Introduction: the "common sense" of slavery in the free Antebellum North -- Setting the stage of black freedom: parades and "presence" in the New Nation -- Black politics but not black people: early minstrelsy, "white slavery", and the wedge of "blackness" -- Washington and the slave: black deformations, proslavery domesticity, and re-staging the birth of the nation -- The theatocracy of antebellum social reform: "monkeyism" and the mode of romantic racialism -- Melodrama and the performance of slave testimony; or, William Wells Brown's Inability to Escape -- Epilogue: no exit, but a new stage
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages 171-206) and index