-56, quoted in Daphne A. Brooks, Bodies inDissent: Spectacular Peiformances o Race and Freedom 1850 1910 (Durham and London: DukeUniversity Press, 2006), 77-78.

24 Comment, ThePainted Panorama 725 See, among orhers and more recently, Stephan Oetterman, The Panorama.

History o a Mass Medium (New York: Zone Books, 1997): " I hope to show rhat rhe pictorialpanorama was in one respect an apparatus for teaching and glorifying the bourgeois viewof the world; it served borh as an instrument for liberating human vision and for limitingand 'imprisoning it anew. As such it represents rhe first true visual 'mass medium"' [ ).


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WIU.IAM WELLS BROWN'S P ANORAMIC VIEWS 19claims to absolute authenticity and truthfulness were likewise a stock-in

trade of the materials used to promote rival panoramas. 26In John Banvard's Mississippi from the Mouth o the Missouri to New

Orleans for example, a speaker would describe and comment on the viewsas they were slowly unreeled in front of the audience. The commentatorthus presented an ekphrasis-that is, a verbal representation of visualrepresentation-of a very particular kind: not as a summary experiencefor those in the audience who had never seen-or had seen in the pas t -the Mississippi River, but instead as a present experience for the audiencein the auditorium. Traditionally, writers of ekphrasis do not simplydescribe the scene but narrate it for an audience, conveying at the sametime the emotions, realities, and objective truths contained within thesceneY As W J T Mitchell reminds us, a verbal representation cannotrepresent-that is, make present-its object, describe it in the same waya visual representation can and as a result words can 'cite,' but never'sight' their objects. 28 However, in the specific case of moving panoramaswith commentators, the truthfulness of the spectacle-authorized by theextraordinary illusionism of the views and their mechanically controllednarrative 29 was coupled with the ekphrastic hope inaugurated by thecommentator, asking the audience to overcome with their imaginationwhat the visual representation might be lacking. The three elementsvisual representation, verbal representation, and ekphrasis-were thusauthenticating and reinforcing each other in their attempt to substitutewith its simulacrum the real landscape surrounding the Mississippi River.

Both John Banvard and William Wells Brown's panoramas weremoving panoramas, a development of the original round-panorama.

Although the word panorama results from the combination of two Greekwords,pan (all) and horama view, from horan see,), it is a neologism createdtowards the end of the eighteenth century to describe the phenomenonstarted by Robert Barker in 1792. When Barker registered his patent inLondon, he listed all the characteristics of the new form of entertainment:a circular building called a rotunda, housing a painting that would stretch

26 Angela Miller, The Panorama, the Cinema, and the Emergence of theSpectacular, Wide Angle 18.2 (1996): 61. See also Richard D. Altick, The Shows o London(Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: The Belknap Press and Harvard University Press,1978), 132-33.

v See, for example, Liz James and Ruth Webb, 'To Understand Ultimate Thingsand Enter Secret Places': Ekphrasis and Art in Byzantium, rtHistory 14 (1991): 12.

28W. J T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: s s ~ s on Verbaland VisualRepresentation (Chicagoand London: The University of Chicago Press, 1994), 152.

29 Miller, The Panorama, 46.


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20 CosToLAalong the circular inside wall, allowing a spectator standing on a platform,by turning about slowly to gain a continuous and commanding view ofthe scene in every direction. The exhibitions of panoramas were usuallyaccompanied by lights, music, a commentator, and a detailed program.

In the United States round-panoramas never became particularlysuccessful, and audiences seemed to prefer the moving panoramas-i.e.very long canvases attached to two cylinders that slowly unreeled n orderto simulate a journey. The reasons why the round-panoramas so popularin Europe never really met with the favor of the American public aremultifarious. Moving panoramas were easier to tour and did not require aspecific building. As Angela Miller has claimed, besides lacking substantialfunds, ~ m e r i c a n panoramists were also part of a tradition of peripateticshowmanship, and quit willing to move their wares from town to town. 30Stephen Oetterman has also advanced convincing arguments regarding thesuccess of moving panoramas in the United States: Americans were notvery interested n ruins and famous palaces, but rather in their own countryand the new possibilities offered by the westward expansion. Movingpanoramas, with their long canvases unrolling before mesmerized audiencemembers, allowed fo r an experience that would soon become a reality withthe development of the railroad in the United States.

Angela Miller has masterfully summarized how recent studies onthe panoramas, following the theoretical lead of Michel Foucault, havefocused on the ways new technologies of vision do not simply create anobject for the (viewing) subject, but also a subject for the object, thuscreating and reproducing the social structures of power:

In a related sense, the panoramic medium-bothstationary and moving-has been linked to forms ofmodern alienation, the first step toward the society ofthe spectacle, in which representation replaces reality.. . . The point remains that mass urban audiences wereexposed to a programmed spectacle that appeared toneed no interpretation, no cultural authority-a form ofentertainment that was, furthermore, market-driven to adegree unknown in the fine arts, and that had, therefore,to appeal to some perceived lowest common denominatorof taste and experience.31Miller has also warned us, however, that this VIew seems toO Ibid., 38.

