The Enslaved as Spectacle: Ellen Craft, Sarah Parker Remond, and American Slavery in England

Abstract

Focuses on the lecture tours of African American abolitionists Ellen Craft (1851) and Sarah Parker Remond (1859); argues their appearances and appeals on the platform capitalized on their English audiences’ fascination with the “tragic mulatta” figure and familiarity with the “woman as slave” trope. Believes Craft’s “whiteness” clearly affected her audiences, who saw her as a living exhibit of the lowest level to which American slavery would sink. Claims Remond’s lectures, in turn, invoked the figure of the “whitened” slave Ellen Craft embodied in order to stress slavery’s horrors and facilitate an empathic appeal; Remond carefully managed that empathy by moving between embodied and rational appeals and standing as a figure her audiences could imagine would be enslaved in America despite being free-born.