Authorial Minstrelsy: Fugitive Slave Narratives and the Reconstruction of Black Identity in Nineteenth-Century Print and Visual Media

Mid-nineteenth-century Black authors understood whiteness as a construct of racial superiority upheld by laws created by and for white men. Rather than an inherent property, race is a fraught historical category that, under certain conditions, has been performed and contested to achieve specific privileges in a stratified American society. This dissertation examines this history by focusing on three fugitive slave narratives written between the passage of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law and the beginning of the American Civil War: Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself (1861); William and Ellen Craft’s Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom; or, the Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery (1860); and Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave; or Solomon Northup, A Citizen of New-York Kidnapped in Washington City in 1841, and Rescued in 1853 from a Cotton Plantation Near the Red River, in Louisiana (1854). Drawing on historical archives and contemporary scholarship in African American, disability, ethnicity, and sexuality and gender studies, I argue that the slave narrative genre evolved during the mid-nineteenth century in response to developments in visual culture displaying Black bodies as disabled, deviant, and fugitive. In the nineteenth-century, fugitive authors were highly invested in countering representations of the enslaved and free Black body created by freak shows, minstrelsy, and other such white-authored images popular in literary and performative culture. The spectacle of Black bodies appearing in performances where physical features were grossly exaggerated continually reinforced connections between disability and Blackness. Surveillance and control in forms such as fugitive slave notices further dehumanized African Americans as disabled property. Jacobs, Northrup, and the Crafts directly contested these influential portrayals in their narratives, supplanting them with authentic representations of Black life. The fugitive slave narrative genre evolved as authors paraphrased statutes and integrated cultural material into their narratives. Fugitive authors did not leave their audiences to judge the material for itself, however. They drew readers’ attention to the legal, cultural, and societal frameworks that enabled white enslavers to enact violence. Analyzing the work of these fugitive authors contributes to our understanding of visual culture, the slave narrative as a genre, and the history of disability, deviance, fugitivity, and sexuality under American slavery.