3 Ibid., 55.


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il l i M W LLSBROWN'S PANORAMIC VIEWS 21abandon the possibility of artistic agency and it neglects the vital issueof who controls the medium, and to what political and to what ideologicalpurposes 32 and aptly asks: were their ideological functions intrinsic to thepanorama as a medium, or ratherwere they a matter of whowas controllingthe medium and inscribing its particular meanings? 33

According to William Wells Brown, John Banvard's Panoramapresented slavery in a very mild manner, and he thus decided to createand submit to public inspection his panoramic views in order to give acorrect idea of the Peculiar Institution. 34 Slavery was thus not completelyabsent from Banvard's Panorama as is also evident from the descriptionwritten by Charles Dickens that appeared in the Examineron 16 Decemberand entitled The American Panorama:

It is a picture of one of the greatest streams in theknown world, whose course it follows for upwards ofthree thousand miles. It is a picture irresistibly impressingthe spectator with a conviction of its plain and simpletruthfulness, even though that [sic] were not granted bythe best testimonials. It is an easy means of traveling,night and day without any inconvenience from climate,steamboat company, or fatigue . . . The picture itself,as an indisputably true and faithful representation of awonderful region is replete with interest throughout.Its incidental revelations of the different state of society,yet in transition, prevailing at different points of thesethree thousand miles-slaves and free republicans,French and Southerners; immigrants from abroad,and restless Yankees and Down-Easters ever steamingsomewhere; alligators, store-boats, show-boats, theatreboats, Indians, buffaloes, deserted tents of extincttribes, and bodies of dead Braves, with their pale facesturned up to the night sky lying still and solitary in thewilderness, nearer and nearer to which the outposts ofcivilization are approaching with gigantic strides to treattheir people down, and erase their very track from theearth's face-teem with suggestive matter.35

32 Ibid., 58.33 Ibid., 47.

Ripley, The Black bolitionist Papers I:191.35Quoted in Oetterman, The Panorama 328-29.


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22 COSTOLAThe wonderful region was represented as a unified and

organized spectacle for the viewers, although almost outside of history;contradictions were not absent but nonetheless inscribed as part of anarrative of progress, as incidentals, obstacles about to disappear underthe inevitable expansion of a civilization approaching with giganticstrides. Slaves could enter the picture as if on the same plane as freerepublicans, or French and Southerners, and Indians could be placedbetween theatre-boats and buffaloes. Enslavement and massacres werethus posited as momentary variables in the construction of the beautifulAmerican landscape.

It is no wonder that William Wells Brown, after seeing Banvard'sPanorama, felt the need to respond with another that would position slaveryat the center of the frame, as a precondition for a more disquieting criticalspace. Brown's Panorama, in fact, can be better understood if consideredwithin the context of the author's entire corpus, a corpus that includednumerous historical works.36 Brown's plays, his novel C/otel, his variouslectures, his autobiographies and travel narratives, should be considered asfragments of a major historical project that, as John Ernest has noted, wasnot simply of historical recovery but also of historical intervention :

Above all, as Brown's lecture so ably represents, AfricanAmerican historical understanding would requireattention not only to its matter-historical evidencebut also to its mode. It would necessarily be a performanceon the limited stage available to African Americans in thewhite American theatre of history.37

In his Panorama, Brown performed his role as an historian not byattempting to write a linear and stable history, but instead by interruptingand challenging the existing narrative and by offering in its place aconstellation made of the detritus, the leftovers of history. Brown, infew words, attempted not to write history but rather to make historypossible-helping those, both white and black, who had not yet learnedto help themselves. 38

36 See, for example, besides numerous lectures on historical subjects, The BlackMan s Antecedents, His Genius, and His Achievements (1865); The Negro in the AmericanRebellion: His Heroism and H is Fidelity (186 7); The Rising5on; or, The Antecedents andAdvancemento the Colored Race (1874).

37John Ernest, Liberation Historiography: African Amencan Wn ters and the Challengeo History, 1794-1861 Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press,2004), 8 and 4.

38 Ibid., 340.


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Will iAM WELLS BROWN'S PANORAMJC VIEWS 23William Wells Brown, thus, created a moving panorama consisting

of twenty-four views. Unfortunately, none of the images have survivedwith the exception of a couple of drawings-and all we are left with isthe pamphlet that used to be distributed to the audience members andcontaining Brown's commentary of the views. On the title page of thispamphlet, between the title, A Description of W illiam Wells r o w n ~ PanoramicViews of the Scenes in the zje of an American S ave from His Birth in Slaveryto His Death or His Escape to His First Home of Freedom on British Soil andpublication information, Brown placed two quotes:

FICTIONWe hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men

are created equal: that they are endowed by their Creatorwith certain inalienable rights, and that among these areLIFE, LIBERTY, and the PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS.

