In The Captive Stage, Douglas A. Jones, Jr. argues that proslavery ideology remained the dominant mode of racial proposal within the antebellum north, even supposing chattel slavery had nearly disappeared from the zone through the flip of the 19th century—and that northerners cultivated their proslavery mind's eye such a lot forcefully of their functionality practices. Jones explores how a number of constituencies, starting from early nationwide artisans and Jacksonian salary employees to patrician elites and bourgeois social reformers, used the level to acceptable and refashion defenses of black bondage as capacity to verify their various and sometimes conflicting fiscal, political, and social targets. becoming a member of functionality stories with literary feedback and cultural concept, he uncovers the proslavery conceptions animating a big selection of functionality texts and practices, comparable to the “Bobalition” sequence of broadsides, blackface minstrelsy, stagings of the yankee Revolution, reform melodrama, and abolitionist discourse. Taken jointly, he indicates, those works didn't quantity to a decision for the re-enslavement of African americans yet, quite, justifications for daily and state-sanctioned racial inequities of their post-slavery society. Throughout, The Captive Stage elucidates how the proslavery mind's eye of the unfastened north emerged in direct competition to the inclusionary claims black publics enacted of their personal functionality cultures. In doing so, the booklet deals clean contexts and readings of a number of different types of black cultural creation, together with early black nationalist parades, slave dance, the historiography of the innovative period, the oratory of radical abolitionists and the black conference flow, and the autobiographical and dramatic paintings of ex-slave William Wells Brown.