Fear of a Black planet: Climate apocalypse, Anthropocene futures and Black social thought

In recent years, images of climate catastrophe have become commonplace. However, Black visions of the confluence of the Anthropocene and the apocalypse have been largely ignored. As we argue in this article, Black social thought offers crucial resources for drawing out the implicit exclusions of dominant representations of climate breakdown and developing an alternative account of the planet’s future. By reading a range of critical race theorists, from Frederick Douglass and W. E. B. Du Bois to Octavia Butler and Ta-Nehisi Coates, we propose a rethinking of the climate apocalypse. The African American theoretical and cultural tradition elaborates an image of the end of the world that emphasises the non-revelatory nature of climate catastrophe, warns against associating collapse with rebirth, and articulates a mode of maroon survivalism in which the apocalypse is an event to be endured and escaped rather than fatalistically expected or infinitely delayed.

Frederick Douglass, Copyright, and the British Press, 1845-47

In 1845, Frederick Douglass established his copyright to the Narrative of the Life in the United States in order to receive just remuneration for his work. Yet Douglass also relied on a lack of international copyright law to disseminate his abolitionist message to a transatlantic audience. While Douglass made use of both copyright-protected and free-circulating forms of publication to reach a broad audience, he could not always control how his work and image would be reprinted and adapted in the transatlantic press. During his 1845-7 lecture tour, British periodicals and newspapers creatively recontextualised, abridged, and plagiarised his Narrative in articles and reviews. These forms of reuse were conventional in the publishing world of the 1840s, yet when viewed from a modern perspective, they seem to echo the exploitative practices associated with the American slave system.

Slavery and Abolition in Chartist Thought and Culture, 1838–1850

In Britain between 1838 and 1858, the Chartist movement demanded the implementation of the ‘Six Points’, a parcel of parliamentary reforms centred on universal male suffrage. Despite the movement's recognized importance, little study has been made into Chartism's attitude towards slavery and abolitionism. This article will provide the first comprehensive study of this topic, from Chartism's origins in the 1830s until its decline in the decade after 1848. It will illustrate that Chartism was influenced by the radical labour component of the ‘Democratic’ coalition that supported President Andrew Jackson. This helped reinforce amongst early Chartists theories that wage labour was more exploitative than chattel slavery, alongside a racist reaction to West Indian emancipation more extreme than has previously been acknowledged. By 1842, however, various changes within the movement helped bring to the fore more consistently anti-slavery and even anti-racist sentiment with Chartist culture, as did growing exposure to American abolitionism, especially that of William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass. The development of the anti-slavery ‘Free Soil’ ideology amongst American labour radicals profoundly influenced the late Chartist position on slavery by inserting abolition into Chartist aspirations for land reform. Consequently, a core component of late Chartism was its own anti-slavery ‘Free Soil’ ideology, which greatly informed pro-Union working-class agitation during the American Civil War.

The Empire Club Strikes Back

A key flaw in the standard, culturalist interpretation is that prohibitionism was a “whitelash” of conservative, rural, nativists “disciplining” of immigrants and blacks. The reality of 1840s New York was completely different: not only were Irish immigrants more likely to be temperate than their nativist, American counterparts (Chapter 5), but the focus of temperance activism—the money-making liquor traffic—was actually in the hands of established white nativists like “Captain” Isaiah Rynders, “Boss” Tweed, and the corrupt Tammany Hall machine. In upstate New York, temperance-abolitionist-suffragist reformers--including Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Amelia Bloomer, and Susan B. Anthony--began a movement for women’s equality born of their temperance activism. Concurrent with the 1853 World’s Fair in New York, Rynders and his Know-Nothings clashed, physically, with the equal-rights reformers from upstate, whose temperance threatened the financial foundations of the Tammany Hall political machine.

“All Great Reforms Go Together”—Temperance and Abolitionism

This chapter begins with the starting point of conventional temperance narratives: Lyman Beecher’s Six Sermons on Intemperance (1826), and the American Temperance Society (ATS). Rather than being an admonishment against drinking, his sermons condemned the selling of drink, thus underscoring how the modern temperance movement always tilted against the profit motive of the liquor traffic rather than against booze itself. Understanding prohibitionism as a weapon of the weak, this chapter examines the overlooked role of black temperance at a time when abolitionism and temperance were virtually synonymous. In 1851 Maine rescinded all liquor-selling licenses, making it the first prohibition state: a move applauded by Frederick Douglass and black activists, who equated the bonds of addiction with the bonds of slavery. Even the great emancipator himself—the famously temperate Abraham Lincoln—was instrumental in passing Illinois’s “Maine Law” while a state legislator.