-Declaration of American IndependenceFACTThey touch our country, and their shackles fall.

owpe29

In addition, Brown's performance was created by minglingdocumentary discourse (quotations from newspapers, autobiographicalreferences, and other kinds of information) with fictive discourse, thusrendering their distinction problematic, and undermining the relationthat makes documentary discourse the ground for fictive discourse. Thus,Brown was able to escape the charges of white Garrisonian reviewers whocomplained about black lecturers who focused more on their rhetoricalstyle rather than keeping to a simple narrative. 40 Brown, as a consummatetrickster, with one leg resting in the realm of logical discourse while theother was still anchored in his own oral tradition, was able to outsmartThe Man by hitting a straight lick with a crooked stick. 41

39 The quote is from The Task Book III (1784) by E nglish poet William Cowper1731 -1800).

40 William L. Andrews, The Novelization of Voice in Early Africa.n AmericanNarrative, PM 105.1 Qanuary 1990): 24

., See L4J y Burden Down: A Folk History of l my ed. Benjamin Albert Botkin(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1945), 2, quoted in Jean Fagan Yellin, The IntricateKnot: Black Figures in American Literature 1776-1863 (New York: New York UniversityPress, 1972), 160, who places Brown's characterization of folk figures within the trickstertraclition n African American culture. See also, for Brown as trickster, M. Giulia Fabi,The 'Unguarded Expressions of the Feelings of the Negroes': Gender, Slave Resistance,


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24 CosToLAIn this case, the historical document most centrally used to

celebrate American liber ty is presented as fiction and juxtaposed to apoem presented as fact. Taking up the challenge and burden of repetitionwith this revised panorama, Brown wished to disseminate truth uponthis subject, and hasten the downfall of the greatest evil that now stainsthe character of the American people. 42 Thus, according to Brown,history had to be both a recovery-the dissemination of truth-and anintervention-hastening the downfall of slavery. The recovery had to takeinto consideration, at the same time, the paradoxical situation of writinga history either in the absence of sources or in the presence of theirdistortion. The result was a historical representation that had to be botha reading and an unreading : a reading of sources that were at the time

deemed inappropriate for a historian (poems) and an unreading of thosedocuments that made it possible, as Ernest argues, to celebrate liberty ina nation in which slavery influenced every aspect of social life-economic,political, legal, and religious. 43

Brown divided the twenty-four views constituting his movingpanorama into two major narrative segments: the second half (ViewsTwelfth through Twenty-third) almost completely autobiographical, tellsstories connected to both his unsuccessful and successful attempts toescape from slavery. The first half (Views First through Eleventh) preparesthe call for this personal and emotional involvement by presenting itsobjective correlative: the narrator is almost absent from the text and thenarrator focuses instead on definitions of slavery, examples of its abuses,references to British involvement in the maintenance of slavery becauseof commercial interests, and remarks on the corruption of the democraticand religious ideals of America. These elements are all introduced throughthe plain description and visual representation of specific objects: the USCapitol, the Calaboose prison, slave ships, a plantation, etc., creating anequivalent to Brown's conception of the world.

When Brown inaugurates his series of Views with a plantationin the State of Virginia; the oldest Slave State in the Union, 44 he warnsthe audience members toward the end of his description that the imagepresents slavery in its mildest form:

The Slaves in this view now before us are at work in aand William Wells Brown's Revision of Clote/, fricanAmerican Review, 27.4 (Winter 1993):639-54.

42Brown, Descnption, 191.43 Ernest, Liberation Historiograpf?y, 544 Brown, Description, 192.


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W LLIAM W l l BRoWN s PANORAMIC Vmws

Virginia tobacco-field. The man on horseback is a Slavedealer; probably, the agent of one of the wholesale dealersin Washington. The man standing by him, is the owner ofthe farm. Here we see Slavery in its mildest form; therebeing no overseer or driver. The master merely gives outthe task to the slaves, and leaves them to do their work,or goes occasionally into the field and looks after them.

