‘What had become of me?’: Sheppard Lee’s Blackface Transformation

Abstract

Robert Montgomery Bird boldly experiments with cross-racial transformation in his proto-science fiction fantasy Sheppard Lee. This chapter draws on archival research to read Sheppard Lee as textual blackface through two interwoven forms: blackface minstrelsy and the slave narrative. Sheppard’s liminal journey into and out of an African American enslaved corpse mirrors the paradoxical demarcation and transgression of racial boundaries set up in early blackface minstrelsy. This chapter argues that Sheppard’s minstrel-inspired inhabitation of Blackness and his ventriloquisation of the burgeoning slave narrative genre rejects cross-racial consciousness. Instead Bird mocks White civic values of industry and self-possession, while seeking to contain palpable threats of fluid and violent social and racial movement in Jacksonian America.