Courtrooms of Resistance: Fancy Girls’ Racial Performances

• In Event: Stages of Resistance: Courtrooms, Animation, & Opera

Abstract

The crossing of the color line by enslaved Black light-skinned women speaks to the creative strategies of dissidence against the racial constructions of the Antebellum South. This paper investigates how the configuration of the space of the courtroom offers possibilities of resistance for light-skinned Black women in the nineteenth century. Through analyzing two specific performances by Sally Miller and Alexina Morrison, who were known as ‘Fancy Girls’ that went to court to prove their whiteness, this exploration will reveal the significance of racial performativity and how they creatively through the space of the courtroom to seek freedom.

Presenter

• Jessina Mariah Emmert, University of Kansas