You will observe, by the way in which the Slavesbefore you watch the Slave-trader, that they fear he maysucceed in purchasing some of them from their presentowner. Whatever may be said of the good treatment ofSlaves in those States where it exists in its mildest form,the continual fear of being sold and separated from theirnearest and dearest friends, makes it bad at best.45

25

Brown's ekphrasis is preceded by references to the beginning of Slavery(1620), the Fugitive Slave Act (1793), and the responsibility of both the"nominally free" North States and Great Britain in the "infamous trafficof human flesh and immortal souls."46

iew Second describes instead "Two Gangs of Slaves Chained andon Their Way to the Market," the Cruel Separation of a Mother from herChild," and the presence of Slaves "as being nearly white." In addition,this view ends with a poem by John Greenleaf Whittier describing slaves"chained and driven as the beast to the field:"

What, oh our countrymen in chainsThe whip on Woman's shrinking fleshOur soil yet reddening with the stainsCaught from her scourging, warm and fleshWhat mothers from their children driveWhat God's own image bought and soldmericans to market driven,

And battered, like the brutes, for gold 47

45 Ibid., 193.46 Ibid.47 Ibid., 193-194.John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-1892), a well-known nineteenth

century American poet and founding member of the American Anti-Slavery Society,eventually broke with the Garrisonians in 1840 and joined the American and Foreign AntiSlavery Society (see Ripley, The Black bolitionist Papers :217, note 5 .


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26 CosToLAView Third closes the triptych: Brown tells the audience that the

image before them represents the Capitol of the United States; on its right,a group of people is holding a meeting to sympathise with the FrenchRevolution of 1848. On its left, however, Brown places the same gangof Slaves . . . that we saw in the last view and comment that nothingcan more forcibly show the hypocrisy, or the gross inconsistencies, of thecitizens of the United States that their pretended sympathy for people inforeign countries, while they chain, whip, and sell their own countrymen. 48

The Capitol of the Unites States in View Third; the Declaration ofIndependence in View Fourth; the frigate Constitution in View Sixth whichBrown reminds us in the last war between Great Britain and the UnitedStates was the most distinguished vessel in the United States Navy, 49the White House in View Seventh: these are some of the most traditionalsignifiers of the myth of America, serving as vehicles for white supremacistideology. Brown, with the first three views, throws into juxtaposition thesedream imageswith the detritus of history, the ob-scene:50 the objects, events,and stories that resist assimilation into a triumphal story of America asland of continual progress.

As previously mentioned, it might be argued that William WellsBrown's approach to history presents striking similarities to the projectthat Walter Benjamin would articulate about a century later in his ArcadesPrqject. Begun in 1927 as a collaboration for a newspaper article, theproject quickly burgeoned into an essay, then a book, and finally into whatBenjamin himself referred to as the theater of all my struggles and all myideas. 51 The project, unfinished, was interrupted in 1940 with the author'ssuicide after he failed to escape from the Gestapo. History, accordingto Benjamin, decays into images, not into stories and must carry animmanent critique of the concept of progress. 52 The method of theArcades Prqject, which Benjamin borrowed from the French Surrealists,was that of literary montage: I needn't sqy anything. Merely show. I shallpurloin no valuables, appropriate no ingenuous formulations. But the rags,the refuse hese will not inventory but allow, in the only possible way,

48 Ibid., 194.49 Ibid., 197.50 The etymology of the word obscene is not certain. I use obscene here as

something that is against ob-) what constitutes the scene scaena) of the public life, ratherthen something that is onto ob-) filth caenum.)

51 See the Translators' Foreword to the English edition of the materialsassembled in Volume V of Walter Benjamin's Gesame/te Schriften, under the title Das Passagen-Werk and published as The ArcadesProject, IX-XlV.

52 Ibid., 476.


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WilliAM W Eu.s BRoWN s PANORAMIC V EWS 27to come into their own: by making use of them."53 The Arcades Prqject,according to Susan Buck-Morss, "is an attempt to constructinner-historicalimages that juxtapose the original, utopian potential of the modernand its catastrophic and barbaric present reality. t relies on the shock ofthese juxtaposed images to compel revolutionary awakening."54

Particularly interesting is Benjamin's description of "dialecticalimages":

It is not that what is past casts its light on what is present,or what is present its light on what is past; rather,image is that wherein what has been comes together ina flash with the now to form a constellation. In otherwords, image is dialectics at a standstill. For while therelation of the present to the past is a purely temporal,continuous one, the relation of what-has-been to thenow is dialectical: is not progression but image, suddenlyemergent. Only dialectical images are genuine images(that is, not archaic); and the place where one encountersthem is language. 5

As Michael Jennings notes, "every such image, in which a moment fromthe past collides with a moment in the present historical context of thereader not only does it provide an essential revelation of the truehistorical character of the past, but more importantly, it reveals to thereader the only possible accurate understanding of the present."56 Or, inBenjamin's words, the materialist presentation of history leads the past

53 Ibid., 406.5 Ibid., 458: Here the concern is to find the constellation of awakening here

it is a question of the dissolution of 'mythology' into the space of history. That, of course,can happen only through the awakening of a not-yet-conscious knowledge of what hasbeen." See Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics o Seeing (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), 251.

