Danielle Bainbridge, "Currencies of Cruelty: Slavery, Freak Shows, and the Performance Archive" (NYU Press, 2026)

·1 hr·5 clips

A graduate student's haunting encounter with a photograph of conjoined twins Millie Christine McCoy sparks a decade-long investigation into slavery and performance.

The episode features an interview with Danielle Bainbridge about her book 'Currencies of Cruelty: Slavery, Freak Shows, and the Performance Archive.' Host Sullivan Summer introduces the topic by recounting Bainbridge's initial encounter with a photograph of Millie Christine McCoy in the Yale archives as a first-year graduate student. Bainbridge explains how this discovery shifted her research from 1980s feminist Jamaican theater to studying 19th-century performance and slavery. She details the lives of the McCoy twins, who were born into slavery in North Carolina, performed in sideshows, and continued performing after emancipation as singers and multilingual speakers. The conversation compares the McCoys to Chang and Eng Bunker, another set of conjoined twins who became wealthy performers and slave owners. Bainbridge discusses her methodological approach, including the concept of 'the future perfect tense of archival research'—how materials are deposited with an eye toward how history will be told decades later. She analyzes the McCoys' promotional autobiographies, noting discrepancies between their glowing descriptions of former enslavers and court records showing legal battles. The interview covers Bainbridge's ethical decisions in reproducing archival photographs, including cropping images taken under coercive conditions. She describes visiting the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia where Bunker twins' remains are displayed. Bainbridge explains how contemporary poetry collections—Tyehimba Jess's 'Olio' and M. NourbeSe Philip's 'Zong'—inspired her performance piece 'Curio,' which uses verbatim text from the McCoys' archive. The episode concludes with Bainbridge reflecting on whether her book needed to be written and her accountability to the subjects of her research.

As heard by us

A close study of slavery, display, and the archive's hold on a life.

Bainbridge's conversation with Danielle Bainbridge keeps circling the uneasy place where enslavement and performance meet in the archive. It starts with the image that first drew her in, then moves through conjoined twins, publicity programs, marketed autobiographies, lawsuits,…

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Why you'd press play

You get slavery, freak shows, and archive work without losing the human stakes.

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