Frederick Douglass's Travels

Douglass is an interesting figure because he has two transatlantic personas. The first is as a fugitive slave and abolitionist when he takes his two year journey to Ireland and Great Britain in 1845. The second is as post minister to Haiti and wealthy cosmopolitan traveler in the late nineteenth century. Fionnghuala Sweeney's book Frederick Douglass and the Atlantic World has got me thinking about how best to address his work in this chapter. Initially, I was going to deal primarily with "The Heroic Slave" and insurrection and mutiny, but I don't know if that's going to cut it. Part of the problem is that Douglass, far more than either Stowe or Delany, revisits maritime scenes in his writing over and over from his early days learning to write by watching the ship builders' markings in Baltimore, to his apprenticeship as a ship's caulker, to his sailor's disguise when he makes his escape, to his subsequent trips to Ireland, Africa, and Haiti. Haiti in particular is something he revisits in his writing both during abolition and in the Reconstruction Era.

The answer might be to deal with "The Heroic Slave" in two different registers. The first would be as I intended: within the context of the 1850 and the history of insurrection and mutiny. The second would be in the context of Douglass's larger project of self-fashioning through rewriting his autobiography. In a similar fashion to how Delany seems to return to Africa as a way of reversing the Middle Passage, Douglass seems to write about his voyages as a way of reconfiguring his view of the sea away from that first apostrophe as he looked over Chesapeake Bay in The Narrative of the Life. Between 1845 and 1882, Douglass goes from yearning to be on the "gallant decks" of the ships leaving Baltimore, to observing of voyage to Egypt that "Nothing in my American experience...ever gave me such a deep sense of unearthly silence, such a sense of vast profound, unbroken sameness and solitude, as did this passage" (Douglass, Autobiographies, 1008).The yearning in the latter quote is quite different from the that of the Chesapeake Bay soliloquy. There is something of Melville's Ishmael in his tone. Yet if being bound to the shore is representative of bondage to him, this "sameness and solitude" smacks more of desolation than anything else.

There's also the issue of Haiti. Prior to the Civil War he invokes Haiti to both point to a successful slave revolution and to talk up how white fears of slave insurrection are behind the United States' failure to recognize Haiti as a sovereign nation. After the Civil War Haiti represented the best argument against white hegemony as a black republic, despite its persistent instability.

I'm not sure how much of the Reconstruction era Douglass stuff is going to go in there but it's worth knowing about at any rate. Maybe I can somehow address it in the Billy Budd chapter as a way of demonstrating how these issues persisted after the Civil War.

Looking Ahead

I promised myself I wouldn't start writing until August but I'm thinking about revising that since I'm feeling antsy about all the stuff I have swirling around in my head. I'm probably going to spend another week reading and taking notes and then start outlining and generating some close readings of the texts I've read. I also need to organize my notes and figure out what I have the jettison and what needs more research. I think sticking to looking at Dred as my main text is still the right way to go but I also really need to figure out a better way to incorporate Douglass and Delany into that analysis. Here is a loose sense of how I'm going to organize the chapter.

The 1850s
I'm going to need to narrate the history following the Compromise of 1850 i.e. John Brown and bleeding Kansas, the abolitionist debates over black assimilation versus emigration, and pro-slaver supporters arguments in favor of the annexation of Cuba. More than that I need to the way these debates are echoes and continuations of the earlier abolitionist debates in Great Britain. Specifically, how desire for access to the Caribbean sugar market and fear of a black Cuba reenact issues surrounding the rise of the sugar plantation, the expansion of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and eventually the Haitian revolution. In the case of abolitionist debates over emigration, I need to tease out how emigration acts as a reversal of the trauma of the Middle Passage, the desire for return not merely about being a homecoming and the establishment of a black republic, but also a desire for a founding narrative, in which equality with white Americans established through an origin story similar say to the founding of Plymouth Rock.

