Performing Anti-Slavery: Activist Women on Antebellum Stages

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.

Author: Gay Gibson Cima
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 04/24/2014
Pages: 309
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.25lbs
Size: 9.00h x 5.90w x 1.00d
ISBN: 9781107060890

About the Author
Cima, Gay Gibson: - Gay Gibson Cima is a Professor of English at Georgetown University, Washington DC. In 2012, she received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Association of Theatre in Higher Education's Women and Theatre Program. In 2015, she received the Distinguished Scholar Award from the American Society for Theatre Research. Her book, Early American Women Critics: Performance, Religion, Race (2006), won the 2007 Barnard Hewitt Award for Outstanding Research in Theatre History from the American Society for Theatre Research. A recipient of the ASTR's Kahan Prize, she has published widely on feminist performance history and critical race theory in journals such as Theatre Survey and the Theatre Journal as well as anthologies including Changing the Subject: Marvin Carlson and Theatre Studies, 1959-2009 (2009) and The Sage Handbook of Performance Studies (2006).