"Frederick Douglass at 200: Reconsiderations" (a roundtable)

“Frederick Douglass at 200: Reconsiderations” (a roundtable)Panel Chair: Robert S. Levine, University of Maryland Janet Neary, Hunter College, CUNY: “Frederick Douglass’s Ethics of Sight” Maurice O. Wallace,... [ view full abstract ]

“Frederick Douglass at 200: Reconsiderations” (a roundtable)

Panel Chair: Robert S. Levine, University of Maryland

Janet Neary, Hunter College, CUNY: “Frederick Douglass’s Ethics of Sight”

Maurice O. Wallace, University of Virginia: “Douglass as Religious Subject”

Judith Madera, Wake Forest University: “Douglass and Pan-Americanism”

Leigh Fought, Le Moyne College: “Douglass and Women”

Maurice S. Lee, Boston University: “Conservative Douglass”

Jeannine Marie DeLombard, University of California, Santa Barbara: “Douglass and Black Civility"

On the occasion of the 200th-anniversary of the birth of Frederick Douglass, this roundtable explores new ways of thinking about Douglass as a literary and cultural figure. In terms of the conference’s large theme, I don’t think it’s much of a metaphorical stretch to say that from the 1840s to the present, Douglass has served as a kind of barometer to the racial climate in the US. This panel provides an occasion for reconsidering Douglass at our own critical and cultural moment, an occasion that, sad to say, has gained even greater exigence given Trump’s appropriation of Douglass and the subsequent horrors at Charlottesville. One of our panelists will directly address Douglass and modern conservativism; others will explore such issues as religion, gender, law, ethics, and the Americas. The presenters are at different institutions and different ranks, and one comes to us from a History department. I have asked speakers to limit themselves to 8-9 minutes. Even with introductions, we will have over 30 minutes for discussion.

This is a roundtable, so (if accepted) you could drop the paper titles from the program. But the titles could be helpful in displaying the range of approaches on our roundtable. Here are abstracts of the six presentations:

Neary, “Frederick Douglass’s Ethics of Sight”: African American writers such as Douglass not only actively shaped what Maurice Wallace and Shawn Smith call “photographic vision,” but they also advanced a much more capacious understanding of visual culture that refused the sharp distinction between the textual and the iconographic. Challenging the notion of visual culture as simply an archive of objective images, 19^th-century African American authors emphasized perspective, context, and the interpretive work that conditions the reception of iconographic material. My presentation will reflect on Douglass’s theory of visuality and the ways it is foundational to his quest for racial justice and social progress. Insisting on the relationality of sight, Douglass suggests that we cannot know things properly unless we are thinking (and visualizing) ethically.

Wallace, “Douglass as Religious Subject”: My presentation will situate Douglass within both the theological and institutional politics of nineteenth-century religion. Although it has been some years since literary historian William Andrews uncovered Douglass’s credentialing as a “lay preacher” within the emergent African Methodist Episcopal Zion (AMEZ) church, there has been little attention paid to the ways Douglass at once shaped, and was shaped by, an early black liberation theology. I want to consider Douglass’s eschatology, his religiously-inflected (if not finally apocalyptic) vision of the US as a New Jerusalem where peace, not war, might prevail.  As a religious subject, Douglass is especially key to our coming to still newer insights on the impact of African American religious culture on the black anti-slavery movement in America.  Such insights might help us get at what remains (or ought to remain) meaningful about African American religious culture today.

Madera, “Douglass and Pan-Americanism”: Douglass’s shifting relationship to the Caribbean points to the ways we think about citizenship and race as a black/white binary, extending outward from the US. I argue that Douglass wrestled with a kind of black nationalism that sought expression in transnationalism, provided it was a transnationalism that was not superstitious/Voudon, Catholic creole, or yoked to an “underdeveloped” Caribbean Indigeneity. At the same time, he was deeply conscious about US paternalism and anti-racism struggles in the Caribbean. His shifting Caribbean interests indicate the stakes of embodying difference in a national structure, and they show just how much US black cultural forms are tied up with issues of national sovereignty.

Fought, “Douglass and Women”: Douglass often seems to stand alone, even in scholarly imagination. But as my research shows, Douglass as an intellectual, activist, and historical figure regularly interacted with and was shaped by women.  Douglass’s biographers have had a difficult time incorporating women into his story, clinging (however unconsciously) to the separate spheres dichotomy. But most nineteenth-century Americans, and especially women engaged in antislavery and anti-racist activism, did not live such separated lives. By shifting the focus on Douglass’s life to the women surrounding him, we can see that they were much more prominent and important than the cliché of the women behind the man. This new approach helps to integrate Douglass’s personal and public lives and to illuminate his woman’s rights activism with greater specificity.

Lee, “Conservative Douglass”: It goes without saying that Frederick Douglass is a hero of the Left in America, but his name and words are also invoked by those on the Right—from Colin Powell to Clarence Thomas to the Frederick Douglass Foundation. My remarks will focus on a number of questions: What aspects of Douglass's thought make him amenable to modern conservatism? Can the use and abuse of Douglass's thought by the Right advance our understanding of Douglass? And what does it mean in 2018 to encounter conservative versions and misrepresentations of Douglass? 

DeLombard, “Douglass and Black Civility”:  Black civility involves challenging presumptions about racialized criminality so as to assert African Americans’ civil status. As Douglass makes clear in his oratory and journalism, as well as in his autobiographical narratives, the legal logic of slavery depended on the denial of African Americans’ civil personhood even as it exploited a recognized Black humanity. The current tendency to respond to the ongoing crisis of race in America by demands to recognize a shared humanity suggests a need to recall the importance of the specifically Black civility modeled by Douglass, as it is this civil status that remains largely—and dangerously—illegible to other Americans and to the law itself.