In the mid-nineteenth century, John Brown (1800-59) riveted the United States and earned himself an execution with his radical abolitionist tactics encompassing murder and armed insurrection against the United States at Harpers Ferry (present-day West Virginia). Today, his extreme measures ensure his continued circulation across a variety of images and through various investments in his legacy and history. We began thinking together about John Brown precisely because of the promise of collaboration for considering the multifaceted figure that is performed and reperformed on murals and buttons, in sports arenas and bars, on television and in film. The work of abolition is collective and shared, and the political possibilities of the university add up to very little if they remain solitary endeavors. John Brown impels us to gather, to think and work together. Perhaps any one of us alone could have written our article, "The Unbearable Whiteness of John Brown: Theatrical Legacies and Performing Abolition," in Theatre Journal's special issue on "Abolition and Performance." But maybe we would not have done so without the others. This is a coalitional approach to political and abolitionist work in the academy. The reading group as a form has a long political history, and in some ways, our collaboration is not so different. From the beginning, however, our work was oriented toward research inquiries and the potential to then share that research with a yet larger circle. It was an opportunity not just to have a few conversations about John Brown, but to make something (an article) about John Brown.
The project began with a semi-open call posted to Facebook. The post was visible only to some, but it encouraged viewers to forward the call to friends and colleagues who might be interested in working toward an article-length piece of writing on John Brown. Many commented on the post, and the current authors were those who indicated their interest in working together. Once the five of us were all on the same email thread (albeit spaced as far east to west on the planet as northern England to California), we met via Zoom and began by discussing our interest in John Brown as a political, historical, and theatrical figure. Our initial interests were varied, and the wide-ranging examples we found of Brown were key to thinking through the article in terms of the multitude of possible John Browns and his persistent performance—of abolition, of whiteness, of masculinity, of Kansas exceptionalism, of other histories and potential futures. We began by adding individual contributions to a shared document. Over the course of various meetings, this work was edited and remixed and rewritten and expanded on toward a shared and cohesive whole. In particular, there was a moment when we moved from sharing and accumulating to pausing, reflecting, and deciding on a shape. We also would share our John Brown sightings from advertisements to businesses and products named after Brown to costumes and art.
Although the article and this online introduction are written from the collective standpoint of "we," in the remainder, we've atomized ourselves back into our individualities to converse briefly about the processes and ramifications of collective reading, thinking, and writing and to share some of our favorite images of John Browniana.
What drew you to (co)writing about John Brown in the first place?
Michelle Liu Carriger (mlc): I would never have thought to tackle John Brown on my own, but for me, a native Kansan, John Brown has been a perennially recurring figure, due to his notorious murders carried out against proslavery settlers in the years before his Harpers Ferry insurrection and probably even more due to the famous John Steuart Curry mural in the Kansas Capitol Building. When I saw Eero [Laine] post a call to talk about John Brown, I couldn't not want to get that all out on the performance studies table and take a new look. It proved to be a chance to research more deeply and carefully Kansas-born muralist Curry and the process of Brown's transformation into a bizarre patron saint of Kansas history.1 Fun fact: John Brown taught me to dip my toe into archival research as a high schooler in Kansas. After learning how to get a reader's card and gather my pencils-and-no-pens and clear bag together, the first item I ever paged from the Kansas Historical Society was a nineteenth-century photograph of John Brown in his big-beard, older age. I remember being totally shocked that, as some random teenager, you could just order something so historically significant and hold it in your hands. Probably an origin story for a future academic.
Eero Laine (Eero): I had just finished a backpacking trip on the Northville-Placid Trail in the Adirondacks that ended just outside of Lake Placid, New York. As I was driving home, I saw a street sign with a familiar name. I did a double take, pulled a U-turn, took a left down John Brown Road and found myself at the John Brown Farm Historic Site. The encounter was unexpected, perhaps because I had focused so much on planning the solo backpacking trip that I did not do much to investigate where I would emerge from the woods nearly one hundred miles from where I started. Apparently, I was not entirely alone in my ignorance of the exact location of John Brown's burial site. The New York State Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation site notes: "Many Americans know the song 'John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in the grave,' but most do not associate the words with this simple farm at North Elba, New York."2
There is a statue of Brown standing next to an African American child in the center of a roundabout at the entrance to the grounds of the farm. When I was there, the grass surrounding the statue was filled with an installation by Karen Davidson Seward called the Memorial Field for Black Lives. Black yard signs with white lettering read: "Plainclothed Police. Wrong Address. No Knock Warrant. Sleeping EMT. Shot Dead. Breonna Taylor 1996-2020" and "Unarmed Teenager. Confronted by Police. Flees. Pursued. 12 Shots. 6 Hits. Michael Brown Jr. 1994-2014," among forty-eight others.3 The New York State Parks site quotes Brown: "I, John Brown, am quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood. I had, as I now think, vainly flattered myself that without very much bloodshed it might be done."4 I had just spent close to a week alone and now wanted to think and talk with others about that unexpected turn down John Brown Road.
