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"Craft, Ellen."
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Master slave, husband wife : an epic journey from slavery to freedom
Presents the remarkable true story of Ellen and William Craft, who escaped slavery through daring, determination, and disguise, with Ellen passing as a wealthy, disabled white man and William posing as \"his\" slave.
Book
'Thunders of White Silence': Racialized Ways of Seeing and 'Hiram Powers' Greek Slave'
[...]as students of Victorian studies are increasingly challenging disciplinary traditions of refusing to \"see\" race, perhaps especially where poetry is concerned,1 visuality's relations to poetics seem poised to emerge as invaluable resources for moving beyond long-standing, if often tacit, training in evasive, exclusionary reading.2 Here, in turning towards those relations, I'll be tracing a sharp, idiosyncratic line through an increasingly rich, expansive constellation of critical and poetic writings and disciplinary fields.3 \"What is 'Victorian poetry'? By 1964, the art historian Jerrold Ziff could already refer to it as showcasing \"perhaps Turner's most famous (or infamous?) lines of poetry\" (p. 341); in 2020, Laura Brace, a specialist in history, politics, and international diplomatic relations, was still setting Turner's verse, astutely analyzed, at the center of an ambitious revisiting of interdisciplinary controversies around Turner's painting.9 The pattern is an old one: repeatedly, scholars in other fields, not least art history, have led the way in addressing questions of race and enslavement in Victorian poetry. \"Slave\"; \"slavery\": as both Victorian and post-Victorian histories attest, these and similar words' abstraction has long served as a means of displacing or denying the irreducibly individual, material human horrors of enslavement.13 Where-as whom and with whom-might we conceive the challenges of \"seeing\" material relations between Powers's art and EBB's poem? Among art historians, in contrast, it seems more likely to provoke another: \"Which one?\" After all, as such specialists like to underscore, by the late 1860s, to invoke \"Hiram Powers's Greek Slave\" could be to name any one of six distinct marble figures.14 What is more, in an age of mechanical reproduction, marble was only the beginning.
Journal Article
Ellen Craft's “Spanish” Masquerade: Racially (Mis)Reading Hispanicism in Her Cross-Dressing, Feigning Disability, and Running to Sea
An overlooked advertisement, entitled “An Incident at the South” (1849), calls attention to Ellen Craft's Spanish masquerade during her 1848 escape from American slavery. The author underscores her masculine costume, feigning disability, running to sea, and “a darkness of complexion that betokened Spanish extraction.” Despite contemporary criticism, the advertisement asserts Spanish-ness in the production history of Ellen's escape; thus the essay considers a reinterpretation of Ellen's transnational masquerades by reexamining the advertisement (1849) and in relation to her portrait (1850) and slave narrative (1860). Of emphasis is a history of hemisphere conflict – over land, at the borderlands, and at sea – during Anglo-American expansion, Spanish/Mexican displacement, and antebellum enslavement. Ellen's story is also contextualized with rising literary traditions of the mid-nineteenth century.
Journal Article
Great escapes : real tales of harrowing getaways
Facing lifelong separation, William and Ellen Craft fled north in disguise, risking detection at every turn, all for the sake of freedom from slavery. Douglas Mawson battled a power greater than any human villain when Mother Nature trapped him in her icy Antarctic jaws. In 1943, Nazi guards packed hundreds of Belgian Jews into train cars headed for Auschwitz. Simon Gronowski, 11 years old, was determined to escape. Three inmates vanished from Alcatraz in 1962, never to be seen again. During the Cold War, 29 Germans from communist-controlled East Germany escaped through a tunnel under the Berlin Wall.
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“This Slavery Business Is a Horrible Thing”: The Economy of American Slavery in the Lives of the Enslaved
This article examines the business of American slavery from the perspective of enslaved people. It draws from narratives of enslaved fugitivity and interviews with the formerly enslaved to interrogate how they understood the business imperatives of slavery in the antebellum American South. It argues that enslaved peoples’ economic knowledge was cultivated through the violence inherent in the business of slavery, from their ideas about banking to their understanding of entrepreneurialism. Building on the current literature on capitalism and slavery, this article shows that slavery's brutality shaped enslaved peoples’ knowledge of commerce in nineteenth-century America.
