Heartfelt Thanks to Punch for the Picture: Frederick Douglass and the Transnational Jokework of Slave Caricature (original) (raw)
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Pictures & Power - Imaging and Imagining Frederick Douglass 1818-2018 Edited by Celeste-Marie Bernier and Bill E. Lawson, 2017
Frederick Douglass, the abolitionist, the civil rights advocate and the great rhetorician, has been the focus of much academic research. Only more recently is Douglass work on aesthetics beginning to receive its due, and even then its philosophical scope is rarely appreciated. Douglass’ aesthetic interest was notably not so much in art itself, but in understanding aesthetic presentation as an epistemological and psychological aspect of the human condition and thereby as a social and political tool. He was fascinated by the power of images, and took particular interest in the emerging technologies of photography. He often returned to the themes of art, pictures and aesthetic perception in his speeches. He saw himself, also after the end of slavery, as first and foremost a human rights advocate, and he suggests that his work and thoughts as a public intellectual always in some way related to this end. In this regard, his interest in the power of photographic images to impact the human soul was a lifelong concern. His reflections accordingly center on the psychological and political potentials of images and the relationship between art, culture, and human dignity. In this chapter we discuss Douglass views and practical use of photography and other forms of imagery, and tease out his view about their transformational potential particularly in respect to combating racist attitudes. We propose that his views and actions suggest that he intuitively if not explicitly anticipated many later philosophical, pragmatist and ecological insights regarding the generative habits of mind and affordance perception : I.e. that we perceive the world through our values and habitual ways of engaging with it and thus that our perception is active and creative, not passive and objective. Our understanding of the world is simultaneously shaped by and shaping our perceptions. Douglass saw that in a racist and bigoted society this means that change through facts and rational arguments will be hard. A distorted lens distorts - and accordingly re-produces and perceives its own distortion. His interest in aesthetics is intimately connected to this conundrum of knowledge and change, perception and action. To some extent precisely due to his understanding of how stereotypical categories and dominant relations work on our minds, he sees a radical transformational potential in certain art and imagery. We see in his work a profound understanding of the value-laden and action-oriented nature of perception and what we today call the perception of affordances (that is, what our environment permits/invites us to do). Douglass is particularly interested in the social environment and the social affordances of how we perceive other humans, and he thinks that photographs can impact on the human intellect in a transformative manner. In terms of the very process of aesthetic perception his views interestingly cohere and supplement a recent theory about the conditions and consequences of being an aesthetic beholder. The main idea being that artworks typically invite an asymmetric engagement where one can behold them without being the object of reciprocal attention. This might allow for a kind of vulnerability and openness that holds transformational potentials not typically available in more strategic and goal-directed modes of perception. As mentioned, Douglass main interest is in social change and specifically in combating racist social structures and negative stereotypes of black people. He is fascinated by the potential of photography in particular as a means of correcting fallacious stereotypes, as it allows a more direct and less distorted image of the individuality and multidimensionality of black people. We end with a discussion of how, given this interpretation of aesthetic perception, we can understand the specific imagery used by Douglass himself. How he tried to use aesthetic modes to subvert and change the racist habitus in the individual and collective mind of his society. We suggest that Frederick Douglass, the human rights activist, had a sophisticated philosophy of aesthetics, mind, epistemology and particularly of the transformative and political power of images. His works in many ways anticipate and sometimes go beyond later scholars in these and other fields such as psychology & critical theory. Overall, we propose that our world could benefit from revisiting Douglass’ art and thought.
Subverting the racist lens: Frederick Douglass, humanity and the power of the photographic Image
2017
It may be said that a picture is a very small thing. This is a great mistake. Man is a picturemaking animal, and the only picture-making animal in the world. Pictures do play and have played an important part in the grand drama of civilization. Pictures have a power akin to song. Give me the making of a nation's ballads and I care not who has the making of the laws. The same may be said of pictures. 1-Frederick Douglass
A world inverted: political satire and the proslavery argument
Slavery & Abolition, 2019
William Dent's political satire titled Abolition of the Slave Trade, or the Man the Master has been uniformly categorized as a proslavery cartoon. However, elements of the visual satire invoked by the image invite a critique of the institution of slavery that tacitly endorses some abolitionist arguments. This article more fully situates Dent's caricature in the specific historical moment of its publication as a response to both the abolitionists opposed to the slave trade and the advocates propounding the great benefits of plantation slavery. Thus, the politics of the cartoon are more complex than the term proslavery implies. On May 12, 1789, William Wilberforce delivered his opening salvo in the British House of Commons by introducing a motion to abolish the slave trade. His speech was immediately printed in newspapers and as pamphlets: long rebuttals to his characterizations of the brutality of the slave trade and slavery in the West Indies followed quickly thereafter. 1 In addition to printed, textual responses, this controversy became fuel for the political cartoonists whose work was a source of mass public appeal. Caricaturist William Dent published, 'Abolition of the Slave Trade, Or, the Man the Master,' weeks after Wilberforce's speech, providing an illustration of the political controversy engendered by the proposal to abolish the slave trade. 2 The cartoon featured the dramatic scene of role reversal in which a black man became the master and the white man provided the slave labor in the West Indies. Dent's hand-colored etching is arguably the first proslavery satiric print distributed in London during what has now been termed as the
