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Staging Haiti in Nineteenth-Century America

Revolution, Race and Popular Performance

Peter Reed (University of Mississippi)

$145.95

Hardback

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English
Cambridge University Press
01 December 2022
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.
By:  
Imprint:   Cambridge University Press
Country of Publication:   United Kingdom
Dimensions:   Height: 235mm,  Width: 160mm,  Spine: 18mm
Weight:   480g
ISBN:   9781009100526
ISBN 10:   1009100521
Series:   Cambridge Studies in Modern Theatre
Pages:   231
Publication Date:  
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Primary
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active

Peter P. Reed is Associate Professor of Early American Literature at the University of Mississippi. He is the author of Rogue Performances (2009) as well as essays on Black Atlantic performance, theatre culture, and Haiti's impact on American culture.

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