Overview
In Performing Anti-Slavery, Gay Gibson Cima reimagines the connection
between the self and the other within activist performance, providing
fascinating new insights into women's nineteenth-century reform efforts,
revising the history of abolition, and illuminating an affective
repertoire that haunts both present-day theatrical stages and
anti-trafficking organizations. Cima argues that black and white
American women in the nineteenth-century abolitionist movement
transformed mainstream performance practices into successful activism.
In family circles, literary associations, religious gatherings, and
transatlantic anti-slavery societies, women debated activist performance
strategies across racial and religious differences: they staged
abolitionist dialogues, recited anti-slavery poems, gave speeches,
shared narratives, and published essays. Drawing on liberal religious
traditions as well as the Eastern notion of transmigration, Elizabeth
Chandler, Sarah Forten, Maria W. Stewart, Sarah Douglass, Lucretia Mott,
Ellen Craft and others forged activist pathways that reverberate to
this day.