Special Section: Performance Studies in the Early Americas
Performing Anti-Slavery: Activist Women on Antebellum Stages gay gibson cima Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014 298 pp. Gay Gibson Cima's inventive Performing Anti-Slavery: Activist Women on Antebellum Stages questions "[w]hat exactly did performing anti-slavery sympathy mean, not for ladies who merely read sentimental literature about slaves to pass the time, not for literary men who suffered sublimely for slaves they dreamed up, but for black and white women with a direct, on-the-street involvement in the immediate abolitionist movement in the antebellum United States?" (1). In her thoroughly researched and rigorously argued study, Cima addresses this question through the analysis of black and white female antislavery activists involved in the Garrisonian wing of the abolitionist movement. She argues that these women utilized and transformed performances of antislavery sympathy into "diverse performance strategies" that demonstrated "new ways to harness affect for political purposes" (2). Building on performance scholarship such as Daphne Brooks's Bodies in Dissent (2006) and Harvey Young's Embodying Black Experience (2010), Performing Anti-Slavery revises the Garrisonians' place within antislavery historiography and reconceives how female and cross-racial activist performance and spectatorship operated in relation to the self and the state. Cima begins her study with the historicization and theorization of sympathy, which provides the conceptual foundation for the activist performance practices discussed in the following chapters. Influenced by the idea of metempsychosis, "a practice rooted in collective dedication to { 179 180 }EaRLy amERican LiTERaTURE: VoLUmE 5 1, nUmbER 1 self-judgment and practical action" from what was then known as the East Indies, Garrisonian abolitionists, Cima argues, developed the idea of the "partisan spectator" (40). Cima's analysis of the...