Stowe
The journey she takes from Uncle Tom's Cabin to Dred is an interesting one involving both the influence of Douglass, critiques from Delany and others regarding the representation of slaves, and her trip to England prior to writing Dred. This last one is a bit flimsy but I think Clarkson and the British fight is on her mind during the gestational period of this novel. The character of Dred and the setting of the swamp allow her to negotiate both the present and the past in presenting abolition as the outcome of a longer history.

Revolution, Insurrection, Mutiny and the Slave Ship
The slave ship is a fraught image in this moment. On the one hand the Transatlantic slave trade has technically been abolished. But as Blake shows us, and as the Amistad, Tryal, and Creole cases also demonstrate, the slave ship won't go away. The slave ship mutinies and the slave insurrections provide rhetorical moments for abolitionists to invoke both the Haitian and American revolutions.

The Literary Representation of the Slave
Not sure where this is leading exactly but it seems to me that some of the problems I introduced in the first chapter on Grainger and Equiano become even more fraught, especially in the wake of the Compromise of 1850 and the Dred Scott decision. Douglass and Delany in particular use these texts about insurrection as a way of making opposite points in a way. Douglass ties Madison Washington to the history of the American Revolution as a way of creating an American identity for his character. Delany's Blake is more of a Moses figure leading people away from the States to some never-seen promised land. Stowe is a bit trickier. While Dred at once seem to be merely a representation of other insurrectionists from history she seems less concerned with creating an accurate black revolutionary figure than she is in using him to discuss abolitionists need to recognize themselves as fellow insurrectionists as well as highlighting the role of pro-slavery violence in creating these insurrectionist figures.

The Maritime Imaginary
Hopefully by the time I work these other things out, I'll have a clearer sense of how they play into the role of the maritime in abolitionist texts. For the moment though I'm stuck on this quote from "The Heroic Slave" (1853)

During all the storm, Madison stood firmly at the helm,— his keen eye fixed upon the binnacle. He was not indifferent to the dreadful hurricane; yet he met it with the equanimity of an old sailor. He was silent but not agitated. The first words he uttered after the storm had slightly subsided, were characteristic of the man. 'Mr. Mate, you cannot write the bloody laws of slavery on those restless billows. The ocean, if not the land, is free.'(Douglass 237)

A vexed statement if there ever was one. On the one hand he's correct. The opportunity for mutiny while at sea demonstrates the illusion of authority aboard a ship. On the other hand it seems to me that the kind of freedom attained through mutiny epitomizes the problem of negative freedom, a freedom from tyranny but not necessarily enfranchisement.

Blake Post Mortem

Finally finished Blake which is kind of an excruciating re-read. The kind of primary texts I'm working on in this chapter make me long for my Melville chapter.

Not sure at this moment how much of my chapter is going to discuss Blake. I've set up this chapter as exploring the problem of the literary representation of free and enslaved blacks, and Douglass, Delany, and Stowe have written three texts that attack this problem head-on, and have done it in a way that invokes the Middle Passage, the history of sugar production, British abolition, and the Haitian and American Revolutions. The difference between Douglass's and Delany's visions for blacks in a post-slavery world seems to turn on the lessons learned from this history. Delany seems to yearn for full autonomy for blacks away from the United States, and in setting his revolution in Cuba tries to recreate the Haitian experience, albeit with a "full-blooded" black elite. Yet this vision keeps failing. One of the frustrating things about reading this text is how much planning goes into these slave revolts and how little payoff there is.

Of course the reason for this "failure" of vision is in part that this novel was suppose to help raise funds for an African expedition. This raises the question of why abolitionist texts were written. Delany seems to have been taking advantage of Stowe's success in publishing anti-slavery novels. He even sets up the beginning as almost a mirror of the opening of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Is the novel's failure to capture a wide audience due to the timing of publication, or is there something lacking in terms of compelling and sympathetic characters?

