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
Conclusion
- 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
From the outset of his public career, Douglass was confronted with the dilemma of representation in the complex social, cultural and political milieu of the nineteenth-century Atlantic world. His early trip to Ireland, and the changes to the Narrative that he implemented there, signal his first major reconfiguration of the anti-slavery debate. The central fiction of the narrative, the slave subject, is repositioned within an international Atlantic, rather than insular US discourse of western modernity. The Irish Narratives become the expressive locus of Douglass's economic success, social mobility and increasing ideological independence. They also mark his alliance with feminized political spaces of comparable class and moral intention, an alliance that was to continue throughout his career.
In this, Douglass's work was instrumental in consolidating a transnational ethical culture committed to liberal, Anglo-American values and the principles that underpinned them. Conversely, the preface to the new texts becomes the site of a counter-discourse, which posits slavery as the result of colonial process, though the radicalism of that position was soon to be lost with the emergence of Douglass's unequivocal Anglophilia. The Narratives also demonstrate the agency of the slave-subject in mediating images of the United States in an international context, and, indeed, Douglass's power over the economic and ideological success of transatlantic abolitionism.
Ireland, a site on the margins of western discursive practice, was a space of empowerment for Douglass in the early years of his public career. The impact on his writing was such that it necessitates a re-evaluation of the apparent limitations of the slave narrative form. In its Irish incarnations, Douglass's Narrative demonstrates a generic and formal flexibility that attests to his increasing personal status and narrative authority, as well as confirming the recalibration of his socio-political stance. As such, the Irish editions, composed on the margins after an escape from the United States, might be considered an act of literary maroonage, with direct impact on contemporary hegemonic understandings of US subjectivity and the American experiment as a whole.
In addition to the implications for generic understandings of autobiography within the American canon, or the exceptionalism of the African American narrative position, the Irish Narratives have repercussions for the now national space in which they were produced.
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- Frederick Douglass and the Atlantic World , pp. 188 - 192Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2007