55 Benjamin, The Arcades, 462.56 Michael W Jennings, Dialectical Images. Walter Benjamin s Theory of Literary

Criticism (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1987), 36. Elin Diamond hasapplied Benjamin's concept to three contemporary performance artists: Peggy Shaw,Robbie McCauley, and Deb Margolin. As Diamond claims, it is by means of "dialecticalimages" that these artists are able to temporalize perception, and so furnish the performative"present" with the sense of the historical without summoning teleology: "using dialecticalimages to bring past and present into collision, these feminist artists turn performancetime into a now-time of insight and transformation." In particular, Diamond's descriptionof McCauley's Indian Blood (first performed in 1987) with her full -sized projections ofhistorical documents, private and public, bears strict similarities with Brown's panoramas.Diamond, Unmaking Mimesis 146.


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28 COSTOLto bring the present into a critical state. 57

In his attempt to shou; the truth about American Slavery, WilliamWells Brown understood, like Benjamin, that the historical truth of hisepoch resided in its assembled fragments and that truth would be lost, notrecovered, as Max Pensky has noted, by the imposition of a theoreticalsuperstructure upon them. 58 In addition, besides foregrounding thoseforgotten moments usually hiding behind the fayade of the harmoniouspresent, Brown also displaced his audience members' expectations byshowing what consti tuted a possible obscene-i.e., what could lie outsidethe box o representation. 59

In View First for example, Brown presents us with Slavery inits mildest form, 60 in his attempt to refrain from representing thosedisgusting pictures of vice and cruelty. 61 William Wells Brown was wellaware of the impossibility of representing the real condition of the slaveand the reality of the slave system, a system that, asJohn Ernest has pointedout, both resisted and required representation. 62 Brown thereforecreated a constellation of images that would frustrate his audience'sexpectations. The scenes of torture in the literature of slavery, in SaidiyaHartman's words, rather than inciting indignation, too often [they]immure us to pain by virtue of their familiarity . and especially becausethey reinforce the spectacular character of black suffering. 63 Brown, thus,rather than attending to the voyeuristic attitudes of an audience fascinatedwith those disgusting pictures of vice and cruelty which are inseparablefrom slavery, 64 decided to deal with images that could, as Benjaminwould say explode the homogeneity of the epoch with the ruins ofthe present.65 The homogeneity of the epoch was constructed through

57 Benjamin, TheArcades 471.58 Max Pensky, Me thod and time: Benjamin's dialectical images, in The Cambridge

Companion to Walter Benjamin, ed. DavidS. Ferris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,2004), 180.

59 Regarding the box i representation I am relying here on Georges DidiHuberman, Co' fronting Images:Questioning the Ends i a Certain History i t (Pennsylvania:Pennsylvania University Press, 2005), 139.

60 Brown, A Description, 193.61Ibid., 192.62Ernest, Liberation Historiograpf?y, 39-40.63 Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes i Suijection. Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in

Nineteenth -Century America (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 3.64 Brown, Preface to A Description, 192.65 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 474: Historical materialism must renounce the

epic element in history. It b lasts the epoch out of the reified 'continuity of history.' But


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Wn.l..IAM W l lS BROWN S PANORAMIC VrE\X S 29those phantasmagoric images that became the expression of collectiveutopian fantasies and longings: wish images in which the collectiveseeks both to overcome and to transfigure the immaturity of the socialproduct and the inadequacies in the social organization of production. 66Thesephantasmagorias the US Capitol, a plantation in Virginia, the WhiteHouse, etc.-were juxtaposed by Brown, within the same view, with someof the heterotopias typical of the nineteenth-century American landscapechain-gangs, slave auctions, slave-ships, white slaves, etc. The differencebetween Brown and other panorama artists such as Banvard, lay not inthe specific objects represented in each single view, but in the artist'sgoal i.e., the reproduction of appearances as such rather than theirrepresentation. The goal of panorama artists of the nineteenth century,as we have previously seen, was to eliminate any difference between theworld represented and its copy. For Brown, on the other hand, the goal wasno longer the maintenance of identity, but the production of differenceachieved through the transformation of familiar objects by means of bothrepetition and displacement. As Elin Diamond has noted, the dialecticalimage doesn't stand for an absent real . . . nor is it internally harmonious.A version of the demystifying gestus, the dialectical image is a montageconstruction of forgotten objects or pieces of conunodity culture that are'blasted' out of history's continuum. 67

With View Twe fth entitled First view in the Life of William WellsBrown, the author shifts to stories which are primarily autobiographicaland narrate events concerning both successful and unsuccessful escapes.As W T. ] Mitchell has noted, slave narratives are never about slaverybut about the movement from slavery to freedom: The slave narrativeis always written by a former slave; there are no slave narratives, onlynarratives about slavery written from the standpoint of freedom. 68 Thetitle alone-A Description . . . rf the Scenes in the ift rf an Amen·can Slave,from His Birth to His Death to His Escape forces the narrative and theaudience reading to deal with a clear-cut alternative: freedom or death,thus obliterating any possibility of an idealized version of slavery.

