SOURCE: “‘De Genewine Artekil’: William Wells Brown, Blackface Minstrelsy, and Abolitionism,” in American Literature, Vol. 69, No. 4, December, 1997, pp. 743-80.

In the following essay, Gilmore examines how the popular minstrel show became for Brown a forum for constructing a “viable representative black manhood” and analyzes Clotel for its representations of race and gender.

In 1856, in addition to continuing to deliver lectures, former slave and “professional fugitive” William Wells Brown began to read dramatic pieces of his own composition at antislavery meetings.¹ His first play—the first play known to have been written by an African American—was entitled either The Dough Face (a common epithet for “Yankees”) or Experience; or, How to Give a Northern Man a Backbone and provided a satirical reply to Boston clergyman Nehemiah Adams's proslavery A South-Side View of Slavery (1854).² There is no extant text of this play, but two years later Brown published The...