REVIEW ESSAY: Somatography

New North Star

Possibly one of the most revealing facts about Frederick Douglass's public career is that Douglass burst upon the scene with a powerful oration that we know only by the reactions it provoked. Douglass's speech in Nantucket in 1841 was by all accounts deeply moving and memorable, and it launched one of the most remarkable careers in American history, but it is not a speech available for careful study. It is appropriate, though, that we approach this speech through the eyes and ears, the reconstructions and recollections, the memories and memoirs, of people like William Lloyd Garrison, James N. Buffum, Samuel Joseph May, or John A. Collins, and that we encounter the speech, indirectly but with real power, in the ongoing legends of Douglass's modest beginnings and in accounts by such writers as R. R. Raymond or James McCune Smith. 1 This speech, and its subsequent legend, remind us that a significant aspect of Douglass's career as orator involved not only his eloquence and rhetorical skills but also the occasions and forums for his public performances, the social environment in which they operated, the print culture in which they were recorded, celebrated, or dismissed, and the responses they generated. Something important is lost about Douglass's oratory when his public speeches are removed from their public dynamics, from the oratorical performance itself, for Douglass himself was deeply attentive to those dynamics, and deeply aware of the extent to which the significance of each speech had to do with how it reframed not only the speaker but even the platform on which he spoke. To fully appreciate Douglass's career as orator, then, we need to pay attention to those who witnessed and responded to his performances on the public stage. 2 We can begin with someone who claims to have anticipated Douglass long before he ever spoke in public. Douglass's presence was so powerful that R. R. Raymond, a White Baptist minister very active in abolitionist and other reform efforts in Syracuse, anticipated it even before he ever actually encountered Douglass in person. Looking back to the "castle-building daydreams" of his youth, Raymond recalls, "A favorite image of my creation was an Africo-American for the time,-a colored man, who had known by experience the bitterness of slavery, and now by some process free, so endowed with natural powers, and a certain degree of attainments, all the more rare and effective for being acquired under great disadvantages,-as to be a sort of Moses to his oppressed and degraded tribe." 3 Raymond emphasizes the unlikelihood of ever encountering such a being, one "gifted with a noble person…and refinement of manners, and some elegance of thought and expression," observing that "by what unprecedented miracle such a paragon was to be graduated through the educational appliances of American slavery, imagination did not trouble 1 Responses to Douglass's inaugural antislavery speech are included in John Ernest, Douglass in His Own Time (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2014), 49, 109-111, 177. 2 I agree with Andrea Deacon concerning the strange absence of a full body of scholarship focused on Douglass's career as an orator, and I agree to some extent as well that "although this dearth of critical analyses, coupled with Douglass' reputation, is indeed curious, one possible reason for this lack of serious attention may stem from Douglass' rhetoric being perceived merely as epideictic or ceremonial in nature.

2010

This thesis offers a synthesis of existing research regarding not only Frederick Douglass' literacy in the slave narrative genre, but also :m Aristotelian analysis of his Narrative olthe Lile olFrederick Douglass, An American Siuve, Written by Himse{j' (1845), Douglass' chaiienge is to reach an Lludicllcc not only of abolitionists, but also of free blacks who are more grounded in the vernacular tradition than equal to his own considerable skills in rhetorical literary construction. First and without hesitation, I thank my thesis director, Dr. Michael Loudon for his encouragement and his constant reassurance as I completed my thesis. I would also like to thank my committee members: Dr. Ann Boswell for encouraging me and helping me see my potential and Dr. Tim Taylor [or helping mc to realize my love for and admIration towards Frederick Douglass. I would also like to thank my Muiemu fur all tlte encouragement and Ion: as \\ell as for taking the time to read the Narratil'e so that we could discLlss it more in-depth. My deepest gratitude to my sister for in her God created the pcrfect inspiration and the perfect support system. \1y most humble appreciation goes to Jmnes [or the support through the difficult times and the joyous moments: I am eternally grateful. J would like to thank my mother for her patience. kindness and l1e\cr ending support. Finally. I offer my gratitude to all my loved ones for e\erything they've done to help me accomplish this privilege. Ifby chance I have forgotten to thank anyone t()r his help, I ask that you charge it to my head and not my heart.

