The Political Economy of Frederick Douglass' Closet

This paper attends to the ecological expressivity of Frederick Douglass’s closet testimonial in his 1845 autobiographical narrative. I argue that Douglass’s closet testimonial offers a peculiar witnessing of his Aunt... [ view full abstract ]

This paper attends to the ecological expressivity of Frederick Douglass’s closet testimonial in his 1845 autobiographical narrative. I argue that Douglass’s closet testimonial offers a peculiar witnessing of his Aunt Hester’s beating that registers an ecological rupture of settler expansion and black fungibility even as it proposes a sound genealogical relationship between a black and queer past. Building on scholarship that considers slavery as the epochal rupture and the negative allegory of the nineteenth century, including Hortense Spillers’ ungendering of slavery, and Saidiya Hartman’s elaboration of the impossibility of recovery, this paper contends that Douglass’ closet expressivity registers both the fraught “nature” of black fungibility within the context of settler colonialism and the mutually constitutive categories of black and queer. Rather than reading Douglass’ narrative as rehearsing the scripts of humanity and freedom through the self-authored genre of autobiography, I consider how to read Douglass’ narrative within the climate of the closet as problematizing a history of settler colonialism, abolitionist sentimentality, and the self in the new world under slavery. In the end, I show that what emerges from Douglass’ recounting of Aunt Hester’s beating exceeds representation and erasure precisely because the spectacle of antiblackness and settler colonialism performs an ontological doubling within the context of the closet; thus, a doubling of incalculable violence and loss.