← New Books Network
New Books Network
Danielle Bainbridge, "Currencies of Cruelty: Slavery, Freak Shows, and the Performance Archive" (NYU Press, 2026)
00:59:31
Loading summary
Transcript36 lines
- [00:01]
A
Welcome to the New books network.
- [00:05]
B
The first time I saw a picture of Millie Christine McCoy, I recognized them. Their posture, their style of dress, their straight faced affect, their grace. I recognized some indescribable, ineffable thing that immediately piqued my imagination as I gazed at a small black and white carte de visite under the glaring fluorescent lights of the archive. The hold they had on me was as inexplicable as it was immediate. As a 22 year old first year graduate student only recently out of undergrad, I naively didn't even know it was possible to study and theorize performance without a video recording. And thus we are thrust into the world of conjoined twins. Millie Christine McCoy, subject of currencies of Cruelty, Slavery, Freak Shows and the Performance Archive by assistant professor and the Director of Interdisciplinary PhD in the Theater and Drama program at Northwestern University, Danielle Bainbridge. Danielle, welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:10]
A
Thank you for having me.
- [01:12]
B
So, Danielle, in the book's prologue, you ask the question, what happens when the exchange of money for talents extends to the bartering of human life for cash as represented in the arch? Or to put it more precisely, what happens when enslavement and performance meet? Talk about how you came to that question.
- [01:36]
A
Thank you so much. So I think I came to that question relatively early in the project. So as you mentioned in the introduction and as I mentioned in the introduction to the book, I was just out of undergrad, I had started a PhD program and I had originally gone to grad school because I wanted to study 1980s feminist Jamaican theater. And I thought that was the thing I wanted to do. And so I, you know, applied with that project to grad school. I was accepted to a program and I, I went and ultimately I had this encounter with this photograph of Millie Christine McCoy, who became the centerpiece of the book. And as I looked at that photograph, I just became completely captivated. I thought, who are these women? You know, how did they come to be in the archive? What are their stories? How did they end up in this sort of space? And yet I'd never heard anything about them. I didn't know anything about them, not in a realistic way. And as time went on and I just discovered that they were born into slavery, that they lived through emancipation into the 20th century country, that they had this long and varied and very storied career as entertainers, I thought, well, this must be a singular case of, you know, just these two women. And then I discovered that there were other performers in a similar position born into slavery, made to work in these sideshows and freak shows, born with disabilities. And I thought, well, this is an interesting history that maybe needs to be told about the intersections of performance labor and enslaved labor. And I think the questions really arrived for me from an interrogation of labor systems. So how did these systems of extraction work against black people, work against black subjects in the 19th century? Whether it meant they were performing, you know, sort of more traditional manual labor, like field work or domestic work, or whether they were performing on stage, these were all forms of extraction. And I think I wanted to highlight that very early in the book so that we were set up not to think of this from a perspective of just performance as pleasure, but also performance as labor.
- [04:13]
B
I want to talk for a minute more about your introduction to Millie Christine. As I was reading your book, which I. I told you this before we hit record. I'll say it now. For the record, I loved this book. I really, really enjoyed this book a lot. But I was thinking about a reader's introduction to Millie Christine for. For me, it was actually through Taima Jess's book Olio, which we'll talk about more, because you talk about Olio as well. But that's a book of poetry, and that's how I first Learned of the McCoy twins. And I think other readers are going to learn about them through your book. Other readers may have come to them through your project Curio, which, again, we'll talk more about that. But I'm curious how you. How you thought about a reader's introduction to these people and, like, the method or the medium by which they were introduced to them.