Light or Fire: Frederick Douglass and the Orator's Dilemma, 2022

Most scholarship on political rhetoric views it as an exercise in changing the minds of an audience. However, we see numerous examples of political speech aimed at those who already agree with the speaker, to motivate them to act on judgments they have already made. This kind of discourse is often dismissed as pandering, or the "red meat" rabblerousing that contributes to polarization. I draw upon Frederick Douglass to render a more complete account of this speech, which I term "hortatory rhetoric." Douglass draws upon the prophetic tradition of Black Christian preaching to develop an alternative for when persuasion has reached its limit. This kind of speech raises a set of normative difficulties that differ from those raised by the rhetoric of persuasion, which Douglass helps us to think through. He provides a framework for understanding when it might be permissible or even desirable to abandon persuasion for exhortation.

{Jack McKeon, Bard College} The first sentence of Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave is not written by Douglass. The sentence belongs to William Lloyd Garrison, editor of The Liberator, who begins his preface by recounting his first encounter with Frederick Douglass in Nantucket four years prior. On that August day it was Garrison’s “happiness to become acquainted with FREDERICK DOUGLASS, the writer of the following narrative” (Garrison 3).

Political Theory, 2016

What political problem can autobiography solve? This article examines the politics of Frederick Douglass's antebellum personal narratives: his 1845 slave narrative, the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, and his 1855 autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom, written at the opposite ends of Douglass's transition from the abolitionist politics of William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips to Douglass's defense of political action and the Constitution as anti-slavery. Placing the two texts alongside Douglass's distinction "to narrate wrongs" and "denouncing them," I argue that Douglass writes My Bondage and My Freedom as a mode of denunciation: an autobiographical critique of injustice that balances analysis of collective oppression with advocacy for communal emancipation. Whereas to narrate wrongs encouraged readers to judge Douglass's story alongside popular criteria of justice, to denounce wrongs is to implicate readers within the structures that create antebellum subjects on and off the plantation, by revealing the coercions and conditionings of society that make not simply slaves but slaveowners, sympathizers, and abolitionists. This article claims that autobiography is a distinct genre of political theory, one that challenges present relations between the individual and the collective by representing not simply its author but an expanded view of "the people."

Studies in American Fiction, 2006

Comparative American Studies, Vol. 13 No. 3, 2015

Frederick Douglass' reframing of monuments about American slavery is prophetic. This revisionist view applies an “interracial turn” lens to Douglass’ 1876 Freedmen's Monument Speech. After sketching interracial dynamics in Douglass' career, visual rhetoric in this oration is examined. Read through a history of Douglass’ relationships with white men, the speech constitutes a performative resolution of Douglass’ “white man problem.” A historically situated reading of Douglass’ rhetoric reveals the maturity of his political thought, which calls on future audiences to reassess Douglass' identity, and legacy. A “revised Douglass” charted a path by which we could revise our own “white male problem.” Douglass’ model is timely, given recurring episodes of interracial violence, and the unrest they spark. As a figure who battled racialism and lived a “more attractive alternative,” Douglass legitimates an “interracial turn” in fields including American Studies, communication, ethnography, rhetorical studies, and literary criticism.

The Archive of Fear, 2020

I argue that the long Douglass archive is more than a serial autobiographical text. Instead sly repetitions and transformations of his "slave narrative" generate a trauma theory archive, one that Douglass improvises by reading the long legacy of mesmerism through a variety of eclectic influences. With his future taken from him by slavery Douglass early began to study the behavior of his masters. He became sensitive to their lapse into a crisis state and what Reinhart Koselleck has called “the compulsion toward foresight” whenever they perceived a threat to the institution of slavery. The openness of the ongoing moment that Douglass enlists from the mesmeric crisis builds on his recognition that the future does not flow into the present the way that the present flows into the past. Such a focus widens the social and political horizon of the temporal disruptions later informing the Freudian notion of afterwardsness. The interrupted lecture, so often repeated throughout the Douglass narratives, is itself turned into another form of archive, one where tremulous anticipations associated with fantasies of sovereign power can be shown for what they are: dangerous theory.