Curiously, Brown warns his audience that the view now before[them] is the first scene inwhich the writer is presented in this panorama. 69

it also explodes the homogeneity of the epoch, interspersing it with ruins-that is, withthe present.

66 Ibid., 4-5 .67 Diamond, Unmaking Mimesis, 146.68 Mitchell, Picture Theory, 190.69 Brown, Description, 201.


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30 CosToLHowever, the view is about Brown's disappearance from the premises ofhis master due to severe treatment and his consequent reappearancein a wood, on the top of a tree, trying to escape the dogs that were sentafter him. Brown thus portrays himself as a fugitive slave-both objectof the story he tells and object of his master's severe treatment-and,simultaneously, he reserves a kind of mastery for himself, gaining controlover representation. Brown in the first view concerning his life appearsas both subject and object of the representation and duplicates a strategythat, as Paul Jefferson noted some time ago, was also at the vary basisof Brown's Narrative: In blurring the distinction between Brown assubject, the teller of a generic 'free story,' and Brown as fugitive slave,the object of the story he tells, the first-person Narrative increases ourappreciation of the double achievement. 7 In addition, Brown achievesmastery over representation by creating himself as a presence at onceinside and outside the frame of representation: the one inside the framecharacterized by the action of fleeing-as Paul Jefferson argues, in slavenarratives, the act of fleeing is an existential act of self-creation 71 andthe one outside providing a narrative closure through his bodily presence.While eighteenth-century panoramas' emphasis was on the portrayal ofscenes through the representation of idealized landscapes, Brown's focuson the escapes of himself and others brought the focus back to the needfor action and intervention.

William Wells Brown's goal, thus, was to present his audience withthe truth about slavery, without having to represent slavery itself. The firstpart of his panoramic views seems to present a traditional narrative thatwas, at the same time, visibk through the images-and / ~ i b / e t h r o u g hthe commentary. However, Brown right from its beginning inaugurates anarrative sequence that invites the audience to place themselves into theevent as a direct and personal experience. In the second view, for example,Brown comments: We have now before us a gang of Slaves on their wayto the City of Washington. And at the beginning of the third view hesays: We have now arrived at the City of Washington. The large buildingbefore us is the Capitol of the United States.'m The picture, thanks tothe designation of the speaker, achieves an authority, as a source oftruth about slavery, which is at least equal to that of a logical discourse.73

7 The Travels o William Wells Brown ed. Paul Jefferson (Edinburgh: EdinburghUniversity Press, 1991), 6

7 Ibid.7 Brown,A Desmption 193 and 194. The emphasis is mine.73 For the relationship between word and image in African culture-i.e., the

process of the designation of the image-see Janheinz Jahn, Muntu: African Culture and the


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WILLIAM WELLS BRO\VN'S PANORAMIC VIEWS 31The performance that results from this amalgam of image and wordtransforms the space of the abolitionist platform into the locale in whichslavery takes place, until the last view when Brown asks the audiencemembers, after they have accompanied the fugitive, amidst perils by landand perils by water, to imagine themselves as having crossed that river,and as standing, with the Slave, upon the soil over which the mild sceptreof Queen Victoria extends. 74 The spectator is thus asked, not to identifywith the fugitive slave, but to be present in person, as a witness, to theevent: imagine him or herself with the slave, rather than like the slave.Brown, in few words, by means of his performance, creates a ritual space,a space which defies fixity and in which time is endless, because the speaker,the audience, the slave, and the slave-holders are all put together in thenow of an always present time.75 In addition, with this last view, Brown wasalso able to eschew the traps and dangers that are typical of the empathicprocess. As Saidiya Hartman has pointed out, empathy fails to expandthe space of the other and places the self in its stead. 76 In this case,the black body rather than being displaced is instead doubled, forcing theaudience members to acknowledge the mastery of William Wells Brownas narrator present in the flesh, while at the same time being present aswitness to the very moment of self-creation through his escape.

Brown's panoramic views are thus very far from the traditionalidea of the window on the world, because its spectators are, literally,within a performance that activates subversive scopic practices as a wayto destabilize the hegemonic pretenses of both traditional discourse andvision. The spectators could live in a liminal space-not simply be infront of an image, but be part of the image and of a suspended timeduring which no conclusion could be reached. A space in which thespectator could be seized by the image, rather than size it up: let go ofone's knowledge-the status quo--and be seized by the catastrophe of thepresent-i.e., chattel slavery.

Western World (New York: Grove Press, 1990), 156-57.74 Brown, Description, 213.75 I am referring here to the article Aes thetics: A Declaration that appeared in

Black Theatre s Unprecedented Times, eclited by Hely Manuel Perez (Gainesville: Black TheatreNetwork, 1999), 117-19.