- [05:13]
A
Yeah, I think that's a wonderful question. I think for me, you know, I was introduced to the McCoys through the archive. I was visiting the By Nikki Rare Books and Manuscripts Library, which is the archive at Yale, and I saw this photograph, which is the encounter that I detail in the introduction. And I felt at that moment that I wanted to dig further into their lives and into their stories. But I also had hesitation around that as I continued to learn more and more about them, about whether this would be a project that honored their. Their lives, their struggles, their complexity, their ingenious performance strategies. You know, I. There was a lot at stake for me in wanting to do this. I don't want to say correctly, because I don't know if there's even such a thing as doing it correctly, but, you know, that's kind of the impulse I had, especially because I had never, in a serious way, studied the 19th century before. I did this project. And so I know a lot of people will have been introduced to. To Millie Christine through Jess's work, because I. I love that collection, Olio. I think it's a really inventive, wonderful, rich, and also just stylistically, like on the page, it's very interesting. Yeah, it's such a beautiful poetry book, like the. The physical thing that I always tell my students to buy it when I teach it and not to, you know, look for PDFs, because the encounter with the page is so much a part of how you read it. But I. I think I went into this book thinking people don't know these women or don't know much about these women. And so I didn't presume a familiarity with the McCoys before I started writing. I maybe assume that people would be either vaguely familiar or not familiar at all. And so I wanted it to be, in a way, approachable for not just academic readers, but also general audiences, so that they could encounter this book and learn about these stories and learn about their lives in different ways. And then Curio, which was the performance piece that I devised in 2017, 2018, and then turned into a short film, is about the McCoys. And it's another way in for people to learn about their lives and their artistry and their performances. But I thought film as a medium and performance as a medium does something that a physical book can't do. It engages people with a sort of liveness that a book doesn't do in the same way. And I think the impulse for me to, you know, write the performance piece and then ultimately turn into a film came from the fact that I was myself a theater person, a performer. I have an undergrad degree in theater. Like, I. I was really dissatisfied in going through the archives with all these performance documents and not seeing them enlivened. And so I wanted to see what it would be like in a way, you know, in a fashion, I guess, to put this performance on its feet. And I think, again, when I wrote Curio, I wrote it with the understanding that people would have little to no familiarity with the McCoys. So I think of my book in some ways as an introduction to these figures, but also as a study of them that, you know, hopefully will inspire other works that can come out of this archive.
- [08:57]
B
Can you talk for just a minute? I'm thinking about our listeners who are coming to this discussion saying, the who like Millie, Christine who. Talk for just a minute about who the McCoys were.
- [09:12]
A
The McCoys were two conjoined twins. They were twin sisters born in the 1850s in North Carolina, and they lived until 1912. They were sideshow and freak show performers, made to perform in their childhood in these exploitative sideshows and freak shows. And then as they became older and lived through emancipation, actually continued to perform in various contexts as a way of sustaining themselves and sustaining their families. They were singers. That was one of their sort of hallmark acts after emancipation. They began to, you know, sing duets. Sometimes they would dance or perform musical instruments. They would speak to two people in two languages at the same time. So these were sort of the kind of performance styles that they would do. In some part, the speaking of two people in two languages at the same time was to prove that they had separate minds because people were so fascinated by this idea of conjoined twins. They rose to fame after Chang and Ang Bunker, who I also discuss in the book. Chang and Ang Bunker are the original so called Siamese twins who were born in Ven Siam Kurde, Thailand, and ultimately became very wealthy from their performances and then lived in North Carolina, married two sisters and owned two adjacent plantations and became slave owners or enslavers. And I parallel their story at certain points to the McCoys, just because they were both, you know, North Carolina residents, both sets of conjoined twins, and have some biographically similar things in their lives. But ultimately, you know, obviously very different circumstances on account of gender and race. And so the McCoys passed away, like I said, in 1912, and there was not a lot of work done about them in comparison to, say, the Bunker twins, who have, you know, the bunker twins had 20 plus children between the two of them. So they have many descendants. There are books and plays and academic articles and things written about the Bunkers. Part of the remains are in a museum in Philadelphia, the Mutter Museum. So, you know, in comparison, the McCoys are much less well known, even though during their heyday they may have been comparably famous. But I became interested in the McCoys, you know, early in my grad school career on a visit to the archive. And then I said, in the way only a first year grad student can say, I said, this was my, like, side hustle project, that I would do this on the side and I would have my real dissertation somewhere else. And, you know, obviously that didn't work out because, you know, one paper turned into two paper turned into a dissertation, turned into a book, et cetera. But I think, you know, it's funny for me to look back on that and think that I, you know, my initial interest was Just to write one seminar paper. And then obviously, 10 years later, here. Here we are.
- [12:34]
B
So we talked about the introduction. I want to take one step backward for a minute before going forward. And there is a prologue to the book as well. And the prologue actually opens with you. The prologue opens the first time I saw a picture of Millie Christine McCoy. And I'm curious about how you think about your own gaze as a performance scholar. And, you know, is your gaze different from, in this case, the reader's gaze or. We're talking about performance art also. So there's an audience member too. Like, talk about how you thought about your gaze as it relates to the McCoys and the wider subject matter.
