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Afro-Creole Revelry and Rebellion on the British Stage: Jonkanoo in Obi; or, Three-Fingered Jack (1800)

Valladares, Susan

Afro-Creole Revelry and Rebellion on the British Stage: Jonkanoo in Obi; or, Three-Fingered Jack (1800) Thumbnail


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Abstract

Scholarship on John Fawcett and Samuel Arnold’s Obi; or Three-Fingered Jack (Haymarket, 1800) has largely focused on how the pantomime (and its later melodrama adaptation by William Murray) were performed and received relative to maturing debates about slavery, abolition and emancipation. My essay contributes to this ongoing investigation by shifting the emphasis away from the heroic agency embodied by Obi’s eponymous ‘Three-Fingered Jack’ in order to explore the politics of black resistance activated by the minor, but important, character of ‘Jonkanoo’. In its recovery of the Jamaican Christmastime festivities that lent this character his name, my essay reinterprets Obi in light of a performance tradition infused with subversive energies. It argues that the pantomime must be understood in the context of the slave revolution in Saint Domingue (1791–1804)—a cataclysmic event poignantly described by the historian Robin Blackburn as ‘the only successful large-scale and generalized slave revolt known in history’—and examines to what extent Obi’s Jonkanoo character might serve as an index for the ambitions as well as limitations of early nineteenth-century acts of cultural transposition.

Citation

Valladares, S. (2019). Afro-Creole Revelry and Rebellion on the British Stage: Jonkanoo in Obi; or, Three-Fingered Jack (1800). The Review of English Studies, 70(294), 291-311. https://doi.org/10.1093/res/hgy093

Journal Article Type Article
Online Publication Date Nov 2, 2018
Publication Date Apr 30, 2019
Deposit Date Nov 9, 2018
Publicly Available Date Nov 2, 2020
Journal Review of English Studies
Print ISSN 0034-6551
Electronic ISSN 1471-6968
Publisher Oxford University Press
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 70
Issue 294
Pages 291-311
DOI https://doi.org/10.1093/res/hgy093
Public URL https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1343475

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Copyright Statement
This is a pre-copyedited, author-produced PDF of an article accepted for publication in Review of English studies following peer review. The version of record Valladares, Susan (2018). Afro-Creole Revelry and Rebellion on the British Stage: Jonkanoo in Obi; or, Three-Fingered Jack (1800). The Review of English Studies is available online at: https://doi.org/10.1093/res/hgy093





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