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Characteristic of Daphne Brooks's thoroughly original and important study is the brief comparison of William Wells Brown's play The Escape (1857) with Pauline Hopkins's 1879 play Peculiar Sam that appears towards the end of her introduction (12). Hopkins's work is frequently compared with that of Brown, but more usually in terms of their novelistic output. In Bodies in Dissent Brooks thus succeeds in broadening and reshaping the contours of inquiry into African American cultural production from the mid-nineteenth century on by focussing specifically on performance: those "pioneering acts of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century performers who drew from the condition of...