- [13:15]
A
Yeah. So the subtitle of the book is Slavery Freak Shows and the Performance Archive. So the archive is as much kind of a figure or character in this book as anything else. Why do we go to the archive? What does the archive mean? How do we make meaning of this place and this sort of site that in some ways is a repository of history and information, et cetera, but in other ways is a site of violence, exclusion, silence for many black subjects and their descendants? And I wanted to start the book with the archive and sort of that encounter, in part because I thought this is really where the project took shape. The archive was as much a part of my thinking as the materials that it held. And so the prologue, you know, is an ethnography of the archive. And I. I use sort of that first person lens, that autoethnographic lens, to think through what it means to be someone who is the descendant of the enslaved, but then goes to these really complicated places where slavery is actually. In the prologue, I talk about the. The Hazel Plantation Library, which is at UNC Chapel Hill. It's like a recreation of a plantation library. And it's at the entrance of the archive that I went into to study the McCoys and the bunker twins. And I just found that experience so strange that you can go to study slavery in a place that in some ways is kind of celebrating the. The mythological beauty of the plantation? And that encounter was really kind of alarming to me, but also really started my critical thinking about what is it that we do when we engage with these materials? How do we hold ourselves accountable for some of the harm that happened that made it possible for these materials to be here? And I wanted that critique to be embedded in the book. So I start with that first person voice, because it's me kind of on the page working out some of those questions and working out some of those Impulses.
- [15:46]
B
So throughout the book, you use the term the future perfect tense of archival research. Talk about the future perfect tense of archival research.
- [16:01]
A
Yeah, so the future perfect is a tense in languages where you're talking about the. The past tense of the future. So that which will have been. So, you know, like 10 years from now, that will have happened. And as I was studying the archive, I became really interested in a lot of black studies scholars and ethnic studies scholars and American study scholars who were invested in questions of this sort of conditional past tense of the archive. So, you know, Saidiya Hartman's, Sadiya Hartman's Critical Fabulation. There we go. I'm a little fuzzy today was a big factor in my thinking. But as I thought about why do people bring things to an archive? Like, when someone goes to deposit something in an archive, what is their thought process or their desire? I also was encountering this feeling that archives exist not just for a study of the past, but also as a way to shape futurity. And I started to wrestle with this idea of when you put something in the archive, you're not just concerned with how history will be told today, you're concerned with how history will be told 10 years from now, 20 years from now, 30 years from now. And each of those benchmarks, history will be told differently. If you read, you know, a book about US history that was written in the 1950s, it does not read the same as a book about US History written today. And I think those shifts in intense were really interesting to me. And I first started thinking about the future perfect in relationship to the McCoys and their autopsy. So the McCoys, in some of the obituaries and articles that were written after their death, their family reported that they had a fear of being autopsied. Like the Bunker twins who were then put in a museum in Philadelphia. And they were adamant that they didn't want to be autopsied, they wanted to be buried. And so the. The lore is that they were, you know, buried and they had. The family, had guards stand watch on their grave until their bodies can no longer be exhumed and autopsied. And I thought, what an interesting, you know, the. The veracity of the story wasn't so much what interested me, but more just the. The sort of, like. I don't know how I would name it, not manipulation, but the. The subversion of this desire to have them always be in freaked. Always be constantly on stage.
- [18:55]
B
It's access, right? Like. Like, yeah, yeah, they were.
- [18:59]
A
They were able to avoid that. And. But also As a result of that, you know, 10 years, 50 years, you know, 100 years into the future, they're less well known than the bunkers because they weren't, you know, put in a museum. They weren't sort of held up as this, this AR ARC artifact. And I started thinking about that choice to say that we're conscious of how our body is being entered into the record, we're conscious of how our story is being entered into the archive, and we want to cut that off to stop that. And it was that instinct that actually made me start thinking about the future. Perfect.
