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Chapter 3 - Doubleness

The Four Acts of Henry Box Brown’s Black Embodiment

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 June 2025

Matthew Rebhorn
Affiliation:
James Madison University, Virginia
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Summary

Henry Box Brown not only mailed himself in a box from Richmond in Philadelphia in 1849, but he also remediated this experience of embodiment later in competing slave narratives, on stage, in a panorama, and through his role as a magician and mesmerist. In these four “acts,” Brown uses the representation of his experiences of Black embodiment across various media both to support and—simultaneously—to undercut the mind-centered ontology that structured the system of chattel slavery’s reduction of Blackness to mindless matter. Rather than imagine ontological drift, as Bird does, or ontological betweenness, like Forrest, Brown uses different representations of Black embodiment to imagine existence as always already ontologically doubled, as something governed by the mind-centered paradigm that demeans the body, and by the body-centered paradigm that makes the material body’s expressive agency crucial for the fullest articulation of humanity. Brown suggests that consciousness emerges simultaneously from the mind and the body, and that by carefully curating these overlapping, and doubled, forms of consciousness, Black subjects can “mind the body” in order to imagine alternatives to white culture’s dehumanizing of Blackness.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2025

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  • Doubleness
  • Matthew Rebhorn, James Madison University, Virginia
  • Book: Embodiment in Nineteenth-Century American Literature
  • Online publication: 29 June 2025
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009527699.004
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  • Doubleness
  • Matthew Rebhorn, James Madison University, Virginia
  • Book: Embodiment in Nineteenth-Century American Literature
  • Online publication: 29 June 2025
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009527699.004
Available formats
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Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Doubleness
  • Matthew Rebhorn, James Madison University, Virginia
  • Book: Embodiment in Nineteenth-Century American Literature
  • Online publication: 29 June 2025
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009527699.004
Available formats
×