7 Hartman, Scenes o Suijection, 20.


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jOURNAL OF AMERICAN DRAMA AND THEATRE 24, NO. 2 (SPRJNG 2012)

MAKING CITIZENS OF SAVAGES:COLUMBIA s RoLL C LL AT THE HAMPTON INSTITUTE

Lezlie CrossI feel that the Indian is to-day wrestling with his ownfate. That he will pass away as an Indian, I don't doubt,and that very rapidly. It will be into citizenship, and intoa place among the citizens of this land, or it will be intoa vagabond and a tramp.

-Henry L. Dawes, 18871Columbia s II a l ~ a patr1ot1c pageant that traced the history of theUnited States, was first produced on February 8, 1892 at the biracialHampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in Virginia. Hampton,dedicated to the education of both black and Native Americans, wasdriven by a pedagogical goal of assimilation. Hampton students weretrained to become self-sufficient Christian workers. The pageant was thecenterpiece of the annual commemoration of Indian Day at the school.This particular Indian day'' also marked the four-hundredth anniversaryof Columbus' discovery of America. Compiled by teacher HelenLudlow, the pageant was a purposefully-crafted narrative of the past, thepresent, and the future of the United States. The actors in the pageantwere all native students, and the chorus and band featured both black andnative students. Audience members included the student body as well aswhite teachers, politicians, and patrons of the school. The pageant wasa celebration of the glories of citizenship through a display of patrioticheroes and a reinforcement of American ideals.

The staff at Hampton used the theatrical form of the pageant toretrain the voices of the native students to fit these ideals. By prioritizingthe words and sentiments of white authors and historical characters, thepageant taught the students that a white, Christian lifestyle was correct andany other was not acceptable. The representation of the Indian charactersin Columbia s II Call stood in performative opposition to those of WildWest shows where Indian characters were a stereotype of the savageIndian of the white irnagination. The Indians in Columbia s II Call

1 Henry L. Dawes, Defense of the Dawes Act, in Amencanizing the AmericanIndians ed. Francis P Prucha (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973), 108.

2 For a thorough investigation of Native American representation in WildWest shows see L.G. Moses, Wild West Shows and the Images o American Indians 1883 ·1933


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34 CROSShowever, were a projection of the civilized citizen Indian, hoped for bythe Bureau of Indian affairs. The voice of Hampton students which wereheard-in this pageant, in the school journal The Southern Workman or inpublic talks and lectures-were those that fit the message of assimilationthat was advocated by Hampton and the politicians at the Bureau ofIndian Affairs. This pageant is remarkably well documented, allowing aunique glimpse into the way in which white educators used performanceto reinforce ideology. However, the experiences of the student actors areunrecorded. The archive, like Hampton itself, privileged, and continues tohighlight, the narrative of whites.

As indicated by the tide, the pageant focused on Columbia, a femalepersonification of the United States, who evaluated and welcomed worthyheroes and patriots to her roll of honor. Like a Master of Ceremonies,Columbia controlled the action of the pageant, calling forward prominentwhite setders, notable Indian figures, current Hampton students, andfuture citizens of America who each described their contributions tothe formation of the country.3 Several songs, including all three of theanthems of the United States, punctuated the action.4 The text spokenby the students was largely drawn from the writings of white Englishand American poets, novelists, and politicians; however selected studentswere allowed to speak their own compositions.5 With each choice, Ludlowcrafted the pageant to serve as a pedagogical and propaganda tool to speakto every person involved and in attendance at the pageant.

The turning point of o l u m b i a ~ Roll Call was an appeal made toColumbia by a young Indian Petitioner played by Ella Powless of theOneida, a Hampton legacy. Altogether, thirteen members of the Powlessfamily, of the Oneida tribe, attended Hampton through the years. Ella'ssister Maggie Powless was also in the pageant playing a Page of History.Other members of the extended Powless family attended Carlisle IndianSchool in Pennsylvania. The records of Hampton note that Ella Powlesswent on to become a teacher and school matron. They describe her as

(Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996); Michelle A. Delaney, Buffalo Bill sWild West Warriors: A Photographic story y Gertrude K.iisebier (Washington, D.C: SmithsonianNational Museum of American History, 2007); and Bobby Bridger, Buffalo Bill and SittingBull.· Inventing the Wild West (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002).

3 Columbia was performed by Juanita Espinoza of the Piegan.4 The assembly sang Columbia, Gem of the Ocean, Hail, Columbia, and

My Country 'Tis of Thee.5 However, these contributions from the srudents were not considered important

enough to be included n the print version of the pageant which appeared in The SouthernWorkman (March 1892): 43-44.


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MAKING CITIZENS OF $ ,\VJ\GES 35an excellent woman in every way. 6 This sort of praise indicates that Ella

was a success in the eyes of her white teachers; she had adapted to thewhite world and became one of Hampton's cultural missionaries whoreturned to her people with the charge of uplifting them from theirlives on the reservation. Her assimilation to the white lifestyle at Hamptonis likely why she was chosen to play the Indian Petitioner. She stood asa model student, who embodied the spirit of the Hampton educationalsystem.