By the time the "complete" Blake appeared in weekly installments in The Weekly Anglo-African, it was May of 1862. While the Civil War didn't absolutely put the question of Black emigration to rest--as Bob Levine writes, in 1862 "Lincoln was exploring the possibility of colonizing blacks to the tropics of Central and South America"-- it definitely changed the focus of abolitionists (Levine, Douglass and Delany, 217). Delany in fact turned his efforts to the war upon hearing news of the secession of South Carolina while in Great Britain (220). Identity politics become wrapped up joining forces with Douglass in making a case for the Civil War as a war of emancipation.

In terms of sympathetic characters, it would seem in trying to write something so completely counter to Stowe's work, he also failed to capture that element of sentiment that made her work so successful. This may be a reaction to Stowe's feminized male slaves Tom and Tiff, and preference for a more polemical revolutionary rhetoric.

Moving on to "The Heroic Slave" and possibly Life and Times.

Race and Representation

It occurred to me today as I was alternating between Blake and Levine's book on Delany and Douglass that it's high time for a Douglass biopic. Better yet, an HBO miniseries. Douglass has always seemed to be an impossible figure to cast but for a while now I've thought Jeffery Wright might make a good match. He's still young enough that he could transition from younger Douglass to elder Douglass rather believably. The two problems with him are the voice and the height. Wright may be a trifle too short, but it Joaquin Phoenix can get away with playing Johnny Cash...

Because I still have The Wire on the brain I thought Idris Elba might make a good Martin Delany.

Not bad, you think?

Re-reading Blake is painfully slow but there's too much stuff to ignore. It's fascinating the way in which Delany's back to Africa emigration rhetoric echoes both Clarkson and Equiano in both the potential for Africa to yield riches outside of slavery and in terms of emigrated blacks as "raw material" for new nation builders. What's really strange is how he remains so pro-Christian, even to the point of denigrating native Africans, despite his contempt for the role for prayer over action in some abolitionist circles. A fascinating man, Martin Delany.

Once again it's shaming to realize how much I've pushed aside in just this one decade (1850-1860). Both Levine and Sundquist write about the desire of many in both the North and South to annex Cuba for it's sugar supply. For the South, this is also part of what fuels their push to extend slavery into the Western Territories. Turn the Gulf of Mexico into a sort of miniature version of the Atlantic Triangle (Sundquist, Empire and Slavery in American Literature 1820-1865), even to the point of wanting to reopen the Transatlantic slave trade. Delany's staging a rebellion there is both a reflection of abolitionist anxieties over what the annexation could mean for the extension of slavery in the States, and a strange sort of reenactment of the Haitian revolution.

Thinking about anxieties over Cuba really clarifies why Haiti might be on people's tongues for reasons other than insurrection. I'm thinking of taking a look at Life and Times next to get more of a sense of Douglass's own thoughts on both Haiti and Cuba next.

From Stowe to Delany

Short post today as I'm transitioning from Stowe, criticism, and other stuff into rereading Blake. It still has the original flags and underlining from when I read it four years ago but for the life of me I can't remember a thing about it.

Reading the introduction today, it occurred to me that I've been ignoring the discussions within abolitionist circles regarding Liberian colonization and black assimilation, the former being Stowe's original position, the later being Douglass'. Delany originally was with Douglass but broke with him later and attempted to raise funds for black emigration to Central America. It might be interesting to look at the way those debates, particularly the ones surrounding Liberian colonization, reflect a sort of belated Middle Passage anxiety. And even if they don't, they provide a different kind of transatlantic context for the literature.

Delany's an interesting character. I know I've said I'm thinking of making the chapter primarily about Dred, but Blake raises interesting questions about literary representation of slaves and free blacks. Because he frames it as a response to Uncle Tom's Cabin, it might be interesting to look at the ways in which he plays with dialect, domesticity, and masculinity.