Henry Bial (Henry): I had recently read Felipe Cervera and Eero's article on collaborative performance studies, and it was a great reminder that while performance is always already a collaboration (even the solo performer relies on their audience to help make meaning), performance studies scholarship is often a lonely pursuit.5 And as a transplant to Kansas, I've long been struck by the local fascination with Brown, whose iconic image—beard, rifle, and Bible—seems to pop up around every corner here in Lawrence. I'd already seen the basketball fans in John Brown costumes, drank a beer in John Brown's Underground, and stuck a magnet of the Curry mural on my refrigerator. So when Eero put out the call for folks interested in thinking through Brown's performative afterlives, I was excited to jump aboard.
Ben Spatz (Ben): I have never felt entirely at home in the discipline of theatre studies. For me, theatre is primarily a methodology of research rather than an object of study. For the past several years, my primary reading has been in critical Black studies, and I have increasingly felt myself somewhat adrift in the epistemic geography of the university. When I saw the call for a collaborative writing project on John Brown, it seemed like an opportunity to explore my current relationship to the field of theatre and performance studies. I had recently been reading Marquis Bey's The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Gender (a short open access book that is discussed in our article) and thinking more and more about the need to reexamine and deconstruct whiteness from perspectives grounded in Black and Indigenous studies.6 Working with this lovely group of collaborators has helped me to resituate myself in the context of theatre and performance studies and to appreciate what can be learned from putting the study of particular cultural objects, like scripts and productions, in conversation with some of the more abstract language that has developed around phenomena like embodiment and racialization.
SAJ: The main draw of the project for me was the tension, the just incredibly unholdable abrasion, between the celebration of John Brown in certain spheres of my life and, in other spheres of my life, the agony and grief that surround encounters with death at the hands of white supremacy. I don't know anyone who faces the daily premature death risks of racial capitalism, including organizers and thinker-activists whose work is societal transformation, who has come to the conclusion, "I wish I could die to stop this," and yet I kept meeting circulating narratives and images of John Brown rife with this desire. This appeal's strange niche is a major facet of John Brown's resuscitation, although cultural objects that engage Brown variously seek to simply profit off of that appeal or to challenge and upend it. My suspicion of politics that are "appealing" in their "goodness" comes out of my research into the ways that attempts to incorporate radical values into bourgeois liberalism attenuate the politics of those values, reinforcing structural power hierarchies. I am interested in the how of this attenuation: How does the appeal or cultural celebration of John Brown refigure "lesser risks" such as poverty or incarceration into more terrifying than death? And how does this appeal expand its veneration of a single "martyr" to a logic that positions one's death as more precious than one's life, in a way that rewrites the narrative of—as is so disproportionately distributed to Black, broke, and disabled folks—being killed by the state. There is such a difference between the appeal of John Brown's actions in the current moment and Brown's really existing life and politics, or what we know of them. That difference is what drew me to want to explore John Brown further.
What are the stakes/rationale behind writing about John Brown in the multiple authorship mode in particular?
Eero: I have been involved with various groups experimenting with methodologies and modes of collaborative writing in theatre and performance studies.7 I edit a journal with SAJ that (embracing its name, Lateral) is intentionally structured in horizontal and collaborative ways.8 I have long been inspired by Henry's and Ben's observations about our academic disciplines and calls for thinking through our disciplinary methodologies.9 And Michelle and I recently worked together on a couple of articles that asked after issues of field formation and about reading and readership of academic work—one of which, in thinking about the readership for academic work, asks: "Is anyone going to read this?"10 I think my response to such a question now is increasingly that if we're thinking together and writing together, we're already reading each other's work. That is, I don't need to convince Michelle, Ben, Henry, and SAJ to go read my article about John Brown, because they wrote it with me. They have read my article on John Brown, and I have already read theirs, and we have done so over a period of months in a way that has reshaped how I think and consider the subject and the field. The article describes the immensely problematic issues in glorifying individuals, and I can't imagine spending so much time alone writing an article to make such an argument.
mlc: I definitely didn't have a full article's worth in me, but with five coauthors, we are a pretty full article. I can't quite tell if the thesis of multiplying and then disappearing John Browns was one we collectively agreed on or perhaps the inevitable outcome of five different takes on one topic. We were able to re-create my favorite thing about academia, and one that happens all too rarely now that I'm out of grad school, which is the ferment of the seminar with everyone equally engaged in the ideas at hand and collectively shaping them.
Henry: Let's be honest: there's a lot of Browniana out there in the world already. By working collaboratively, we hope that we can add a new dimension, sort of like a jazz combo working out a new arrangement of a standard melody.
