Bibliograph

Staging Haiti in nineteenth-century America, revolution, race and popular performance, Peter P. Reed

Type

Label

Staging Haiti in nineteenth-century America, revolution, race and popular performance, Peter P. Reed

Language

eng

Index

index present

Literary Form

non fiction

Main title

Staging Haiti in nineteenth-century America

Medium

electronic resource

Nature of contents

dictionaries

Oclc number

1345613538

Responsibility statement

Peter P. Reed

Series statement

Cambridge studies in modern theatreCambridge Social Sciences eBooks

Sub title

revolution, race and popular performance

Summary

American culture maintained a complicated relationship with Haiti from its revolutionary beginnings onward. In this study, Peter P. Reed reveals how Americans embodied and re-enacted their connections to Haiti through a wide array of performance forms. In the wake of Haiti's slave revolts in the 1790s, generations of actors, theatre professionals, spectators, and commentators looked to Haiti as a source of both inspiring freedom and vexing disorder. French colonial refugees, university students, Black theatre stars, blackface minstrels, abolitionists, and even writers such as Herman Melville all reinvented and restaged Haiti in distinctive ways. Reed demonstrates how Haiti's example of Black freedom and national independence helped redefine American popular culture, as actors and audiences repeatedly invoked and suppressed Haiti's revolutionary narratives, characters, and themes. Ultimately, Haiti shaped generations of performances, transforming America's understandings of race, power, freedom, and violence in ways that still reverberate today.--, Provided by publisher

Creator