- [19:41]
B
Yeah. It's so interesting to think about, right, with these, these women that, as you said, were enslaved lacked agency as enslaved people. And then even after the Civil War, as black women and disabled black women lacked agency, you know, really lacked agency throughout their life or. But maybe not as those words are coming out of my mouth, though I suspect you would disagree with that. Insofar as they continued performing their content, their choice to continue performing was an active agency. Right. Like I. I think I was. I'm trying to think about their, their decisions, their, their attempt to control their legacy after they were gone as being an active agency for people that may have lacked it, you know, during life.
- [20:38]
A
Yeah, absolutely. I think, you know, it's also interesting because to me, like, limited agency or, or, you know, truncated agency isn't necessarily always the absence of all agency. Right. Like they, they had this ability, like they were involved in many lawsuits throughout their lives, you know, both by their parents as well as them personally, like libel lawsuits, you know, lawsuits against their former enslavers for lost wages, things like that that I think was really interesting for me to encounter because I think oftentimes the assumption, and at least, you know, my false assumption when I started this work was that there was no way for them to resist or to fight back. But actually they did find ways to enact their own decision, making their own choices throughout their lives. So I think it's, it's interesting to me, but it's also, you know, like, for example, it's not just in their lawsuits and things, it was also in their performance strategies. Like prior to emancipation, part of their performances and quotes were these sort of doctor's exams that were conducted on them. They were semi public, so not always like, you know, people could pay to see them, but that the doctors would examine them and then report on them and print them in these, in these publicity programs and autobiographies or what were marketed as autobiographies. And you know, those like performances and exploitations stopped after emancipation. They said, you know, now that we're free, we no longer consent to have a doctor examine us. And that was their desire for the rest of their lives. And I thought, that's really radically interesting and very different than what I think people would assume about these women. So I wanted to highlight those sort of small choices that maybe seem. It's somewhat minor to us now, but actually were really radically courageous in the moment that, you know, distinguished them in some ways from what we would assume.
- [23:08]
B
You just mentioned their autobiography. There's a good deal of the book deals with really literary criticism and really interesting engagement with written works. And one is the air quotes. Autobiography of the McCoys. Talk about those documents.
- [23:32]
A
Yeah. So the autobiographies and biographies of the McCoy twins, there are a lot of versions of them in the archive that vary very slightly. You know, like they are almost textually identical. Some of them have different advertisements, some of them have different doctors reports. Some of them have slightly different details. But they were marketed. They were, you know, promotional playbills that people could purchase at the show and read about the McCoys history. And it was part of promoting their performances. Some of the details that are repeated, you know, version to version, I find really fascinating, you know, for obvious reasons, like stories of them being kidnapped as children and brought to the. Brought to Britain and all of this, you know, other stuff that happened to them. But then there are other portions of the autobiography that give me pause, specifically the portions where they talk about their former enslavers and they speak about them in these sort of glowing terms, how they were like a mother and father to them, how they gave them an education and all of this other stuff. But in reality, I present other evidence from these letters to the Freedmen's Bureau and from lawsuits, that they actually were engaged in lots of legal battles with their former enslaver, Ms. Mrs. Smith, who was the widow of their, you know, enslaver, Joseph Smith. So, you know, that story is just that it's a story. And I wanted to view these documents as literature in a way, because they were promotional documents, right? Like they're pandering or, you know, playing to the audience that they had by telling these stories of, you know, the great plantation south and, you know, these bucolic scenes and, you know, green pastures and the songs they sung were often printed in the programs and have similar kind of themes. And I think, you know, even though the legal record shows something very different, that they were shrewd, that they knew that this was what would get people to, you know, maybe to put it kind of crassly, like, put their butts in the seat and come to see the show. But they also weren't living that life outside of their performances. They were living a life that actually was marked by a lot of resistance to these systems and a lot of resistance to these exploitations. So the autobiographies became kind of central to a lot of the analysis in the book, because in some ways, you know, the McCoys provided some of the details and some of the writing for them, but they were written in collaboration with people who ran the sideshows and freak shows. So they know we can't ever really be positive exactly how much of their voices captured there. But I do think it's important to look at the documents because they continue to use them even after emancipation. So they could have come out and said, actually, you know, there were terrible conditions. We were exploited and abused and, you know, like, they could have done all that. And instead they kept reproducing the same programs with slightly different shifts and, you know, continue to perform as a way of survival. So I think that's probably why I became so interested in them, was not only because of the information relayed in the documents themselves, but also their continued use throughout their life.
