The Captive Stage: Performance and the Proslavery Imagination of the Antebellum North

The Captive Stage offers the first cultural history of proslavery ideology in the antebellum United States. While previous studies of performance and literary culture in the period have overwhelmingly focused on an antislavery theme, in fact the majority of representations of slavery before the Civil War explicitly defended the institution or accepted it as constitutive of American life. To address this lacuna, Douglas A. Jones, Jr. traces the pervasiveness of proslavery ideology in the antebellum period, charting its functionality in the social, cultural, and racial imaginary in the most unexpected of places: the free North. Even after northern states outlawed slavery in the late-18th and early-19th centuries, many of their constituencies continued to profit from imagining and embodying black bondage in positive terms. These gains were not just economic and political but also cognitive and psychological, and reflect the multiple and frequently contradictory ways that Americans across personal and collective difference used proslavery ideology to conceptualize the interrelation of race, subjectivity, and society. Furthermore, The Captive Stage pays particular attention to the ways in which African Americans’ claims to universal freedom and citizenship influenced the shape of these proslaveryinflected conceptualizations.