Sympathetic Listening in Frederick Douglass's "The Heroic Slave" and My Bondage and My Freedom

Pratt’s essay explores how Frederick Douglass responded to the expanding racial segregation of the United States and the inhospitality to “colored” strangers that it represented by occupying and then refiguring the persona of the stranger. Douglass, Pratt notes, also asked his readers to become strangers in return. In this way Douglass constructed a virtual realm conducive to encounters among strangers that were predicated on mutual self-revelation rather than cross-identification. The variable extant meanings of strangerhood in this period meant that such gestures were not without their risks. Yet Douglass undertook to construct a new account of the human in which a reformed vision of strangerhood could found a revitalized democratic culture.

“…The specificity of my claim relates to the nature of that change. 3For a discussion of Douglass's moments of withholding, seeNoble 2006. Andrews 1986 focuses on similar issues.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“I Am a Stranger with Thee”: Frederick Douglass and Recognition After 1845

Pratt¹

2013

The Climates of Liberty: Natural Rights in theCreoleCase and “The Heroic Slave”

Hyde¹

2013

Hyde reassesses the relationship between natural and civil rights by tracking the climatological metaphors that shape representations of the 1841 slave revolt aboard the Creole, in which 135 slaves obtained freedom by redirecting a US ship to the British territory of Nassau, Bahamas. Reading Frederick Douglass’s fictional reconstruction of the revolt in “The Heroic Slave” (1853) in conjunction with the diplomatic letters it revises, Hyde shows how the conceit of natural law allowed writers to portray national statutes as mere “local fictions.” Whereas Secretary of State Daniel Webster symptomatically invoked the rhetoric of weather and natural disaster to negate the agency of the slaves on the Creole, Douglass uses natural phenomena to portray emancipation as a force of nature that controverts the geopolitical partitioning of freedom. Douglass’s objective, however, is not ultimately postnational or cosmopolitan, as critics have suggested. Instead, “The Heroic Slave” uses the universalizing rhetoric of natural law to denaturalize exclusionary laws within the United States, even as it attempts to salvage the potential of US democracy. Douglass never forfeits the idea that rights ought to be inalienable by nature, but by recognizing that rights are alienable in practice—not simply that they are often divested and withheld, but that they can be transferred to those who do not already possess them—he narrates the extralegal drama of political legitimation.

Amoral Abolitionism: Frederick Douglass and the Environmental Case against Slavery

Ellis

2014

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.