Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction: Frederick Douglass and the Atlantic World
- 1 ‘The Republic of Letters’: Frederick Douglass, Ireland and the Irish Narratives
- 2 Friends and Allies: The Economics of the Text
- 3 An American Slave: Representing the Creole Self
- 4 The Hidden Ireland: Social Commentary and Public Witness
- 5 ‘Mask in Motion’: Dialect Spaces and Class Representation
- 6 Race, Civilization, Empire
- 7 Models of Progress: Ireland, Haiti and the Atlantic
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
4 - The Hidden Ireland: Social Commentary and Public Witness
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction: Frederick Douglass and the Atlantic World
- 1 ‘The Republic of Letters’: Frederick Douglass, Ireland and the Irish Narratives
- 2 Friends and Allies: The Economics of the Text
- 3 An American Slave: Representing the Creole Self
- 4 The Hidden Ireland: Social Commentary and Public Witness
- 5 ‘Mask in Motion’: Dialect Spaces and Class Representation
- 6 Race, Civilization, Empire
- 7 Models of Progress: Ireland, Haiti and the Atlantic
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Douglass's Narrative operates within two fields: the United States and the Atlantic. The former demonstrates the degree to which the slave narrative as autobiography can be considered as representative in both form and content as the Franklinian template. Douglass's work incorporates elements of Northern and Southern literary convention, producing an American subjectivity that spans national and racial divides. In the Atlantic context, Douglass's travels and the overseas editions of his work link the issues of slavery and abolition into a transnational network of separate but interlocking agendas. These occupy, to a greater or lesser extent, the terrain of progressive liberal discourse, a terrain that includes the advancement of women's political agency, racial liberalism, British and American nationalism, evangelical mission, and hierarchies of religious affiliation.
Yet the interconnectedness of these agendas also illustrates the complexities of individual and group identity in the context of shifting, increasingly globalized networks of ethnicity, gender or political agency. The Narrative was progressively restructured by Douglass in the period following its initial publication, to the point where it became a key node in this diverse network. Other elements of his textual production during the period 1845–47, the letters to Garrison in particular, continued to build upon the project of self-fashioning initiated in the Narrative, specifically on the American element of that undertaking.
Douglass remained in constant contact with the United States whilst overseas, with bulletins crossing the Atlantic on an almost weekly basis. The letters were updates detailing Douglass's progress, reception and his impression of people and places encountered in the course of his travels. Their status as private correspondence was little more than a literary conceit, however. For the letters were destined not just for Garrison's eyes, but for the pages of the Liberator, a public forum instrumental in binding an imagined community of abolitionists in the United States and beyond.
Douglass's time in Ireland is remarkable for the absence of any appeal across class lines to the peasant population or the urban working class. Particularly notable by its absence, despite the plethora of letters written by Douglass during his visit, is any commentary on the Great Famine of 1845–47, an event exactly contemporaneous with Douglass's time in Britain and Ireland. Given the scale of the disaster and Douglass's ongoing reportage of the people, customs and conditions he encountered overseas, the omission is striking.
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- Frederick Douglass and the Atlantic World , pp. 70 - 93Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2007