- [27:26]
B
You talked before about the bunkers. There are two others that you talk about in the book as well. Blind Tom and Joyce Heth. Talk for a minute about those two as well.
- [27:43]
A
Yeah, so Blind Tom and Joyce Heth were both black performers born into slavery. Joyce Heth was, you know, the first sort of big performer for P.T. barnum, you know, P.T. barnum of Circus fame and. And also from that weird movie the Greatest Showman, which, you know, is neither here nor there for this interview. And then Blind Tom Wiggins was a piano prodigy who performed throughout the country and was also born into slavery in Georgia. So, you know, Joyce heth predates the McCoys. Blind Tom is a little closer in range to the McCoys lives. I wanted to look at other figures who had also had similar conditions to the McCoys. So while I was interested in the bunkers and I wanted to use them as a sort of contrasting story because they had a relationship to enslavement, even if it was not as enslaved people. I wanted to also highlight the stories of other enslaved performers. And so they became sort of other figures in the book, in part because I wanted to think about the parallels between them and the McCoy story. So, for example, Blind Tom was involved in lots of custody battles throughout his life. Joyce Heth. You know, Yuri McMillan has a wonderful analysis of Joyce Heth and what he calls her sonic of descent. So I was thinking about that in relationship to the McCoys vocal performances, and I wanted to think about all of these figures together. Now, the McCoys are the central figures of the book, in part because their archive is the one that I encountered first in somewhere. So maybe there's, you know, kind of like bias there in some ways, but also because I felt their stories were the ones that had been maybe least told in full of the figures that I was. I was researching because there's, you know, a fair amount of writing on. On Joyce Heathen, on. On Blind Tom. So I wanted to focus on the McCoys as sort of the. The argumentative spine of the book. But I did introduce other. Other figures along the way.
- [30:19]
B
So talking more now about the McCoys, one of the things I thought was so interesting is the. In the choice of pronoun, the I and the. We talk some about that.
- [30:33]
A
Yeah. So after reading their autobiography, I was really struck by the fact that they refer to themselves in the single first person. They always referred to themselves as I. You know, I did this, I did that. And when people refer to them, they called her she, she did this, she did that, as if they were one person. Even though their performances were often centered on proving to people that they had independent thoughts. You know, like the fact that they would sing duets in harmony or, you know, speak these two languages at the same time, things like that. And I thought that that was kind of curious. And then I found a note in a. In an article that was written some years after their death where one of their sisters who survived them said that they also, in real life, always referred to themselves in the first person singular. So that they were not a we, they were an I. And I first. I found that, like, just a curiosity, like, why would that be true? You know, they were two separate women. They were two independent thinkers. They were, you know, two people. But they had this sort of shared bodily experience that most of us will never be able to understand or to replicate in any way. You know, they. They shared. They shared a singular body. And the defense of that, that singular body was their shared. Their shared work. But it was also this sense that it wasn't just, you know, me and my sister was me and myself, like that. They were two united people. And in the. I think it's in the introduction because now it's been a little while since I've read the book, but I think it's the epigraph to the introduction that I found in that first image, which is, says, I converse with this slush. These persons. I found her quick and of pleasant manner. Both at times have identical dreams. And that was the first image I saw of them. It was written on the margin. So it's that same black and white photo from the introduction and it's written on the margin of the. The photograph. But I don't know who wrote it. I. For many years, I kind of assumed. I was like, I wonder if this is a doctor that wrote it or. But then after a while I said, well, this is a collective photograph. So it could have been whoever bought the photograph, you know, went to speak to them after the show and then noted this on the side. Whatever it is, is just this kind of stands as this sort of fascinating piece of marginalia that talks about something that is nowhere else that I found in their archive, which is that they reported sometimes having the same dreams. And that really drew me not only as a researcher, but also as a creative of, like, what does it mean to share this sense of identity so closely that even your dreams can sometimes be the same? And I think that that shared pronoun is kind of the material realization of that feeling of shared identity or shared destiny that they had.
