The Liminal Panorama

In our previous seminar, the concept of performance and liminality really stuck with me and it was something I could see cropping up in Daphne Brooks The Escape Artist. The box itself in Henry Brown’s narrative denotes a place of liminality. It is literally liminal, as Henry Brown is both free through his escape, but confined within the box. It is metaphorically liminal as the box is described as both a “grave” and a “womb”. On stage, in his panorama The Mirror of Slavery, Henry Brown advances this notion of liminality, utilizing the performance of his text in order to make important political points about the abolition of slavery.

Brooks notes that “Brown’s moving panorama interrupted the solipsism of other visual displays by placing black performative and representational revolt at the centre of his exhibition”, this is an important point, as not only does Brown try to move away from the notion that the self is all that can be known to exist, but he simultaneously demonstrates that his panorama reflects the performative and bodily nature of antebellum art. In some ways I found this to demonstrate his positing between a mastery of form and deformation of mastery, further evidence of liminality.

The ways in which Brown utilizes the panoramic and landscape art genres further demonstrate this middle ground between mastery of form and deformation of mastery. Brooks notes that the iconography of the river, usually present in panoramas is “conspicuously absent here” and therefore “eschews the dominant conventions of the panoramic genre”. Whilst doing this however, Brown conforms to the genre in its creating an “illusion of reality”. In spite of the fact he was born a slave in America, the first part of his panorama is made up almost entirely of the journey from Africa. The notion of liminality inherent in Brown’s text and panorama serve to make plain that “the national American body politic is itself subject to dissolution in the fugitive slave’s pursuit of freedom”, this liminality between enslavement and freedom demonstrates this and is propelled by the performative liminality of The Mirror of Slavery.