‘Nothing Negro About Him,Except…’: Ira Aldridge and the Campaign For and Against Racialism

Abstract

As a boundary-breaking African American actor performing across Europe, Ira Aldridge garnered a great deal of attention in both life and death. Used by both sides of the debate over racial pseudoscience, Aldridge appeared, in often complicated and contradictory ways, across not only texts that gave racialism continued life but those confronting and refuting its power as well. He was deployed by both sides of a campaign over what race was and was not, and what society should look like in a post-abolition world. This article argues that Aldridge functioned as a particularly complicated celebrity; while his achievements were added to the body of evidence against scientific pseudoscience and its socio-political consequences, at the same time, he was also often conflated with a controversial, fictional character crafted by a white pen.