Lost, Dred, and the Enlightenment

I started watching Lost over the weekend to see what all the fuss is about (and to fill the gaping void left by The Wire). I can already tell that "pretty" factor is going to get to me (perfectly groomed brows and smooth armpits after being stranded for 6 days), but nitpicking aside, so far so good. I think if it was merely a survival show, I'd be bored to tears. I overdosed on books like Hatchet and My Side of the Mountain in my preteen years, not to mention Robinson Crusoe in grad school. Books like that tend to have a limited appeal for me, even when fascinating and well-written. Camping lost its appeal for me when I was about ten years old and really not okay with the lack of indoor plumbing. It was always difficult for me to get lost in the adventure aspect when I was vividly imagining the discomforts of roughing it. But Lost gets right into the supernatural even before we know the names of the survivors. Surviving in the wilderness is only the first step.

Both Lost and some of the reading I've been doing over the last few days have got me thinking of The Great Dismal Swamp as also Stowe's way of discussing Locke, Rousseau, and Paine in conjunction with abolition and insurrection. According Levine, one of Stowe's sources for was a book called The Colored Patriots of the American Revolution (1855) by William Cooper Nell.

In a chapter on 'The Virginia Maroons,' Nell writes, 'The Great Dismal Swamp, which likes near the Eastern shore or Virginia, and, commencing near Norfolk, stretches quite into North Carolina, contains a large colony of negroes, who originally obtained their freedom by the grace of God and their own determined energy, instead of the consent of their owners, or by the help of the Colonizatoin Society.' (Levine 161)

It's interesting to think of Stowe of setting up the Maroon community as an experiment in black self governance and revolution. The Virginia Maroon colony (we'll call it that for the time being) is a fairly old one. A 1939 article in The Journal of Negro History by Herbert Aptheker states that as early as 1672 there are reports of insurrectionist activity in the area surrounding The Great Dismal Swamp. This presents the possibility of looking at the history of the Great Dismal Swamp as presenting a mirror for the history of America's evolution from colony to republic. Granted Stowe presents Dred's colony as a brief and ultimately failed attempt at black revolution. Yet the history suggests otherwise. The community is a fairly durable one until approximately 1862.

Although Dred's little community seems to represent a temporary experiment of escaped slaves creating community even to the point of establishing trade with local sympathetic whites, it also represents maroon communities throughout the Americas and the Caribbean. Moreover, these maroon communities enact an ethos of man in his natural state forming communities, and yet fail to achieve that crucial step of creating government. Why?

Part of the answer might be in that there is something unworkable about Enlightenment approaches to civil government for Stowe particularly Locke's ideas on rationality and property in the abolitionist context. Under the Lockian model the slaves escaping to the swamp returns them to a state of nature. The next step should be to come together in social contract to form a civil government. But that doesn't happen. In a way Dred is potentially the fanatical despot who lures slaves away only to sway them to his cause and revolt. If Stowe is doing what Levine suggests and tying Vesey, Turner, and the like to the American Revolution she's also presenting their failures, or rather the limits of that model in the context of American slavery.

There's room for a bit about Haiti in here, particularly in regards to the "perpetual state of revolt" bit but I'm not quite there yet.

This probably goes without saying but I'm setting aside the whole Lacanian approach to the Maritime Imaginary in favor of re-reading some key Enlightenment texts. I'll probably end up bringing some of it back in but for the moment I think this is more productive.

The More One Reads...

I've been reading Maurice S. Lee's Slavery, Philosophy, & American Literature, 1830-1860 in addition to my explorations into Lacan and Althusser. In the introduction he offers this assessment of the latest work in the American Renaissance:

Just as the American Renaissance proved amenable to political interpretation, more recently canonized traditions appear increasingly open to philosophical inquiry. Such inquiry need not entail deconstruction, neo-Marxism, or psycholinguistics, which have for decades been projected back on nineteenth-century texts. The more historically minded can turn to ideas available at the time to invoke, for instance, Hobbes before Foucault and Schelling instead of Lacan, and to view language not through Derrida but through someone like Thomas Reid. In this way, the literature of slavery can be read within the philosophical history not to attenuate theory or cultural studies but rather to advance them through an effort of synthesis that does not exclude philosophy from the domain of politics and culture. (Lee 9)