- [34:13]
B
Yeah, I. I loved. I have loved. Since finishing the book, I have loved to continue to think on that. The. The use of the singular pronoun also. And we should say for people who are not familiar with the McCoys and maybe have not seen a photograph of them, you've got photographs in the book, but they are conjoined in. Around the waist area. And the reason that I say that is because when I read things like that, they would. Part of their performance was speaking in two different languages at two different times. And these are my own. My own biases. And someone who is, you know, educated in contemporary. You know, in our contemporary times, like. Like. Well, of course they had two different brains. Like, they didn't share a brain. So, like. Of course. Um. But in thinking about what people would have thought or assumed in the 19th century is. Is a little bit different, especially when you point out they had one. There's. They have one body between the two of them. I think also about this idea of the use of the singular pronoun is also an active agency too.
- [35:31]
A
Yeah, absolutely. I think it's a way of claiming a sense of self that maybe defied what people assumed of the McCoys, that they were perhaps because of their disability considered and because of their race and Their gender considered less human. And I think, you know, a lot of their desire, especially their. These photographs of them where they're kind of stylized in these really prim and almost proper ways. You know, they're kind of. They have their hands folded or they're wearing these elaborate dresses. It was a performance of this kind of respectability politic that I think was invested in demonstrating their humanity in some ways. And, you know, from our lens today, of course, we're saying, yes, they, they were two women, they were two humans. But from a different perspective, I think people's reactions to them were also driven by the fact that, you know, you didn't see as many conjoined twins live to adulthood in the 19th century. So that was also kind of a rarity. And I think, you know, that desire to be seen as full people or a full person was also part of the motivator there.
- [36:59]
B
You take great care in this book in giving not just the McCoys, but every person that you talked about and some that we've talked about here, you know, full dignity and respect, we talked about. There are photographs in this book. Talk about your decision making process in producing reproducing photographs for the book, what you chose to reproduce, what you chose not to reproduce.
- [37:28]
A
Yeah, so photographs for the book were kind of a tricky decision because there were certain things that I wanted to show and then there were certain things I said, you know what, I don't feel comfortable recreating this. For example, when they were in their 30s, I want to say the McCoys had a medical issue that needed to be examined by a doctor. His name was Dr. Pancoast. He was one of the physicians, one of the assisting physicians who had autopsied the Bunker twins. And he was interested in, you know, examining them. So he wrote a medical report for a 19th century medical journal about his examination of the McCoys. And he took a photograph of them where they're partially nude. And in his own description of the photograph, he said, you know, they were reluctant to take this photograph, but with some persuasion on the part of myself and Mrs. And to Mrs. Smith, their, their enslaver, we managed to get this one photograph. And they're like holding a sheet over their chest. And Christine, I look at their faces because a scholar named Ellen Samuel, she wrote an article about them and she reproduces just their faces, not their bodies. And, you know, Christine is. Has her head down and she is looking away from the camera like she's almost embarrassed or ashamed. And Millie is looking straight into the camera and she's angry. Like, you can see in her face that she's upset and she's looking back at them. And I wanted to show their faces only because, again, I felt like this photograph was taken under these really coercive conditions. But I wanted to. To do an analysis of their expression, of what it means to have this sort of, you know, dual emotional reaction to the. To the circumstances that they were thrust into and to this, you know, to this exploitation that they had. Hope. Had hoped to put behind them after emancipation. And then, you know, because of this medical issue, they were kind of exploited again by this physician in that same article. He has a wood cutting, like a, you know, a carving that could then be stamped and reproduced. He has a wood cutting that he made of their conjoined genitals, which is the only image that I found. I don't know if others exist, but this is the only one that I found of that portion of them which was often spoken about in the medical reports because they were attached at the hip, like at the waist, through. Through the lower part of their body. And that I knew automatically I was not going to reproduce, in part because I said, it's a wood cutting, because they wouldn't let him take the picture. That's probably what he's not saying, is that he drew it from memory later because they probably didn't allow him to take the photograph at the time. And I thought, I don't. I don't want to see that again. I don't need. I don't think the reader needs that to understand the harm that was done. Similarly, when I was in the archive, either 2016 or 2017, so, like, 10 years ago, I was in the archive at UNC Chapel Hill for a visit, and I was going through the archives of the Bunker twins, and I found a photograph of them autopsied. And it was like, in a small little envelope that I turned upside down and it fell out. And I literally didn't even know it was in the box. And I also found a reproduction of a letter that was written by their. Two of their sons that basically said, you know, we're disappointed that it was written to the physicians who did the autopsy that said, we were disappointed that you didn't return the entrails of our fathers. And I was like, what do they mean by entrails? And then I remembered that at the Mooner Museum, they have some of their conjoined organs on display. So that is what I assume they're referring to, is that they were returned, stitched up on the Front with their organs having been removed, and the family had specifically said they didn't want their bodies damaged. And so, you know, the sons basically say, you didn't return the entrails, but, you know, you can keep them until further notice from the family. And, like, I just thought that that was also really shocking that this stuff that's still on display is. Is also part of, you know, this kind of exchange with the family. So that photograph, I again, did some cropping, and I showed just the stitching of their skin, but not the entirety of their figures, because in some ways I thought I. I didn't want to recreate that. That chain of harm again. And so I think a lot of times, you know, there's lots of things in the archive that are. For these performers that are kind of disturbing. And I don't want to reproduce anything just for the shock value of it. I wanted to only demonstrate and show what needed to be shown to make the arguments I was making. But ultimately, those were probably the two biggest redactions I had in terms of images, were to crop those two photos and to eliminate the. The wood cutting.
