• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.64 no.1
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• pp.77-94
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• 2018

This paper examines William and Ellen Craft's Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom (1860)-a narrative of the enslaved couple's escape from Macon to Philadelphia in the guise of a white male master and a colored slave. Expanding Judith Adler's notion of "travel as performed art," my reading of Running focuses on the Crafts' stratagems of transvestism-crossing boundaries not only of gender, but also of race, class, and disability. If travel can be understood as a form of performed art, then why not address a traveler as a performance artist? I present William and Ellen's role-playing in Running as performers of crossing borders and categories, or, as "fugitive performers," since the couple's story never reaches its final arrival but narrates an eternal run-away, far more than "a thousand miles to freedom." Using social stereotypes of race and gender to disguise, William and Ellen plot, write, choreograph, play, and recite on the moving stages and manipulate the others-especially white American audiences-who accompany the couple's run-away and those who were responsible for the cultural drama-a tragedy of American slavery. Becoming "fugitive performers," William and Ellen de-essentialize and debunk the nineteenth-century America's firm belief in distinct color line between black and white, and in the high yet unstable bars between male / female, abled / disabled, master / slave, and freedom / slavery. The Crafts alert their contemporaries and readers by presenting the complex and permeable boundaries of race, gender, class, social and cultural ability.

• (The)Study of the Eastern Classic
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• no.66
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• pp.103-128
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• 2017

Slaves have been investigated around diaries or slave ownership papers of nobilities up to now. While slaves were described in tales or stories on loyal slaves or historic tales, slaves were not sufficiently examined. This paper analyzed the actual awareness on slaves through the description on slaves in Chinese poem. It was generally very difficult to deal with young slaves because young slaves were included in the lowest class without education and not an adult. The fugitive slaves were loss of labor and brought the emotional betrayal. There were spells to make fugitive slaves return. The sense of loss was nearly same in the death of slaves as in the death of family members. The longer the slaves lived with owners, the greater the sense of loss was. However, the difference of awareness on slaves per period was not identified in this paper. It can be identified only by fully examining more data on slaves. It will be the theme of further study.

• The Journal of the Convergence on Culture Technology
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• v.9 no.5
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• pp.105-110
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• 2023

This article attempts to analyze John Greenleaf Whittier's anti-slavery poems. As a Quaker, he criticizes and satirizes the rife slavery in the mid nineteenth century. His thoughts are based on his religious belief. "The Farewell of a Virginia Slave Mother" depicts the mother who lost daughter for she was sold to the South. The harsh state of the corrupt South is described. In "Massachusettes to Virginia," the speaker, deploring the moral corruption of Virginia, denounces any attempt to return slaves to slave states. With a moonrise as a socio-political symbol, "Arisen at Last" celebrates the passage of law to protect fugitive slaves. Written after the Civil War, "The Peace Autumn" celebrates the peaceful situation in which Emancipation was declared. His efforts contributed to the abolitionist literature.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.65-102
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• 2018

This paper focuses on "The Story of $Bras-Coup{\acute{e}}$" in George Washington Cable's The Grandissimes (1880), a story to and around which Cable claimed the larger work was built. It tells of an African candio sold into slavery who, to the dismay of his white purchasers, refuses to work, strikes his master, and runs away to lead a life of a fugitive in the swamps. He is finally captured, whipped, and maimed, but not before he casts a powerful voodoo curse at his master and his plantation. He dies a heroic death, with the last words that he goes "To--Africa." Cable once said that he "meant The Grandissimes as truly a political work as it ever has been called." It is a political work in that $Bras-Coup{\acute{e}}^{\prime}s$ personal rebellion is associated with much-feared slave revolts, especially the black revolution in San Domingue/Haiti. There is also $Honor{\acute{e}}$ f.m.c. (free man of color), one of the narrators of "The Story of $Bras-Coup{\acute{e}}$" and a stand-in for the Freedmen in the postbellum United States, who nurses his own insurrectionary flame. Through these figures Cable makes a "terrible suggestion" that a black revolution is on the horizon unless whites would not mend their ways soon.