Oy. Just when I think I'm on the right track, I come across something like this and it sends me back to the drawing board. Lee's book is something I probably should have read before writing my dissertation proposal since he gets at a bunch of different things I'm interested in exploring, namely that literature of this period is invested in vexed philosophical questions regarding the position of slaves in the post-revolutionary moment. Lee does talk about some Enlightenment thinkers like Hobbes and Kant but he's also looking the contemporary German philosophers like Schelling, people I don't even have a passing acquaintance with. I guess I'm not sure which is the most logical place from which to draw my definition of the Imaginary. Should it be from Lacan's concept of The Imaginary or should I drawing from contemporary concepts of the imaginary? Concentrate on Emerson, Kant, and the like? A little of both perhaps...use the Lacanian concept and look how the philosophy of the 18th and 19th centuries enacts it? 

Reading Lee's book is both great and panic-inducing because he hits several of my pet points and does it really well. His chapter on Melville even as a section called "The Almost-Ship of State." "No political philosopher of the antebellum period was more provocative then Herman Melville" (134).  This is where I begin my thinking and where the dissertation ends. Of course to get there I have to get through Dred, so I better set Melville aside for now.

In his chapter on Stowe he discusses how Stowe's training in metaphysics manifests in her writing and how the violence of the abolition debates in the 1850s challenged her sentimental theory.  Dred, in depicting not just the plotting of a slave insurrection but partisan violence between whites, challenges her own theories on sentiment and enlightenment in Uncle Tom's Cabin. Violence is seen as inevitable given the limits of moral sympathy and also, in some ways, desirable. This is mostly in line with Levine's analysis but with more emphasis on the way in which Stowe and her contemporaries used literature to explore and critique Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). 

I haven't really thought of Dred as engaging with Enlightenment philosophy in the same way that Billy Budd does. My conception of this chapter has been primarily in terms of abolitionist debates of the 1850s and in the way that representations (or non-representations) of slave insurrections and their actors echo historical anxieties regarding insurrection. In terms of the limits of reason and sympathy I've mainly seen Stowe as in denial about it. But I think Lee's offering a way to engage Dred with something beyond the debates and the echoes of Haiti, etcetera. In terms of my own argument, or what I hope my argument is shaping up to be, the way that Dred both looks at the present and the future in terms of the debate, it also looks at the past, hence the coastal nature of the title character and his tendency to meditate in the hulks of ships. I think given both Stowe's trip to Europe and this concept of her own grappling with Smith I might have something else upon which to build on my concept of the Maritime Imaginary. 

Of course that means I'll have to re-read Adam Smith. Oy squared. 

Fragments

It's been a disjointed couple of days. I've been simultaneously trying to get a handle on Dred reception history and dabbling into Lacan (or rather Eagleton's interpretation of Lacan) which makes for kind of muddled reading. The Dred stuff is useful just in terms of nuts and bolts research. Of course it gives me things that seem like they should fit in somewhere but where isn't completely obvious. One of the places it's led me is to her memoir of her travels to Europe after the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin and before writing Dred, Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands in Two Volumes (1854). In it, she devotes a whole chapter about her sojourn at Playford Hall, formerly the residence of the late Thomas Clarkson. The purpose of the chapter does little except give a brief history of Clarkson's early career lifting heavily from Clarkson's own memoirs. In terms of what it might mean for the chapter, at this point, not much save that Stowe's own awareness of the British legacies of transatlantic slavery and the early abolitionist movement. If Stowe herself is haunted by Clarkson's slave ships than the presence of empty hulks of ships makes sense.


A more interesting tidbit courtesy of Audrey Fisch is that shortly after the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin in England and in response to its immense popularity an anonymous text appeared called Uncle Tom in England or Proof that Black is White. This book appeared in 1852 and according to Fisch was written out alarm that Stowe's original was gaining in popularity amongst the lower classes. I'm trying to decide if it's worth it add this to my already teetering tower of reading.