American Literature, 2019
This essay takes the critical reception of Uncle Tom's Cabin in Frederick Douglass' Paper as an occasion to rethink modern constructions of critical authority while arguing for a print culture approach to literary criticism. Although scholars of antebellum culture typically focus on critical responses that are most readable by twenty-first-century standards (lengthy, signed reviews by readily identifiable critics in prestigious journals), paradoxically the less authoritative liminal critical forms (unsigned, unoriginal criticism circulated as reprinted reviews) displayed the centrality of criticism to nineteenth-century social and political life in the United States. Drawing on an expanded archive of eclectic critical forms, this essay denatural-izes and expands our sense of antebellum critical culture, examining the ways Frederick Dou-glass exploited the material diversity of contemporary print culture as part of his antislavery strategy, reprinting responses to Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel in an array of nontraditional critical forms to achieve pragmatic political goals. In so doing, Douglass transformed literary criticism from evaluation and entertainment into a powerful weapon in the war against slavery and the promotion of the interests of African Americans, applications that reaffirm the essay's claim for the importance of a material approach to critical culture. InJul y 1852 editor, orator, abolitionist, and former slave Frederick Douglass included within the pages of Frederick Dou-glass' Paper an account of a recent three-day trip to Ithaca, New York. In recounting the details of his tour, Douglass paused to express his astonishment at the "pleasing change in the public opinion of the place" in its stance toward slaver y since his last visit ten years earlier. He observed that while the Fugitive Slave Act and the cumulative effect of antislavery lecturers and papers must be held partly
African American Satire and Harlem Renaissance Literary Politics: A Review
This article discusses the use of satire in the fictional works of the Harlem Renaissance with reference to critical and intellectual debates about the value and function of African American art. Such satire, I argue, was often employed for its social and political power as a polemical, subversive, and controversial genre fit for debating the representation of blacks in literature and reflecting on the achievement of the Renaissance. It evolved as a reaction to propaganda demands and as a self-conscious assertion of aesthetic freedom. As a weapon against human folly and vice, satire in Harlem Renaissance fiction also had an inherent reformative vision and sociopolitical messages about the racial situation. As a subversive genre, African American satire was in tune with the radical orientation of the Harlem Renaissance movement in its reaction to the genteel school of uplift propaganda.
Degrees of Exposure: Frederick Douglass, Daguerreotypes, and Representations of Freedom
PhiN. Philologie im Netz. Beiheft/Supplement 5/2012: Audiences, Networks, Performances: Studies in U.S.-American Media History. Eds. Antje Kley and Peter Schneck. 71-100.
This essay investigates the picture-making processes in the writings of Frederick Douglass, one of the most articulate critics of photography in the second half of the nineteenth century. Through his fiction, speeches on photography, three autobiographies, and frontispieces, he fashioned himself as the most "representative" African American of his time, and effectively updated and expanded the image of the increasingly emancipated African American self. Tracing Douglass's project of self-fashioning – both of himself and his race – with the aid of images as well as words is the major aim of this essay. Through a close reading of the historical novella "The Heroic Slave," I examine how the face of a slave imprints itself on the photographic memory of a white man as it would on a silvered daguerreotype plate – transforming the latter into a committed abolitionist. The essay furthermore uncovers how the transformation of the novella's slave into a free man is described in terms of various photographic genres: first a "type," Augustus Washington (whose life story mirrors that of Douglass) changes into a subject worthy of portraiture. As he explored photographic genres in his writings, Douglass launched the genre of African American fiction. Moreover, through his pronounced interest in mixed media, he functioned as an immediate precursor to modernist authors who produced literature on the basis of photographic imagery. Overall, this essay reveals how Douglass performed his own progress within his photographically inflected writings, and turned both himself and his characters into free people.
A Negro Hercules: Frederick Douglass in Britain
Black stardom is a burgeoning field, and the fame of formerly enslaved African Americans in Britain during the mid nineteenth century offers an intriguing case study. In 1846, one British newspaper described the ex-slave turned abolitionist Frederick Douglass as a 'Negro Hercules'. During his British sojourn, Douglass travelled thousands of miles from Exeter to Edinburgh and contemporary newspapers waxed lyrical about his commanding stage presence and 'eloquent' lectures. Douglass created a sensation in Britain, and his celebrity rested on his status as a formerly enslaved individual, his powerful oratory and strong, commanding physical presence, as well as his talent at influencing and exploiting contemporary debates to help the anti-slavery cause. He gave renewed vigour to tense debates over non-fellowship with slave-holding American churches and controversies such as the Evangelical Alliance had international consequences, vividly exposing the influence of American slavery on British society. I will discuss the controversies, complications and consequences of Douglass' celebrity, which provided a stepping-stone towards fame and success in America.