Refinements of Cruelty: Enslavement, -Enfreakment, and the Performance Archive

Refinements of Cruelty: Enslavement, Enfrealanent and the Performance Archive, excavates the archives of six 19^th century freak show performers with intimate connections to the system of American slavery' from 1811-1912. Some performed as slaves like musical prodigy and pianist Thomas "Blind Torn" Wiggins, conjoined twins Millie-Christine McKoy (whose performances at first centered on their shared genitalia and then later shifted after emancipation to encompass singing, dancing, and recitation in multiple languages) and PT Barnum's performer Joice Heth, whom Barnum toured under the false claim of her being the 161-year-old former nursemaid of President George Washington. Others, such as Chang and Eng Bunker, the original so-called "Siamese Twins," rose to fame first as freaks who displayed their conjoined and racialized bodies, and later as slave owners. The project tracks these performers from the Bunkers birth in Siam in 1811 to the McKoys' death in 1912. But this time period also marks the years of active performance for the subjects in my ongoing research, rather than merely bookending their lifespans (most notably Joice Heth, who was born around 1756). It also encompasses the transition from legal slavery, through emancipation, reconstruction, and the dawn of the 20 ^th century. I theorize the archival remains of their performances (playbills, visiting cards, newspapers, autopsy reports, reviews, photographs) as alternative ledgers of enslaved labor in order to expand the methods of accounting for enslaved bodies and their performance labor beyond traditional archival routes (such as Building on Ellen Samuels understanding of "enfreakment" as the process of being actively made a `freak' at the nexus of race, gender, disability, and performance my project reveals the relationship between the spectacularized otherness of side show performance and the dehumanizing project of American slavery.

My project examines archival practices of accounting in slavery and performance and is animated by three main questions. First I establish how the improvisational and anticipatory nature of the archival practices of slavery is mirrored in 19^th century freak show performances that span the ante-bellum and post Civil War United States. I call this anticipatory accounting a `future perfect' practice of archive and performance that considers "what will have been" rather than just the historical past tense. Second I analyze the ways that unfree or newly freed enfreaked subjects accounted for themselves, their performance strategies, and their labor pre- and post emancipation. I argue that these methods of `giving an account of oneself' (to cite Judith Butler) are equally reflected in the archive's intense accounting for the bodies and labors captured under US enslavement and also in its accounting for the performance labor of enfreaked subjects. And last I examine how archival structures that recorded enslavement and enfreakment on the sideshow stage are deeply invested in accounting equally for performers' physical bodies as well as their performance labor. This creates a system of fungibility whereby the unfree enfreaked body accrues high value as an object of spectatorship and performance even as the terms of bondage renders that same body abjectly valueless as a traditional enslaved laborer. This occurs both onstage during life and also in the archive after death. I combine these three critical questions to assess not only the process through which these performers became enslaved, but also the ways they were enfreaked, marking both slavery and freakdom as active practices of subjection.