Journal Article
Transatlantic Interracial Sisterhoods: Sarah Remond, Ellen Craft, and Harriet Jacobs in England
In the nineteenth century the transatlantic world was animated by an exchange of ideas, texts, and information that circulated between the US and Europe. Abolitionists, social reformers, and educators who crossed the ocean contributed to the building of bridges of collaboration established around different reform movements and activism. Women were nonetheless connected by the shared experience of patriarchal oppression and gender discrimination and by such uniting forces as womanhood and motherhood. As Paula Baker argues, 'Motherhood' and 'womanhood' were powerful integrating forces that allowed women to cross class, and perhaps even racial, lines. Hence, despite the dissimilarities and antagonism that divided them, women considered other women their comrades in fighting against oppression. They formed sisterhoods, which were a demonstration of how women organized their activities with the aim of creating extensive international and interracial communities geared to resist racism and gendered power asymmetries. In sum, as they assumed agency, women became involved in counter- hegemonic acts of resistance to oppression.
Journal Article
The Underground Railroad As Afrofuturism
This article employs the lens of Afrofuturism to address the Underground Railroad, detailing what imagination, tact, and technology, it took for fugitive Blacks to flee to the “outer spaces of slavery.” Black enslavement was as terrifying as any exotic fictional tale, but it happened to real humans alienated in the “peculiar institution.” Escaping slavery brought dreams to life, and at times must have felt like “magical realism,” or an out-of-body experience, and the American North, Canada, Mexico, Africa, Europe, and free Caribbean islands were otherworldly and science fiction-like, in contrast to where Black fugitives ascended. This article will address the intersections of race, technology, and liberation, by retroactively applying a modern concept to historical moments.
Journal Article
Students' Right to Their Own Literacies: Using Models of Literacy in African American Literacy Narratives
Exploring the enduring implications of Paul Kei Matsuda’s founding work on “The Myth of Linguistic Homogeneity in U.S. College Composition” (2006), this dissertation investigates student literacy narratives from a composition studies and translingual perspective. Despite the contributions of language theory politics from translingualism, pervasive views of language and the ways college teachers, including writing teachers, conceive of difference continue to limit the possibilities for our students and the discipline. Aware of the pitfalls of a “sameness-of-difference” notion of the diverse experiences contained within the classroom space, I am interested in the ways that the literacy narrative can help students better appreciate the larger socio-ideological forces that support and constrain reading and writing practices in material and conceptual ways. Models of literacy can help students reflect on the literacy events, sponsors and other meta-narratives that have shaped them in their growing identities as readers and writers. African American writers, including Ellen and William Craft, W.E.B. Du Bois, Nella Larsen, and Toni Morrison, provide a framework for students’ own in-depth investigation into their literacy practices through these content chapters. While other work focuses on the role of literacy as one feature of African American literature, this dissertation shows the literacy narrative as a genre tackling pervasive notions of racialized difference and equality. In defining literacy acquisition as a socially-situated process, these narratives highlight the socio-political import of learning to read and write in America and the pivotal role of the imagination in unbinding literacy from text-based production. The literacy narrative can help students better appreciate the larger socio-ideological forces that support and constrain reading and writing practices in material and conceptual ways. As a reflective starting place to envision the challenges and rewards of literacy in their professional and personal lives, literacy narratives can help students decide in what ways writing matters to them. These assignments also attest to how language users shape, and are shaped by, the college literacy classroom, calling for a theory that acknowledges that the work of the First Year Writing classroom can become a productively collaborative space. This not a story of how African American authors speak for contemporary students, but rather how these texts can mobilize their own understanding of the significance of literacy on people and on individuals. In harnessing these texts, the dissertation calls for a more robust praxis in assigning literacy narratives in First Year Writing composition classes and multilingual English-language learner equivalents.
Dissertation
Frado, Linda, Ellen, and Iola
While the March sisters are bemoaning how \"dreadful to be poor\" and a \"Christmas without any presents\" (11) in the midst of Civil War, Linda Brent's chapter \"Christmas Festivities\" describes enslaved women's attempts to \"gladden the hearts of their little ones\" despite the slave auction that presages \"the Slaves' New Year's Day\" (Jacobs 118, 15). Alcott's autobiographical novel set the standard for a decidedly American, New England girlhood, but nineteenth-century black women authors would deploy sentiment and sensation in their autobiographical fictions for a different objective. In their hands, Alcott's tropes (with influence from Harriet Beecher Stowe and Lydia Maria Child) became powerful tools of resistance, shining the spotlight on \"little women\" who were not allowed a true or intact childhood; whose plot trajectories forked not between artistic spinsterhood and marriage, but who became adolescent mothers confronted with a choice for freedom with or without their children; whose domestic labors served others, toiling like the unaffectionately nicknamed Frado as \"Nig\" under the constant threat of a beating; and whose adventures abroad involved stowing away on a ship (Linda Brent) or gendered and racial passing on a train (Ellen Craft).
Journal Article