Provocative Eloquence: Theater, Violence, and Antislavery Speech in the Antebellum United States by Laura L. Mielke (review)

Violence suffused the United States during the decade preceding the US American Civil War, animated by and intensifying the political conflicts surrounding slavery. South Carolina Congressman Preston Brooks viciously beat Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner in retribution for perceived calumny against the South. John Brown's abolitionist insurgencies intensified the conflagrations of "Bleeding Kansas" and culminated in his public execution following the raid on Harpers Ferry. Throughout, proslavery forces greeted antislavery speech with threats and violent reprisals.

Focusing primarily on this turbulent decade, Laura L. Mielke's Provocative Eloquence offers a compelling study of the role of antebellum theatre as a repertoire that mediated public discourse on violence, slavery, and freedom. Mielke draws from Joseph Roach and Diana Taylor to devise "an interperformative and intertextual approach to a culture in which print and performance overlap, influence, intersect, interact, and generally become entangled with one another" (22). Through this method, Mielke assembles a broad array of antislavery texts, orations, and performances, analyzing each for its idiosyncratic articulations of freedom and re-citations of violent rhetoric.

Centrally, the book presents historical alternatives to William Lloyd Garrison's dominant figuration of the antislavery movement as bound to "moral suasion" (19). By contrast to the ethical nonviolence of Garrisonian abolitionism, Mielke analyzes the frequent recourse to incendiary oratory at the antislavery lectern and in theatrical stagings of slavery and its envisioned demise. For instance, in an incisive account of the dramatic readings of black abolitionists William Wells Brown and Mary Webb, Mielke theorizes their practice of "dramatic suasion" as "a political-rhetorical strategy" that staged "antislavery speech's provocations of violence" to hold up proslavery brutality to public scrutiny (56, 58). In another innovative analysis, Mielke traces citations of Portia's speech from The Merchant of Venice as a script for antislavery rhetoricians' rationalizations of violence as a just measure in settling the "bond" of human bondage (117–56). Other chapters include analyses of popular stage actor Edwin Forrest's July 4th oration as an ambivalent articulation of the violence necessary to secure freedom; stage adaptations of Harriet Beecher Stowe's antislavery novel Dred (1856); and, John Brown's militant abolitionism and its uptake onstage and in antislavery rhetoric. Across these disparate objects, the book outlines the intensity with which antebellum speech agitated toward violent ends. Moreover, Mielke traces how "the speaker's ability to provoke action through eloquence makes theater essential to the antislavery movement's consideration of forceful resistance" (3). Thus, the book persuasively demonstrates how theatrical forms such as "dramatic suasion" supplemented antislavery speech and augmented its capacity for provocation.

The central framing of antislavery speech "as provocative of internal transformation, outward protest, violent resistance, and/or brutal censorship" presents some methodological and theoretical quandaries for performance history (20). Namely, provocation definitionally implies incitement and instigation—that is, to provoke is to cause or to prompt something to happen. By focusing on antislavery speech as the primary archive for theorizing rhetorical provocation, Mielke's analyses place a great deal of agency in the hands (and throats) of antislavery orators whose provocations instigate theatrical and everyday scenes of violence. Rather than figuring antislavery rhetoricians as themselves provoked into action by the brutalities of slavery, the violence of proslavery mobs, or the state's authorization of racist cruelty, antebellum provocation appears as a predominantly antislavery practice opposed to proslavery "censorship" (18). This tendency is most evident in the interpretation of Sumner's antislavery rhetoric as an "intentional incitement of proslavery auditors almost to the point of assault—a use of theatrical form terribly relevant to his caning" (90), an ironized claim that nevertheless posits Sumner as the author of his violent beating by Brooks. While this framing of speech as "provocative" celebrates the agential and productive capacities of antislavery speech, it also advances a causational logic in which antislavery utterances prompt proslavery belligerence.

Though "provocative eloquence" draws upon...