The enslaved as spectacle: Ellen Craft, Sarah Parker Remond, and American slavery in England

Focusing on the lecture tours of African American abolitionists Ellen Craft (1851) and Sarah Parker Remond (1859), this paper argues their appearances and appeals on the platform capitalized on their English audiences' fascination with the 'tragic mulatta' figure and familiarity with the 'woman as slave' trope. Craft's 'whiteness' clearly affected her audiences, who saw her as a living exhibit of the lowest to which American slavery would sink. Remond's lecture, in turn, invoked the figure of the 'whitened' slave Ellen Craft embodied in order to stress slavery's horrors and facilitate an empathic appeal. Remond carefully managed that empathy by moving between embodied and rational appeals, and by standing as a figure her audiences could imagine would be enslaved in American despite being free-born.