'All Right!: The Narrative of Henry Box Brown As a Test Case for the Racial Prescription of Rhetoric and Semiotics.

The image of Henry 'Box' Brown emerging from the packing case in which he was successfully transported from slavery to freedom was a central icon of mid nineteenth-century abolition publicity. A comparative reading of the two major editions of Brown's narrative, one extensively ghost-written, the other authored solely by Brown, shows that Brown had his own cultural and stylistic agenda, an agenda at odds with many of the assumptions of the abolition establishment. The popular imagery generated by Brown's narrative further reveals his problematic relationship with his abolition mentors. The author suggests that one way to read Brown's behavior as a self-publicist is to relate it to late twentieth-century techniques of performance art.