{"id":17217,"date":"2011-10-23T00:08:40","date_gmt":"2011-10-23T00:08:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=17217"},"modified":"2011-11-14T00:07:57","modified_gmt":"2011-11-14T00:07:57","slug":"the-bondage-of-race-and-the-freedom-of-transcendence-in-frederick-douglass%e2%80%99s-my-bondage-and-my-freedom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=17217","title":{"rendered":"The Bondage of Race and the Freedom of Transcendence in Frederick Douglass\u2019s My Bondage and My Freedom"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Bondage of Race and the Freedom of Transcendence in Frederick Douglass\u2019s My Bondage and My Freedom<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Postgraduate English: A Journal and Forum for Postgraduates in English since 2000<\/a>
\nDurham University
\nIssue Number 4<\/a> (September 2001)<\/p>\n

Briallen Hopper<\/a><\/strong>, Lecturer in English
\nYale University<\/em><\/p>\n

Frederick Douglass<\/a> has a strange way of describing what he feels like when he feels most free. When trying to convey how ardently enthusiastic he was when he first lived among abolitionists<\/a>, he writes, \u201cFor a time I was made to forget that my skin was dark and my hair crisped\u201d (Douglass 366). He echoes this expression of elation and lost self-consciousness when he writes about why he loves living in England: \u201cI meet nothing to remind me of my complexion\u201d (Douglass 374). Douglass was born into a racist society, and it is natural and perhaps inevitable that losing the awareness and memory of his body should be a freeing feeling for him; but when this feeling is described in a work of propaganda so carefully constructed as My Bondage and My Freedom<\/a><\/em>, the reader expects it to be interpreted so as to fit with a larger message that there is nothing intrinsically imprisoning about dark skin and \u201ccrisped\u201d hair, and Douglass refuses to interpret it in this way. To Douglass, the feeling of freedom seems to be uncomfortably close to the feeling of being invisible-or white.<\/p>\n

\u00a0I do not pretend to be able to ease the discomfort that Douglass creates in modern readers when he describes the pleasure of losing awareness of his hair and skin, but I believe these readers can understand Douglass better if they read his descriptions of transcendence of race in My Bondage and My Freedom as in part a reaction to the racialist attitudes towards individuals and cultures that prevailed in antebellum culture, including abolitionist culture. In the first two parts of this essay, \u201c\u2018The African Race Has Peculiarities\u2019: Transcending a Racialized Body,\u201d and \u201c\u2018A Little <\/em>of the Plantation Manner\u2019: Transcending a Racialized Culture,\u201d I will describe how the racialism in Harriet Beecher Stowe\u2019s Uncle Tom\u2019s Cabin<\/span> and in the Garrisonian abolitionists\u2019 expectations for black abolitionists constrained Douglass in a way that was analogous to slavery.<\/p>\n

Any attempt to free people from a bondage based on racial identity by an appeal to a liberating discourse which is also based on racial identity is bound to be problematic; as Robyn Wiegman<\/a> writes, \u201cIf identities are not metaphysical, timeless categories of being; if they point not to ontologies but to historical specificities and contingencies; if their mappings of bodies and subjectivities are forms of and not simply resistances to practices of domination-then a politics based on identity must carefully negotiate the risk of reinscribing the logic of the system it hopes to defeat\u201d (Wiegman 6). My claim about My Bondage and My Freedom<\/em>,<\/span> put into anachronistic terminology, is that Douglass felt that the politics of racialist abolitionism did not negotiate the risk of reinscription carefully enough; furthermore, he did not believe it was possible for identity politics to avoid reinscribing the logic of slavery.<\/p>\n

Douglass\u2019s desire for transcendence was not simply a reaction to racialism. It can also be understood as a positive expression of what he desired for himself and for African-Americans generally: a desire historically described as \u201cassimilationism\u201d and now pejoratively referred to as \u201cuniversalism\u201d or \u201cbourgeois liberalism\u201d; a desire that is evoked by Martin Luther King\u2019s<\/a> mythical phrase about children who are judged \u201cby the content of their character rather than the color of their skin.\u201d In the third part of this essay, \u201c\u2018Race is Transient\u2019: Transcending Race,\u201d I discuss how Douglass, in a strangely postmodernist-yet-universalist way, deconstructs race in order to make assimilation possible. In My Bondage and My Freedom<\/em> and in countless speeches, Douglass describes the racial self-designations and un-self-designations he makes when traveling on trains (following Douglass\u2019s lead, both the Supreme Court and W.E.B. Du Bois<\/a> have at times recognized trains to be an ultimate test of the validity of racial identities). These designations and undesignations are breathtaking examples of an American\u2019s willful transcendence of race…<\/p>\n

Read the entire essay here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Bondage of Race and the Freedom of Transcendence in Frederick Douglass\u2019s My Bondage and My Freedom Postgraduate English: A Journal and Forum for Postgraduates in English since 2000 Durham University Issue Number 4 (September 2001) Briallen Hopper, Lecturer in English Yale University Frederick Douglass has a strange way of describing what he feels like […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,1196,8,6940],"tags":[8014,84,8013,8012],"class_list":["post-17217","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-literary-criticism","category-media-archive","category-slavery","tag-briallen-hopper","tag-frederick-douglass","tag-postgraduate-english","tag-postgraduate-english-a-journal-and-forum-for-postgraduates-in-english-since-2000"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17217","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17217"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17217\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17217"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17217"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17217"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}