Seeking to transform community-based theatre-making, this book explores the transformative potential of abolitionist theatre, as theatre artists and teachers collaborate with marginalized communities to challenge systems of oppression and inspire profound societal change. Focusing on the idea of bringing people together to demand collective care and community-led practice, this collection works to define theatre’s role in the goals of abolition. Abolitionist theatre-making is a theatre that is connected to the practice of decolonization, intersectional feminism, climate justice, social justice, and liberation struggles. Exploring these ideas and offering a direct exploration of the questions that theatre artists and teachers should ask themselves when evaluating the abolitionist impact of their work, the volume provides accessible and practical tools for theatre-makers with perspectives from working practitioners throughout. Through real-life stories and experiences shared by theatre practitioners, the book provides a rich and diverse tapestry of examples that highlight the ways in which community-based theatre can contribute to transformational change. Readers will benefit from practical frameworks, thought-provoking perspectives, and thoughtfully crafted insights that inspire them to reimagine their own theatre practices and empower them to create theatre that challenges and dismantles oppressive systems while uplifting marginalized voices. Ideal for undergraduate and graduate students with an interest in utilizing theatre-making for social change, this book offers new and practical insights into how the path to abolition might be laid and theatre’s key role in it. This book will also be of great interest to theatre artists and activist practitioners who are involved in community-based theatre projects with marginalized populations.

The stage was a vital force in 19th Century America, especially in the debates over slavery and race. This Toby original anthology brings together for the first time a selection of plays that shaped way in which the drama of slavery was performed in the American theatre

Shows how theater was essential to the anti-slavery movement's consideration of forceful resistance

For almost a hundred years before Uncle Tom's Cabin burst on to the scene in 1852, the American theatre struggled to represent the evils of slavery. Slavery and Sentiment examines how both black and white Americans used the theatre to fight negative stereotypes of African Americans in the United States.

In Performing Anti-Slavery, Gay Gibson Cima reimagines the connection between the self and the other within activist performance, providing fascinating new insights into women's nineteenth-century reform efforts, revising the history of abolition, and illuminating an affective repertoire that haunts both present-day theatrical stages and anti-trafficking organizations. Cima argues that black and white American women in the nineteenth-century abolitionist movement transformed mainstream performance practices into successful activism. In family circles, literary associations, religious gatherings, and transatlantic anti-slavery societies, women debated activist performance strategies across racial and religious differences: they staged abolitionist dialogues, recited anti-slavery poems, gave speeches, shared narratives, and published essays. Drawing on liberal religious traditions as well as the Eastern notion of transmigration, Elizabeth Chandler, Sarah Forten, Maria W. Stewart, Sarah Douglass, Lucretia Mott, Ellen Craft and others forged activist pathways that reverberate to this day.

"The Escape; Or, A Leap For Freedom" by William Wells Brown. Published by Good Press. Good Press publishes a wide range of titles that encompasses every genre. From well-known classics & literary fiction and non-fiction to forgotten−or yet undiscovered gems−of world literature, we issue the books that need to be read. Each Good Press edition has been meticulously edited and formatted to boost readability for all e-readers and devices. Our goal is to produce eBooks that are user-friendly and accessible to everyone in a high-quality digital format.

In the nineteenth century, long before film and television arrived to electrify audiences with explosions, car chases, and narrow escapes, it was America's theaters that offered audiences such thrills, with "sensation scenes" of speeding trains, burning buildings, and endangered bodies, often in melodramas extolling the virtues of temperance, abolition, and women's suffrage. In Spectacles of Reform , Amy E. Hughes scrutinizes these peculiar intersections of spectacle and reform, revealing that spectacle plays a crucial role in American activism. By examining how theater producers and political groups harnessed its power and appeal, Hughes suggests that spectacle was—and remains—central to the dramaturgy of reform. Engaging evidence from lithographs to children's books to typography catalogs, Hughes traces the cultural history of three famous sensation scenes—the drunkard suffering from the delirium tremens, the fugitive slave escaping over a river, and the victim tied to the railroad tracks—assessing how they conveyed, allayed, and denied concerns about the rights and responsibilities of citizenship. These images also appeared in printed propaganda, suggesting that the coup de théâtre was an essential part of American reform culture. Additionally, Hughes argues that today's producers and advertisers continue to exploit the affective dynamism of spectacle, reaching an even broader audience through film, television, and the Internet. To be attuned to the dynamics of spectacle, Hughes argues, is to understand how we see. Consequently, Spectacles of Reform will interest not only theater historians, but also scholars and students of political, literary, and visual culture who are curious about how U.S. citizens saw themselves and their world during a pivotal period in American history.