Her work will culminate in the first comprehensive assessment of Brown\u2019s unique persona and his impact on the anti-slavery movement. She will also analyze what she terms the \u201cafterlife\u201d of Brown\u00a0 \u2013 his representation by contemporary African American artists such as Glen Ligon, Wilmer Wilson, and Pat Ward Williams.<\/p>\n
Since publishing an article in 2015, titled \u201cWill the Real Henry \u2018Box\u2019 Brown Please Stand Up?<\/a>\u201d, Cutter says she\u2019s been contacted nearly weekly by individuals interested in Brown, from artists and filmmakers to historians and journalists, and even magicians. The article revealed, based on Cutter\u2019s research, new information about Brown, including how he learned magic \u2013 from a fellow slave \u2013 and where he passed away: Toronto.<\/p>\n \u201cHe is such a fascinating figure, yet no one has truly evaluated his whole life, let alone his performative legacy and the ways former slaves handle the individual materials of slavery,\u201d says Cutter.<\/p>\n After his dramatic emancipation, Brown became a speaker in the North, where he first received the nickname \u201cBox\u201d at the Anti-Slavery Society and met noted abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass. While campaigning against slavery, he developed a panorama \u2013 large art scrolls that he would unfurl\u00a0\u2013 to support his speeches and story. Upon the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act<\/a>\u00a0in 1850, he moved to England for safety.<\/p>\n Minstrel shows were the rage in Britain, notes Cutter, and Brown began developing a show of his own, blending panoramas, magic, and plays, in which he called himself such names as \u201cProf. H. Box Brown\u201d and \u201cThe African Prince.\u201d In later years, he experimented with so-called electrobiology, a form of hypnotism.<\/p>\n But nearly every performance included the dramatic flourish in which he re-enacted his emergence from what he claimed was the original box in which he was shipped.<\/p>\n Cutter highly doubts that the box was the real thing. But that was classic Brown, she says: always in it for a spectacle. He toured England for nearly 25 years, performing hundreds of shows a year; he even acted in semi-autobiographical plays on stages in London and Margate. Cutter\u2019s research under the new grant will take her to the Theatre and Performance Collections at the Victoria and Albert Museum<\/a> in London to investigate their artifacts.<\/p>\n Brown\u2019s public image didn\u2019t go over well with prominent anti-slavery figures of the time. Douglass publicly denounced Brown\u2019s 1849 book, Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown<\/em>, in which he described the means of his escape, because Douglass wished he had kept it secret so others could be freed that way. He also looked down upon Brown\u2019s elaborate shows, says Cutter.<\/p>\n \u201cDouglass was dignified, serious \u2013 he didn\u2019t smile in portraits or photographs,\u201d because he felt people would ridicule African Americans if they weren\u2019t seen as serious, says Cutter.<\/p>\n \u201cThere are heroes, like Douglass and Uncle Tom from Uncle Tom\u2019s Cabin<\/em>, that people know and associate with emancipation \u2013 Brown was different from them,\u201d says Cutter. \u201cHe\u2019s the anti-Uncle Tom.\u201d<\/p>\n Cutter\u2019s forthcoming book, provisionally titled \u201cSlavery as Spectacle: The Lives and Afterlives of Henry Box Brown,\u201d will help to fill the gaps in Brown\u2019s life and feed the public interest in his legacy, she says. It will examine both a little-studied method for anti-slavery activism, namely, Brown\u2019s performances; and will bring to life the artistic endeavors of one of the most enigmatic figures of abolitionist history.<\/p>\n \u201cBrown wrote himself out of abolitionist history, at least in part,\u201d Cutter writes, \u201cbut inscribed himself into a longer history of artists who use their work to deconstruct the boundary between the viewer and the viewed.\u201d<\/p>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/01\/Figure-5.21-Poster-from-Browns-performances-in-Shrewsbury-England-531x1024.jpg\"){kind=spacer}
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