- [43:38]
B
You talked about the Mutter Museum. You went to the museum and wrote about that experience in the book as well. Can you say a few words about that experience?
- [43:50]
A
Yeah. The Mooter Museum is a really weird museum. It has, like, all. I mean, I don't know if anyone remembers, like, in the early 2000s, there was that traveling exhibit, it was called the Bodies exhibit, where they would have, like, you know, human remains on display. And you could go and they would have, like, you know, a nervous system removed from the human body and, like, highlighted with dye or, you know, lungs blown up so you can see them or, you know, just all sorts of things. And the Muna Museum is essentially like that. It's all human remains of various types. And I went there to go, like, look at and witness the. The bunkers remains, as well as this plaster cast that they made of them, of their. Of their form. So they covered them in plaster and made like a. A literal. It looks like a. Just a cast, like the one that you would have on your wrists if you broke your arm or something, of their body, of their torsos. And the experience of going to the museum was really odd. Even for someone who studies what I study, it was odd. You know, I remember, like, there was families there, there were kids there. There were all sorts of different people come to witness this. This stuff. And all I can think about was, how did all of this get here? You know, like how did we come to accumulate, preserve and display all of this stuff? And I think a lot of folks, like, maybe weren't thinking about that as they were looking through the exhibit. Because there is a certain kind of. I don't. I don't know what I'd call it, maybe horror factor that goes into this. It's the same sort of impulse that I think makes people visit, like, dark tourist sites where, you know, people would go to, like, concentration camps or war fields or, you know, things like that, where terrible things have happened and yet they go to witness it in a certain kind of way. That's what I felt like in the Mutter Museum in some ways that it was like, we want to see our insides because we're naturally curious about them. And even if the circumstances under which the stuff was gathered maybe is, you know, cloudy, I think it's. It draws a certain kind of interest that, you know, morbid interest that a lot of people have. But the thing that freaked me out the most was probably seeing such young children there because I was like, I don't know if this is necessarily the kind of exhibit like I'd bring a young child to, but, you know, everyone makes their own choices.
- [46:38]
B
Yeah, I found that super. I found that again, the whole. The whole book is really. Is really fascinating and really interesting, all these different parts and pieces. We talked before about this analysis of their autobiographies and biographies. But you do another kind of analysis as it relates to two poetry collections. In the final section, the collections Olio and Zong as well, talk about that analysis and why you decided to engage in that kind of analysis.
- [47:14]
A
Yeah, so early in the process I started thinking about creating this performance piece called Curio. And you know, I puzzled it over for many years. I kept thinking about it and, you know, and it was actually interesting in that, like, I had the idea of doing it. I was at home at my parents house many, many years ago. I, like, came home from grad school and my sister was there and we were both sitting on the couch, like foot to head, like, you know, laying down and she was sleeping and I was laying the other direction and we were, you know, laying next to each other and I just thought, huh, I should make a performance piece about the McCoys because of that experience of proximity to, like, my own sister. And just thinking about what that lived experience must have been like, what it. What that singular. I must have felt like that was kind of the beginning of thinking that I would do a performance piece out of it. And then I was also, you know, in coursework. So I was reading all these various collections and works and things like that. And I was introduced to Zhong in a class and I was also introduced to Olio. I don't know if I was introduced to that in a class or if I read that on my own. It's been so many years now that it's hard to remember. But both of them were really inspirational to me in terms of thinking about how do we access and perform and witness the archives of enslavement. So I knew when I was writing that final chapter that I wanted to talk about those two collections and the poets approaches to language and enslavement and history. And then as things kept developing with the. The piece that I wrote, Curio, that was like kind of a late stage addition to the chapter where I thought, okay, I want to do an analysis of not only how those poetry collections operate, but also how they inspired my own work and my own, you know, methodological approaches to performing the archives of Enslavement. So that chapter is probably the one that's the most maybe different than the others in some ways, because it has a different kind of lens than the other chapters. And it's also dealing with contemporary texts in a different kind of way rather than 19th century archival materials explicitly. But I wanted to kind of trace that inspiration from Zong and from Olio through Curio and through how I approach the McCoys archives.
