Performing Ellen: Mojisola Adebayo’s Moj of the Antarctic: An African Odyssey (2008) and Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom; Or, the Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery (1860)

Abstract

The subject of Mojisola Adebayo’s one-woman performance, Moj of the Antarctic: An African Odyssey, is Ellen Craft, an ex-slave whose escape from the slave-owning state of Georgia to England in the late 1840s is recounted in the escape narrative Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom; Or, the Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery. Rather than using her performance to present her biographical subject with an interiority the original slave narrative scarcely offers her, Adebayo reconstitutes Ellen and relocates her in an auto/biographical work that self-consciously blurs the boundaries between autobiography, biography, and biofiction, thus exposing the overlap and interdependency of these textual forms. Through a detailed analysis of both texts and their contexts, this essay argues that Adebayo constructs a figurative, first person auto/biography of Ellen Craft, a “call and response” production, originating in an “intimate, somatic engagement with the body of another”, whose “touch” sets up a fluid process of identification. Her work performs a textual revision of the slave narrative genre and its rich, socio-cultural contexts. As a performed, auto/biographical reimagining of Ellen Craft’s flight from slavery Moj of the Antarctic, like Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom, transgresses multiple borders and, in the process, subverts expectations of what constitutes an authentic self. It deconstructs conventionally defined categories of race, gender, and sexuality and radically extends the Crafts’ own examination of the meaning of freedom.