Stories of Freedom in Black New York.

By Shane White. (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 2002. Pp. [x], 260. $27.95, ISBN 0-674-00893-6.)

Jurgen Habermas's notion of the "public sphere" as a site of political engagement has stimulated much recent scholarship on the celebrational and performative aspects of northern urban culture in the early nineteenth century, some of which has focused on African American communities. One intriguing cultural institution established by blacks in New York City during this period--when whites were slowly and reluctantly abandoning the institution of slavery--was a theater company that performed Shakespeare and other popular plays for mixed-race audiences. Shane White's Stories of Freedom in Black New York is both much more and a bit less than an account of the short life of the troupe called the African Company within its concentric settings of black and white New York City in the 1820s.

White sees the African Company as a kind of paradigm or instance of the exuberant black response to the demise of slavery. Black New Yorkers made noise in the streets, strolled about in elaborate finery, crowded whites off sidewalks, and otherwise demonstrated their impatience with whites' pretensions. By performing Shakespeare, whose plays were embraced by mainstream white American culture, the African Company boldly laid claim to American culture as African American, too.

The African Company survived for barely two years between 1821 and 1823, with a brief revival six years later, and White's account, painstakingly pieced together from sparse documentation, is necessarily sketchy. But he uses the company's history as a point of origin for long, looping excursions into the lives and careers of several interesting people, black and white, who were connected with it in various ways: William Brown, who founded the company, built the first American building specifically for African American theater and was bankrupted by the venture; actor James Hewlett, who survived its demise to become a solo performer, eventually touring widely before being forced off the stage and into a life of petty crime; Mordecai Noah, a white newspaper editor, occasional playwright, and New York celebrity, who reviewed the theater's productions with belligerent disdain and occasional grudging admiration; and Ira Aldridge, the famous black tragedian, who claimed to be a founding member of the African Company but may only have stolen James Hewlett's past to gain credibility in London. There are still other excursions into riots and court appearances, "black dialect" parodies, cases of mistaken racial identity, and a host of other phenomena that illuminate the growing nervousness about racial meaning and the instability of racial categories in the early years of gradual abolition.

The paucity of sources on some characters and events, and the sheer variety of phenomena to be explored, make some excursions more satisfying than others and the connections and chronology a bit difficult to follow at times. Nonetheless, this is an imaginative and well-researched study that conveys the excitement of urban life for African New Yorkers seizing their new freedom with gusto and performing it for themselves.

JOANNE POPE MELISH

University of Kentucky