Re-Producing the Meaning of the Geography of Enslavement: Henry Box Brown's Subversive Geographical Resistance.

This article applies insight from the field of Black geography to the performance work of Henry Box Brown, a man who in 1849 mailed himself in a large postal crate from slavery in Richmond, Virginia to freedom in Philadelphia, PA. As a mobile subject, Brown had a unique purchase on how space and pla...

Descripción completa

Detalles Bibliográficos
Publicado en:Slavery & Abolition Vol. 46; no. 4; pp. 806 - 826
Autor principal: Cutter, Martha J.
Formato: Artículo
Publicado: Taylor & Francis Ltd Dec2025
Materias:
Acceso en línea:Ver este registro en EBSCOhost
fields @attributes:
  recordID: 1
pdfLink:
plink: https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=hlh&AN=190209191&site=ehost-live
header:
  @attributes:
    shortDbName: hlh
    uiTerm: 190209191
    longDbName: Humanities International Complete
    uiTag: AN
  controlInfo:
    bkinfo:
    jinfo:
      jid:
        0144039X
        RJP
      jtl: Slavery & Abolition
      issn: 0144039X
      maglogo: Y
    pubinfo:
      dt: Dec2025
      vid: 46
      iid: 4
      pid: 377
      pub: Taylor & Francis Ltd
    artinfo:
      ui:
        190209191
        10.1080/0144039X.2024.2434136
      ppf: 806
      ppct: 20
      formats:
        fmt:
          – @attributes:
              type: T
          – @attributes:
              type: P
              size: 856KB
      tig:
        atl: Re-Producing the Meaning of the Geography of Enslavement: Henry Box Brown's Subversive Geographical Resistance.
      aug:
        au: Cutter, Martha J.
      su:
        Slavery
        Geography
        Brown, Henry Box
        American Civil War, 1861-1865
        Emancipation of slaves
      sug:
        subj:
          Slavery
          Geography
          Brown, Henry Box
          American Civil War, 1861-1865
          Emancipation of slaves
      keyword:
        Civil War
        geography
        Henry Box Brown
        panorama
        performance
      ab: This article applies insight from the field of Black geography to the performance work of Henry Box Brown, a man who in 1849 mailed himself in a large postal crate from slavery in Richmond, Virginia to freedom in Philadelphia, PA. As a mobile subject, Brown had a unique purchase on how space and place could be sources of psychological and physical enslavement but also how they offered speculative geographies of liberation. During the (nearly) half century in which Brown performed, he sought to create an oppositional geography through four specific sites deployed during his performance work in England: the box in which he escaped; the slave ship he reproduced in his performance work; the panoramas he enacted in England until 1863 (with special attention to Brown's Civil War panorama and its veiled indictment of the UK's support for the Confederate Army); and the auction block he performed in his stage work during 1857. Geographical reconfiguration was, then, vital to the ways in which Brown manipulated and performed enslavement and to his strategies of performative resistance. Even as Brown demonstrated the omnipresence of enslavement, his geographical wake work struggled to create speculative, potentiate spaces where his fugitivity might be reconfigured.
      pubtype: Academic Journal
      doctype: Article
      src: R
    language: English
    refInfo:
    copyright:
      @attributes:
        flag: Y
      custom: Copyright of Slavery & Abolition is the property of Taylor & Francis Ltd and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites without the copyright holder's express written permission. Additionally, content may not be used with any artificial intelligence tools or machine learning technologies. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.
      item: Slavery & Abolition
      holder: Taylor & Francis Ltd
      dt:
        @attributes:
          year: 2025
    holdings:
      @attributes:
        islocal: N