Mixed Race Studies

Crimes of Performance

Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society
Volume 13, Issue 1 (2011)
Special Issue: Black Critiques of Capital: Radicalism, Resistance, and Visions of Social Justice
pages 29-45
DOI: 10.1080/10999949.2011.551476

Uri McMillan, Assistant Professor of English
University of California, Los Angeles

In this article, I focus on the intersections between discourses of crime and illegality with modes of performance in the multiple impersonations staged by William and Ellen Craft, two married fugitive slaves who escaped from chattel slavery in the United States in 1848 through a complex set of layered performances. I begin illustrating the linkages between crime and performance by tracing the workings of a dynamic I term “fugitive transvestism” in an aesthetic representation of Ellen Craft, specifically an engraving she posed for in 1851 that was later published in The London Illustrated News. In doing so, I not only reveal the engraving as a site where we can witness Craft’s embodied performances, rather than a seemingly static document, but also focus on the crimes of “being” acted by Craft that surface in the engraving itself. In addition, I further reveal the performative and criminal acts committed by Ellen Craft, by later moving to a discussion of prosthetics, focusing attention on the mechanisms of Craft’s escape costume. Prosthetic performances, as I discuss them, were dramatic and tactical strategies employed by the Crafts that continue to reveal the suturing of crime and performance in Ellen Craft’s counterfeit embodiment of her alter-ego, while taking it further into yet another set of unlawful impersonations. Thus, this essay will evince how the Craft’s multiple crimes of performance enabled their mobility across 19th-century spatial sites and representational spheres.

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Ellen Craft’s Radical Techniques of Subversion

e-misférica
Hemispheric Institute for Performance & Politics
Issue 5.2: Race and its Others (December 2008)
16 pages

Uri McMillan, Assistant Professor of English
University of California, Los Angeles

Image by Bruce Yonemoto

This paper considers the antebellum performance(s) of fugitive slave Ellen Craft. Craft, an African-American female slave from Georgia, impersonated a white male slaveholder, Mr. William Johnson, in order to escape from slavery with her husband William. I argue that through various techniques of performance—cross-racial impersonation, prosthetics, costume, hair, and gender performance, for example—Craft radically destabilized nineteenth-century social norms, particularly racial and gender mores. An antebellum subject who manipulated her body as an elastic object, Ellen Craft made costumes out of the rigid nineteenth-century identities of “blackness” and “whiteness,” particularly 19th century white masculinity. In this paper, specifically, I analyze the corporeal techniques Craft wielded in her original performance to escape in America before moving to her appearances later on the abolitionist lecture stage in England.

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