- [50:04]
B
And I know we talked about Olio before Taima Jess, which is a collection of Persona poems of 19th century Enslaved Americans who are also performers. Just say a word about Zong. Again, for people who may be unfamiliar with what Zong is as a poetry collection.
- [50:29]
A
So Zong is a collection by Noblesse Philip that was written about the Zong massacre, which was a slave ship that was en route to the, you know, quote, New World. And it had, you know, hundreds, dozens of black enslaved Africans on board. They grew sick on the journey. The enslaved people. And the captain of the ship and the crew basically decided that they would throw these people overboard as a way of collecting on the insurance payout. So the idea being, well, they're probably worth more to say it really crudely dead than alive to these people in terms of money. And then when they, you know, then there was a huge sort of insurance battle and all these things under basic field took the archival records, the actual, like legal documents, and made poetry out of them by using just the words found in the records. And she also performs these pieces sometimes. And it's. It's just a really fascinating collection like Olio, I think it's better as a physical book than anything else because it. It needs to be engaged with, like, on the page as it was written. But I was really inspired, especially by her use of taking things directly from the archive and repurposing them and reusing them in sort of found poems. And I ended up doing a similar thing in Curio, where all the lines that the McCoys have in curio are taken from different parts of their archive. So they're verbatim, whether it's, you know, from a publicity poster from the autobiography or from a newspaper article, they're all taken from the archive.
- [52:30]
B
So in the book's conclusion, you write, I have asked myself many times if this book needed to be written. I still have no definitive answer to that question. Now that the book is out in the world, do you have an answer?
- [52:46]
A
You know, I still. I still don't. I think in some ways, all of us, you know, all writers think about that question, you know, about their work. And considering this is, you know, I've published my first two books in the last several months, like one in November 2025, and then this one in January 2026. And there is a. I forget who said this to me. It was like a friend who was, you know, saying, like, there's a certain kind of hubris of going into a bookstore and seeing, like, all the books in the bookstore and then saying, you know, what this store needs is another book. That book has to be by me. Yeah, exactly. And I just. I always find that really funny, and I wish I could remember who said it so I could credit them, because it's exactly the impulse that being a writer is like, there's so much literature, there's so much writing in the world. You could start reading today, not sleep, read for the rest of your given life, and never make even a dent in the amount of writing that's been done. And yet we continue to keep producing new books. And I think, you know, there was a part of me that wondered, what with the figures in this book, you know, I feel that one of my grad school professors would always say, you know, who are you accountable to in your work? So shout out to Jafari for that. But he would always say that, like, who are you accountable to? And I think about that very often, and I think, you know, I feel accountable to the people whose stories I'm telling you. And would this book have pleased them? I. I can't ever answer that, but I think, you know, I did my best to tell a very complicated but interesting story, and I hope that it does some good and very little harm. And that's the best you can hope for of the work that you produce.
- [54:50]
B
The book is Currencies of Cruelty, Slavery, Freak Shows and the Performance Archive by Assistant professor and the Director of Interdisciplinary PhD in Theater and Drama Program at Northwestern University, Danielle Bainbridge. Find Danielle on Instagram at quirkyprofessor on bluesky Danielle Bainbridge and you can email her at Danielle BainbridgeNorthwestern. Edu. And I'm your host, Sullivan Sommer. You can find me online@sullivansummer.com on Instagram he sullivansummer and on substack sullivansummer, where Danielle and I are going right now to continue our conversation. Thank you for listening to the new book.