Ben: As Henry's comment suggests, collaborative writing is a practice that is linked to other forms of embodied and performative play/work. At the start of the process, I suggested that we should each lead or direct a John Brown-focused creative project—or at least imagine doing so—in order to feel out the differences in our approaches and situations through practice. What does it mean, I wondered, to think and write about John Brown from the specific location of the town of Huddersfield in northern England? While we did not end up incorporating practice research explicitly, the interaction between the coauthors certainly pushes against a number of disciplinary and formal boundaries, as can be seen in the multivocality of the final article.
SAJ: Writing is always collective, whether we name it so or not! The pleasure of embracing that, leaning toward it instead of doing all of the work to obscure it, means that we can get, collectively, further in our research. Along the way, we had the opportunity in this project to do the deeply political work of meeting each other where we were and being in conversation. That alone is not abolition, but it is essential to any kind of—including abolitionist—building together. That so much of this conversation could happen through the written word, on the page, gave it a capacious pace and level of attention. That capaciousness was also a decision, an active choice made by each of us in our responses to and with each other's writing. Collaboration may, as the common refrain about compromise says, "leave everyone equally dissatisfied," and yet throughout our cowriting, we also still chose to continue to be, grow, and think with one another. There are many different ways to do abolition,11 and none of them is perfectly satisfying. This cowriting was not abolition, but by being conversation and processing together, it was a politics of practice.
What were surprises, challenges, highlights, or things you might do differently about researching and writing together (on a topic like John Brown)?
Eero: What I take away from studying the performance of the individual John Brown with friends and colleagues is that abolition is necessarily a collective act. Or, more likely, abolition is a series of actions, always with others. How do you study something collective by yourself? Since working on the idea with others,12 I often return to the notion of study as Fred Moten and Stefano Harney write about it: "study is what you do with other people."13 A real highlight in this project was the opportunity to study John Brown and abolition with friends and colleagues.
mlc: A highlight was definitely being surprised and impressed by what new texts and ideas might appear, brought by others. Two challenges were trying to bring disparate writing and reasoning styles into harmony and, conversely, feeling tentative about editing text that I didn't write myself. It's really hard to cut when you're cutting someone else's stuff!
Ben: I was surprised and struggled at a few points along the way because I found that we did not spend a lot of time speaking in real time about the underlying conceptual and political issues raised by the article. Our synchronous video chat conversations were devoted largely to process logistics, such as how we should proceed in the next phase of editing or who would be responsible for particular bits of investigation. I wondered why we didn't speak more directly about our own political and theoretical commitments, such as our feelings and experiences in relation to abolition, militancy, radicalism, whiteness, and race in general. As the process went on, I came to appreciate the more distanced approach we took, which also seemed to be grounded in a disciplinary context: the idea that we needed to focus on theatrical or at least cultural works rather than "real" history. But this is a question I would like to explore further.
SAJ: It is always challenging to work from a place of, when you get down to the gritty details, different individual goals; working through that difference to arrive at a shared new location was a highlight. Also, I learned so much about Kansas culture! It was a not-exactly-unpleasant surprise to encounter the absolute breadth and often ridiculousness of, as Henry calls it, Browniana.
Henry: At some point in the process, my University of Kansas colleague David Roediger, who is arguably the leading theorist of whiteness in US history and culture, graciously agreed to read a draft of our article in progress and gave us some encouraging feedback as well as several very helpful suggestions. One which didn't make it into the article, alas, was to point us to the wildly inaccurate 1940 western film Santa Fe Trail, in which John Brown, played by Raymond Massey, is the antagonist, opposite Errol Flynn as Jeb Stuart and Ronald Reagan (!) as George Armstrong Custer.14 More to the point, Dave's critical generosity assured us that there was a place for our collective voice in what had begun to feel like an already-crowded John Brown conversation, and it also served as a reminder that great thinkers approach all scholarship with a spirit of collaboration rather than competition.
Any fun fact or quirk about John Brown or any other aspect of this project that was your favorite?
Eero: In our early discussions, we noted the multiplicity of ways that Brown performs and has performed across history. I'm still struck by the immense range of these representations—from the literary to the many John Brown memes and contemporary art. For instance, "Resurrect John Brown and give him a Battlemech" is a Facebook Group with nearly six thousand members that is both a wonderful sci-fi directive and another example thinking with John Brown that foregrounds him against collective action (as we discuss in our article).15
mlc: My previous knowledge of John Brown was heavily restricted to his mythical status in Kansas, so learning even basic facts—like that he was a sheep farmer from upstate New York before embarking on the campaign that made him famous—was fun and interesting. And I was gobsmacked by the Curry mural Freeing of the Slaves. I even got to go see it in person in Wisconsin after ATHE 2022 in Detroit. Having grown up with the John Brown of Tragic Prelude, I couldn't have imagined it as so close to a variation on the theme, especially one which so eloquently illustrated some of our concerns about John Brown as a potentially obliterating legacy.
