During the antebellum era, northerners produced cultural performances – print caricatures, blackface minstrel acts, museum exhibitions, dramas – shaped by a proslavery ideology that did not openly embrace chattel slavery but did reject inclusive citizenship for free blacks. According to Douglas Jones, these primarily white artists were responding to an active black protest culture that worked to move black people to the centre of the American polity, and these artists decided that America's ambitious black citizens were better suited to captive roles within a rigid racial hierarchy. The concept of targeted white responses to black mobility is nothing new; theatre historian Samuel Hay once outlined how the New York press lampooned black entertainments as part of a statewide initiative to limit black suffrage. What makes Jones's project exceptional is his ability to balance thorough explications of black activism with incisive explorations of this proslavery imagination.

Jones first explores early nineteenth-century commemorations of the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade, specifically highlighting how published transcriptions and descriptions of Thanksgiving orations and parades served as performative scripts compelling black people to act. Disturbed by these civic demonstrations, white northerners crafted ‘Bobalition’ broadsides designed to ridicule Africans celebrating in distinctly American ways. In another coupling, Jones links David Walker's radical Appeal (1829) to blackface minstrelsy's performance of ‘black’ politics without black people. He also introduces the violent rhetoric of black antislavery activist Henry Highland Garnett, followed by an examination of Harry Seymour's temperance drama Aunt Dinah's Pledge, which worked to contain independent black voices.

Overall, Jones's interpretations of proslavery performance are consistently impressive, but his greatest interventions involve blackface minstrel pioneer T. D. Rice and black antislavery activist/artist William Wells Brown. He dismantles the class-based argument of minstrel revisionists who mistakenly cast Jim Crow as an advocate for antebellum blackness. According to Jones, ‘class and race were so intertwined in early minstrelsy that separating them for the purposes of historical analysis is methodologically inappropriate’ (p. 61). He does recognize the potential for anti-authoritarian, interracial class solidarity, but claims that white minstrel performers squandered that opportunity when they rejected universal equality to serve their social and political needs. As evidence, Jones quotes T. D. Rice's proslavery 1837 curtain speech, reprinted in the Baltimore Sun, in which Rice declared that his ‘Jim Crow’ did not advocate abolition but demonstrated ‘Negroes’ were inferior to whites.

As for William Wells Brown, Jones claims that The Escape; or, A Leap for Freedom (1858) was overdetermined by the antebellum moment and depicted the American polity, which free blacks coveted, as ‘fundamentally iniquitous’. Brown's main characters – Glen, Melinda, Cato – flee to Canada because Brown cannot imagine a reconstituted America without slavery, thus ‘producing a lasting proslavery effect’ (p. 148). In the shadow of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, The Escape provided a forum for ‘good men’ to ‘confront the weaknesses of the anti-slavery crusade vis-à-vis southern Slave Power, an accommodating Congress, and a reactionary Supreme Court’ (p. 162). Jones advances an undeniably pessimistic interpretation of this well-known slave narrative, but his analysis is thoroughly convincing, as is the rest of Captive Stage.