The Indian Petitioner's request, the first appearance of a nativecharacter in the pageant, was a poetic plea for inclusion in Columbia'sroll of honor. Prior to the appearance of the Indian Petitioner all of thefigures in Columbia's band of heroes were white; emphasizing a narrativeof conquest. However, the poem did not add an authentic native voice,but a white woman's interpretation of that voice, written by a northernQuaker, Edna Dean Proctor. The Indian Petitioner's poem is an entreatyfor assimilation in the face of a destroyed native way of life. The poemarticulated one vision of the cultural crossroads of native peoples inthe late nineteenth century: assimilation or elimination. This viewpointpermeated the action of Columbia} II Call.

The pageant was a part of the celebrations of Indian Dayat Hampton. On 8 February 1887 the US government passed theinfluential Dawes Act, which divided tribal lands into separate allotmentsto individual Native Americans. Two years later the Indian Office inWashington D.C. decreed that 8 February should be set aside as Indianday. Programs to commemorate the Dawes Act should be developed atall Indian schools in order to impress upon Indian youth the enlargedscope and opportunity given them by this law and the new obligationswhich it irnposes. 8 To memorialize this landmark legislation, GeneralS C Armstrong, the founder of Hampton, proclaimed the day an IndianEmancipation Day to parallel the commemoration of the signing of theEmancipation Proclamation. For Armstrong, each piece of legislationgave his students the opportunity to become citizens of the United States,although neither piece of legislation actually endowed citizenship. IndianDay was described as the one day in the year when H ampton Institute

6Jon L Brudvig, Hampton Normal AgriCIIItural Institute s American Indian Students,1878-1923, http:/ www.twofrog.com/hamptonfeml.txt (accessed 5 March 2012).

7 Edna Dean Proctor, The Indian's Appeal, The Fnends Intelligencer andJournal,49 (1892): 158. The full poem, as it appeared in the pageant, can be found at the end ofthe article.8 David Wallace Adams, Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding

School Experience 1875-1928 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995), 196.


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36 CROSSgives itself over to the Indian to commemorate their emancipationfrom the slavery of triballife.9 However, for many Native Americans,the Dawes Act was the opposite of the Emancipation Proclamation.Instead of freeing them from a life of slavery, the act took power fromtribal rulers and gave it to the government.

For many of the students at Hampton, the opportunity tobecome educated in an anglo-American model of education was theirchance at a new way of life, as a citizen of the United States. In C o l u m b i a ~Roll all native student Joseph DuBray made a speech setting forth thatthe Indians have taken chances open to them, of schools and work andcitizenship already offered. 10 Ella Fire-Thunder of the Sioux, who playedthe Housekeeper in the pageant, told this story about her desire to becomeeducated:

I was eight years old when I asked my uncle if I could goto school but he said I couldn't go as I was too young togo to school. But I ran away from home and went to a[n]Agency Government school. I was only twelve yearsold when I went to Hampton, VA to school and this isthe best school that I ever went to. At first my folks toldme I couldn't go and they told me I might die over thereand never get to see them again. But I ran away againand went to Hampton with Mr. Freeland who came afterIndian children.11

The final line of Ella's testimony reveals the tensions betweenthose students who willingly attended Hampton, as she did, and thosewho did not voluntarily attend. Especially in the early years of Hampton,during the Indian Wars, many native students were forcibly removedfrom the reservations and held as hostages at Hampton to inspiretribal elders in their families to cooperate with government agents. By1892, a few native students attended Hampton despite opposition in theirtribes, but others were sent there with familial support. However, Ella'sfamily's fears about her dying at school were not unwarranted. In July

9 The Southern Workman 21, no. 3 (March 1892): 41. The Dawes Act is named forits creator Senator HenryL Dawes. The full name of rhe act is ~ n Act to Provide for theAllotment of Lands in Severalty to Indians on the Various Reservations. The Hamptonnewsletter The Southern Workman terms this legislation The Land in Severalty Bill.

10 Ibid., 44.Qtd. in Jon L Brudvig, First Person Accounts as written by American Indian

Students at Hampton Institute, 1878-1923, http:/ /www.twofrog.com/hamptonstories2.ht ml (accessed 30 October 2011).


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MAKING CTTIZENS OF SAVAGES 37of 1892, five months after Columbia s Roll Call was performed, two nativeHampton students-Walter Little Eagle and Fannie Frazier--died.12 Dueto a combination of circumstances, eastern boarding schools were oftenplaces where native children died. However, Ella's desire to go to becomeeducated overpowered familial objections.

The staff atHampton believed their education wouldgive studentsa unique advantage over others of their race who did not have the benefitof education, those who had not become cultured. These other, savage,Indians were on full display for American audiences in Wild West shows.Hampton was, at its core, an industrial school, where the students learneda variety of different trades. The skills learned by t

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