Henry: At some point during the process, I mentioned the project to my mother, who grew up in Massachusetts and now lives in New York; she remarked that she had written a high school term paper on Brown in, I think, 1955!
Ben: I too have been amazed at the kaleidoscopic multiplicity of the iconography around John Brown. When I started the project, I knew little more about him than what I had learned in grade school. Yet I now see him as a powerful figure through which to examine the complexities of white identity, racialization, and allyship as well as questions of revolutionary violence and militant struggle in the present. The texture of cultural production around John Brown continues to evolve, and I believe we have only scratched the surface in this project. Perhaps the panoply of images in this digital supplement will inspire others to cast the net even wider.
What would you like readers to take forward from this article—ways of writing, thinking, or staging John Brown?
mlc: I so appreciated getting to triangulate my weirdo specialist Kansas knowledge with a Kansas transplant (Henry) and then cross-pollinate it with John Brown in critical theory and his provocative appearances as an ambivalent figure over generations of plays and representations. There turned out to be a lot more there than I had expected. And doing that work of discovery collectively instead of solo made a lot of the journey more fun.
Eero: There is always more work to be done, and I am always interested in working with others.
Henry: Making history isn't a solo act.
Ben: These days, I often find myself carrying a banner for critical Black studies, at least in Europe. This John Brown project has confirmed my sense of the importance of Black studies for reimagining the university and the world. The idea I will most likely take forward is that of John Brown's absolute remaking—even to the point of a very different kind of social death—through his deep engagements with Black socialities. I continue to work through the implications of this idea.16
SAJ: I hope white readers will push at the edges of their own (dis)comfort with the question of actually "doing John Brown" (whatever that might mean in today's world), and the ways that must be very different then imagining, representing, or fantasizing about white salvation. Best case scenario, this article stokes the fire to, if I may echo a call from twenty-five years ago, "rededicate ourselves to the fulfillment of the tasks for which" Brown and many other organizers died.17 We have urgent work to do.
Footnotes
1. For more on John Steuart Curry (1897-1946), see "John Steuart Curry," Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Steuart_Curry.
2. "John Brown Farm State Historic Site," New York State Parks, Recreation, and Historic Preservation, https://parks.ny.gov/historic-sites/johnbrownfarm/amenities.aspx.
3. Paul Grondahl, "Powerful Black Lives Memorial at Abolitionist John Brown's Farm," Times Union, September 22, 2020, https://www.timesunion.com/news/article/Grondahl-Powerful-Black-Livesmemorial-at-15586258.php.
4. Quoted in "John Brown Farm State Historic Site."
5. Felipe Cervera and Eero Laine, "The Planet, Everyday: Towards Collaborative Performance Studies," Text and Performance Quarterly 40, no. 1 (2020): 90-107.
6. Marquis Bey, The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Gender (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020), https://manifold.umn.edu/projects/the-problem-of-the-negro-as-a-problem-for-gender.
7. See, for instance, Ends: Collaborative Performance Research, https://performingends.com.
8. Lateral, official journal of the Cultural Studies Association: https://csalateral.org.
9. See, for instance, Henry Bial, "Performance Studies 3.0," in Performance Studies in Motion: International Perspectives and Practices in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Atay Citron et al. (London: Methuen, 2014), 30-41; Ben Spatz, "Earthing the Laboratory: Speculations for Doctoral Training," Performance Research 25, no. 8 (2020): 33-41.
10. Eero Laine and Michelle Liu Carriger, "The Labor of Academic Journals: Or, Is Anyone Going to Read This?" Reception: Texts, Readers, Audiences, History 15 (2023): 59-63; Michelle Liu Carriger and Eero Laine, "'Cultivating a Small Field': On the Work of Citation in Theatre and Performance Studies Scholarship," Theatre Topics 33, no. 2 (2023): 83-89.
11. See, for example, the work documented through One Million Experiments, https://millionexperiments.com.
12. Maria Shantelle Alexies Ambayec et al., Mourning the Ends: Collaborative Writing and Performance (Goleta, CA: punctum books, 2024).
13. Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (New York: Minor Compositions, 2013), 110.
14. See Santa Fe Trail (1940), IMDb, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0033021.
15. "Resurrect John Brown and give him a Battlemech," Facebook Group, accessed June 10, 2024, https://www.facebook.com/groups/resurrectjohnbrown.
16. See Ben Spatz, "Afterword: On Death and Ceremony," in Race and the Forms of Knowledge: Technique, Identity, and Place in Artistic Research (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2024), 205-11.
17. Russell Banks et al., "Renew the Legacy of John Brown," Race Traitor, no. 10 (Winter 1999): 2.