Blue sky and grey fog: Transatlantic ecologies of emancipation in antebellum African American writing

Upon arriving in Belfast in 1846, Frederick Douglass wrote to William Lloyd Garrison that “Instead of the bright blue sky of America, I am covered with the soft grey fog of the Emerald Isle. I breathe, and lo! the chattel... [ view full abstract ]

Upon arriving in Belfast in 1846, Frederick Douglass wrote to William Lloyd Garrison that “Instead of the bright blue sky of America, I am covered with the soft grey fog of the Emerald Isle. I breathe, and lo! the chattel becomes a man.” His letter forms part of a body of black writing that links emancipation both to metaphors of the transatlantic environment, and the materiality of transatlantic exchange. This paper explores how transnational economies and ecologies allowed black abolitionists to articulate black cultures of nature, and produce literary cultures that proved difficult to formulate on US ground. In Ireland, where African-American abolitionists often hit landfall, the natural and social environment provided rich pickings for writing exploring questions of personal and political sovereignty. Likewise, the role played by Irish editors and publishers in producing the literary work of black authors, and of Ireland as a space for circulating those texts, positions the transatlantic as an important element of an emerging emancipatory ecology which black writers both inhabited and produced. Black transatlantic writing, therefore, provides a critical correlation between an emancipated black identity that repositions the human in relation to both the natural environment, and the specific cultural systems in which that identity is situated.