The Lacan readings are interesting but I need to read more, and read slowly. My brain has never readily absorbed this kind of thing and time hasn't done me any favors. Strangely it's leading me into Althusser's work ideology. Or maybe not strangely since I've been playing fast and loose with the term in Chapter 1. But I think both in terms of the problem of literary representation and positing that something about language changes with the rise in Transatlantic trade both approaches will end up framing my thinking well. If the definition of self transforms in the wake of the Glorious Revolution and with the implementation of race slavery what you have is both the illusion on the part of the British that this vast colonial empire constitutes a whole even if they can only see it in parts, and the misrecognition of that whole for something that it is not, colonists as subjects and not as potential revolutionaries. With regards to the slave the opposite thing happens. Self becomes fragmented into parts and use-value. This makes Equiano's work all the more interesting in that he needs to reconstitute the fragmented self into a whole. A maritime imaginary is perhaps one in which both ideologies and subjectivities are reflected and refracted by oceanic crossings.

A clumsy thought experiment but better to try it out now than a month from now when I'm trying to write coherently. I also don't want to end up doing an awkward psychoanalytic reading of texts like this throughout the whole dissertation.

"There shall be no more sea"

I think the approach to Dred as a whole is going to concentrate on two things: the space of the swamp as an interstitial place caught between land and sea, and Dred as a figure where both past and present insurrectionist figures. Stowe ties Dred to the marshy areas of the south, the coast and the sea in this really amazing moment towards the end of the novel when Clayton finally speaks to Dred.

"The Lord bade me go from the habitations of men, and to seek out the desolate places of the sea, and dwell in the wreck of a ship that was forsaken for a sign of desolation unto this people. So, I went and dwelt there, and the Lord called me Amraphal, because hidden things of judgment were made known to me. And the Lord showed unto me that even as a ship which is forsaken of the waters wherein all flesh have died so shall it be with the nation of the oppressor...Every day is full of labor, but the labor goeth back again into the seas. So that travail of all generations hath gone back, till the desire of all nations shall come, and He shall come with burning and with judgment, and with great shakings; but in the end thereof shall be peace. Wherefore, it is written that in the new heavens and the new earth there shall be no more sea."

Places like the hulk of the ship, the Everglades, and the shore provide the spiritual surrounds for one "destitute of the light of philosophy." In the quote above Dred cites the shipwreck both in terms of the past and the present, the past being the legacy of the Transatlantic slave trade-- the "a sign of desolation unto this people"--, and the present, probably both the dependence of the US economy on transatlantic trade of cotton, and the prevalence of Ship of State metaphors within debates between abolitionists and pro-slavery groups. The ship, an emblem of the initial site of bondage, is now the nation on the course for wreckage.

"There shall be no more sea," is taken from Revelation 21.1, but I don't think it's too much of a stretch to say that Stowe also uses the sea to talk about slavery's persistent hold on the South. The empty hulks of the ships are specters of the past and warnings about the future. The shore and the swamp are transitory spaces where the boundaries between land and water are blurred and changeable. On the one hand there's the threat of being mired down and stuck. On the the other hand, the swamps are places of refuge. Dred, in being tied to those places also brings past and present together, in the invocations of Vesey, Turner, and the fainter echo of Brown, and the references to Toussaint( I need to look at Southerne's Oroonoko again to see if there are is anything useful there in Oroonoko's language).

Of course finding moments like these always reminds me of the overwhelming problem of this dissertation which is how to define a maritime imaginary. When I was first telling people about this project, several people immediately asked about Lacan's Imaginary. I've been resisting using Lacan because, for one, it's Lacan, and for another, I'm suspicious of letting a single theoretical application lead my work. I tend to work best when I'm working mostly from the primary material. But I've noticed some of my major keywords--fragmentation, subjectivity. and, to a certain extent, my concept of negative doppelgangers--are taking bits and pieces from Lacan. Today, I detoured into some introductory reading on the basics of the Mirror Stage thinking it might clarify things. I have a feeling I'll end up doing what I usually do. "I take my concept from Lacan's Imaginary in part by using X, Y, and Z. Where I depart is...."

Tomorrow I might start with a few close reading exercises using Lacan and see where it goes.