Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-24hb2 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-27T14:23:01.878Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Representing Chaos: William Craft's Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Abstract

Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom: The Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery (1860) is best understood as William Craft's attempt to represent the contradictions and instabilities inherent in white–supremacist thought and culture. I consider race as a complex of various and interconnected social, economic, legal, and political theories and practices. Chaos theory, I argue, offers a useful framework for grasping this understanding of race, in part by discouraging attempts to isolate any discrete concept of race as independent or definitive. Addressing this chaotic reality, Craft approaches his story with a narrative method analogous to fractal geometry–that is, an approach to representation and measurement that accounts for apparent irregularity, fragmentation, and instability. Order and stability do not follow from the successful escape but rather are negotiated through a mode of representation that prioritizes accuracy over a conceptually neat Euclidean order. (JE)

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2006

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Adams, Henry. The Letters of Henry Adams. Ed. Levenson, J.C., Samuels, Ernest, Vandersee, Charles, and Winner, Viola Hopkins. Vol. 2. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1982.Google Scholar
Andrews, William L. To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760–1865. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1986.Google Scholar
Armistead, Wilson. Five Hundred Thousand Strokes for Freedom: A Series of Anti-slavery Tracts, of Which Half a Million Are Now First Issued by the Friends of the Negro. London, 1853.Google Scholar
Barrett, Lindon. “Hand-writing: Legibility and the White Body in Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom.” American Literature 69 (1997): 315–36.Google Scholar
Blackett, R.J.M. Beating against the Barriers: The Lives of Six Nineteenth-Century Afro-Americans. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1986.Google Scholar
Briggs, John. Fractals: The Patterns of Chaos. New York: Touchstone, 1992.Google Scholar
Brown, Gillian. Domestic Individualism: Imagining Self in Nineteenth-Century America. Berkeley: U of California P, 1990.Google Scholar
Brown, William Wells. Clotel; or, The President's Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States. Bedford Cultural Ed. Ed. Robert S. Levine. Boston: Bedford, 2000.Google Scholar
Cassuto, Leonard. The Inhuman Race: The Racial Grotesque in American Literature and Culture. New York: Columbia UP, 1997.Google Scholar
Craft, William. Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom: The Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1999.Google Scholar
Du Bois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk. Writings. New York: Lib. of Amer., 1986. 357547.Google Scholar
Eglash, Ron. African Fractals: Modern Computing and Indigenous Design. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1999.Google Scholar
Ernest, John. Liberation Historiography: African American Writers and the Challenge of History, 1794–1861. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2004.Google Scholar
Fisher, William W. III. “Ideology and Imagery in the Law of Slavery.” Slavery and the Law. Ed. Finkelman, Paul. 1997. Lanham: Rowman, 2002. 4385.Google Scholar
Foreman, P. Gabrielle. “Who's Your Mama? ‘White’ Mulatta Genealogies, Early Photography, and Antipassing Narratives of Slavery and Freedom.” American Literary History 14 (2002): 505–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Franklin, John Hope, and McNeil, Genna Rae, eds. African Americans and the Living Constitution. Washington: Smithsonian Inst., 1995.Google Scholar
Fredrickson, George M. The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914. New York: Harper, 1971.Google Scholar
Garber, Marjorie. Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety. New York: Routledge, 1992.Google Scholar
Gilroy, Paul. Small Acts: Thoughts on the Politics of Black Cultures. London: Serpent's Tail, 1993.Google Scholar
Gleick, James. Chaos: Making a New Science. New York: Penguin, 1987.Google Scholar
Goldberg, David Theo. Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning. Cambridge: Blackwell, 1993.Google Scholar
Gossett, Thomas F. Race: The History of an Idea in America. 1963. New York: Schocken, 1965.Google Scholar
Hartman, Saidiya V. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford UP, 1997.Google Scholar
Hayles, N. Katherine. Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1990.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hayles, N. Katherine. “Introduction: Complex Dynamics in Literature and Science.” Chaos and Order: Complex Dynamics in Literature and Science. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1991. 133.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Higginbotham, A. Leon Jr. Shades of Freedom: Racial Politics and Presumptions of the American Legal Process. New York: Oxford UP, 1996.Google Scholar
Horsman, Reginald. Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1981.Google Scholar
Harriet, Jacobs. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1987.Google Scholar
Jacobson, Matthew Frye. Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1998.Google Scholar
Jefferson, Thomas. Notes on the State of Virginia. 1787. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1982.Google Scholar
Kawash, Samira. Dislocating the Color Line: Identity, Hy-bridity, and Singularity in African American Literature. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1997.Google Scholar
Laban, Rudolf. Choreutics. Ed. Ullmann, Lisa. London: MacDonald, 1966.Google Scholar
Mandelbrot, Benoit B. The Fractal Geometry of Nature. San Francisco: Freeman, 1982.Google Scholar
McCaskill, Barbara. “‘Trust No Man!’ But What about a Woman? Ellen Craft and a Genealogical Model for Teaching Douglass's Narrative!’ Approaches to Teaching Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. Ed. James C. Hall. New York: MLA, 1999. 95101.Google Scholar
McCaskill, Barbara. “‘Yours Very Truly’: Ellen Craft—the Fugitive as Text and Artifact.” African American Review 29 (1994): 509–29.Google Scholar
Mills, Charles W. Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1998.Google Scholar
Reid-Pharr, Robert F. Conjugal Union: The Body, the House, and the Black American. New York: Oxford UP, 1999.Google Scholar
Roediger, David R. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. London: Verso, 1991.Google Scholar
Saxton, Alexander. The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth-Century America. London: Verso, 1990.Google Scholar
Rogers M., Smith Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History. New Haven: Yale UP, 1997.Google Scholar
Smith, Thelma M., ed. Uncollected Poems of James Russell Lowell. 1950. Westport: Greenwood, 1976.Google Scholar
Sollors, Werner. Neither Black nor White, yet Both: Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1997.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stanton, William. The Leopard's Spots: Scientific Attitudes toward Race in America, 1815–59. Midway Reprint. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1960.Google Scholar
Starling, Marion Wilson. The Slave Narrative: Its Place in American History. 2nd ed. Washington: Howard UP, 1988.Google Scholar
Takaki, Ronald. Iron Cages: Race and Culture in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford UP, 1990.Google Scholar
Weinauer, Ellen M.‘A Most Respectable Looking Gentleman’: Passing, Possession, and Transgression in Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom.” Passing and the Fictions of Identity. Ed. Ginsberg, Elaine K. Durham: Duke UP, 1996. 3756.Google Scholar