Amoral Abolitionism: Frederick Douglass and the Environmental Case against Slavery

Abstract

Ellis’s essay reconstructs the history of environmental crisis—the crisis of Southern soil exhaustion—at the heart of the antebellum slavery debates. Through readings of landscape in My Bondage and My Freedom, the essay argues that in the 1850s, Douglass displaces the moral and sentimental antislavery rhetorics for which he is known in favor of a newly pragmatic antislavery logic focused on slavery’s unsustainability—its tendency to exhaust the soil. This argument has two main aims: to explore Douglass’s engagement with ecological and economic antislavery rhetorics, and, more broadly, to consider the relevance of his pragmatic turn to modern ecocriticism as it reexamines the role of ethical sentiment in its project going forward.

Fear of a Black planet: Climate apocalypse, Anthropocene futures and Black social thought

“…The coming together of environmental degradation, architectural dilapidation and human deprivation produces an image of a post-apocalyptic wasteland, a world where some great force has swept through greedily sapping all energy. The unsustainability of the plantation system is revealed in Douglass's narrative, the process of ravenously stripping the world of resources, both human and nonhuman, steadily pushing the planter class over an ecological cliff edge (Ellis, 2014). Charles Ball's slave narrative Slavery in the United States (1837) reiterates Douglass's image of a wasted planet denuded of life (Davis et al, 2019).…”

NILAI LINGKUNGAN DALAM CERPEN “APAKAH RUMAH KITA AKAN TENGGELAM” KARYA ANAS S MALO MELALUI TANGGAPAN MAHASISWA (KAJIAN EKOKRITIK) (Environmental Value in the Short Story “Apakah Rumah Kita Akan Tenggelam” by Anas S Malo through Student’s Responses (Ecocritical Study))

“…Karya sastra dapat menunjukkan rasa simpati terhadap pembaca (Ellis, 2014;Hardiningtyas, 2016b;Khan, 2020). Karya sastra dapat merepresentasikan ideologi, pendapat, dan visi misi untuk disampaikan kepada pembacanya (Agustina, et al, 2016;Hardiningtyas, et al, 2020).…”

“…Karya sastra adalah kenyataan yang dikonstruksikan oleh imajinasi pengarang. Sastra dapat menunjukkan rasa simpati terhadap pembaca (Ellis, 2014;Hardiningtyas, 2016b;Khan, 2020). Dalam penelitian ini mahasiswa sebagai pembaca yang memberikan penafsiran dalam cerpen "Apakah Rumah Kita Akan Tenggelam" sesuai dengan horison harapannya, sejalan dengan penelitian (Fokkema & Kunne-Ibsch, 1977;Jauss, 1983;Segers, 2000).…”

Antebellum Posthuman

“…I have argued elsewhere for the burgeoning materialism and "amoral abolitionism" of My Bondage and My Freedom; rather than recapitulate that argument here I would like to return to The Heroic Slave which, as Douglass's only foray into fiction, allowed him to distill his ideas with vivid concision. 104 We have already seen how the novella's opening scene naturalizes natu ral law by identifying Madison Washington's natu ral right to freedom with the instinctive self-assertion of animals in the forest. At the end of the novella, in the climactic scene of Washington's successful mutiny aboard the Creole, Douglass again rewrites the rational vio lence of American Revolutionary liberalism as natu ral, inhuman, and involuntary vio lence-a demand for freedom that is systemic to the material order of being.…”

“…103 With Connolly, as with theorists like Brian Massumi and John Protevi, we can see how assemblage theories of po liti cal affect shift our attention from the question of what's right to the question of how (rather than should) a given set of affects, dispositions, beliefs, and, ultimately, institutions may come to be supplanted by another. 104 Like Thoreau's essays for Brown, then, posthumanist theories of politi cal affect and assemblages offer something like an ecological model of moral change that challenges us to acknowledge the distinctly nondeliberative, subhuman, nonhuman, and suprahuman forces that shape our politi cal landscapes. Unlike Thoreau, however, these con temporary theories do not tend to flag the ways in which the unmanned "creative pro cesses" they describe threaten to relegate us to po liti cal passivity by contracting the scope of individual action and intentionality.…”