Staging Dissensus

This chapter explores speeches and essays by Frederick Douglass to show the peculiarities of democratic claims making from an understanding of the people not as a unified subject but as a form of political subjectification. It focuses on Douglass’s most celebrated address, “The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro.” The chapter describes and analyzes how Douglass exemplifies a form of political subjectification called a “constituent moment,” in which someone gladly speaks in the name of a certain group but does not have the authority to do so. It illuminates the connections between the formal and constitutional dimensions of Douglass’s speeches and explores his consideration of the power of claims enacted through practice as well as speech. Moreover, the chapter examines the art of rhetoric and how Douglass’s delivery of the famous speech in 1852 demonstrates an example of “staging dissensus.”

Frederick Douglass

This chapter looks at Frederick Douglass’s through a Straussian argument that the black’s greatest struggle was the struggle to become part of the American political community. His own struggle to become part of the civilization that white men possessed at the time was based in this desire for there to be a black presence in American politics. Douglass saw that the transition to include African Americans in politics must be done without damaging the basic structure of that civilization. He also stressed how blacks needed to make the most of the opportunities that were available to them so that more opportunities could open up, not just for them but for the community at large. He strove for blacks to work and be the best at what they do because their doing so would disrupt the system and lead to justice.

“The Human Heart Is a Seat of Constant War”

This chapter reconstructs what Frederick Douglass thought about human nature to deepen peoples understanding of the foundations of his political morality and to counter criticisms of liberal views of human nature. It lays out the base critiques of the liberal view of human nature in modern Western political thought and shows how Douglass viewed the competing tendencies of human beings in order to form a nuanced idea of human nature. Going into the debates in the liberal community, it cites the differing opinions of Thomas Jefferson, Reinhold Niebuhr, and John Locke. With a focus on the dualities that make up Douglass’s view on the subject, this chapter shows how his view shaped his experiences and the way he interacted with the world. The dynamism that makes up Douglass’s idea of human nature makes it a viewpoint to be taken seriously and reflects the tensions inherent within the subject.

Lectures on Liberation

This chapter presents a selection of the lectures that Professor Angela Davis gave in her “Recurring Philosophical Themes in Black Literature” course at the University of California, Los Angeles. These lectures are meant to highlight the less talked about parts of the history and enslavement of black people and to place that history in an illuminating philosophical context. Two lectures are presented in this chapter. The first explains one of the central pillars of oppression, how keeping an oppressed class ignorant and uneducated is a key way to keep them in a disadvantaged state, and uses the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass to show certain philosophical themes. For the second lecture, Davis uses the Narrative once again to show the contradictory way slaveholders practiced Christianity and justified unfreedom through religious texts.

Masters, Mistresses, Slaves, and the Antinomies of Modernity

Modernity is a notion widely debated, whether it is the periodization of modernity or the attributes defining the modern period. Jürgen Habermas situates the Enlightenment as a moment of critique of the early-modern period and the reimagining of modernity after the Age of Reason. This chapter argues that Habermas’s call for completing the unfinished project of the Enlightenment fails to acknowledge the defining moment of modernity—New World slavery—and the agents of the modernizing process—the slaves. The chapter investigates the dynamics of mastery and slavery that are at the center of modernity through close examination of Frederick Douglass’s only work of fiction, The Heroic Slave (1853), supplemented with references to “The Claims of the Negro Ethnologically Considered” (1854) and Douglass’s slave narratives. The memory of slavery, the chapter contends, is integral to theorizations of freedom.

Political Thought in the Shadow of Douglass

This introduction is meant to give the reader some background about the life and times of Frederick Douglass. He escaped from slavery in his twenties and for the rest of his life only grew in renown. Douglass is shown to be a multifaceted and versatile thinker whose personality was a mixture of contradictions, from being both an abolitionist and a statesman to being a romantic and a realist. Now he is a canonical figure in North American letters, and his influence is demonstrated to be more prominent than ever. The introduction describes factors that complicate assessments of Douglass’s political thought and outlines intellectual gaps in the scholarship on Douglass that require proper commentary. It also looks at the Black Lives Matter movement in conjunction with Frederick Douglass’s political thought. The two are compared and found to have much in common in that both focus on cultivating black dignity to insist on the value of black lives.

“A Blending of Opposite Qualities”

This chapter focuses on the blending of Frederick Douglass’s seemingly dissimilar perspectives. It starts off with a personal anecdote about how Douglass watched a speech against the Irish Force Bill in England’s Parliament and noted how the speaker, William Gladstone, used a mixture of persuasive language and menacingly accusatory language. Douglass showed a similar duality in his perspectives as a slave and then a free man. The chapter looks closely at the many microrevisions Douglass made to the same topics and experiences in his various autobiographies to show his struggle with finding the terminology to express his blended view. His revisions indicate how Douglass increasingly paid attention to philosophical analysis as time went on and reveal a man trying to express his political thought with terminology that had not yet been created because prior thinkers did not have the experience of being a slave. The chapter ultimately addresses Douglass’s understanding of democratic citizenship.

The Affect of God’s Law

This chapter looks at Frederick Douglass through his connection with God’s law, showing how this law created a complicated relationship between Douglass and the US Constitution. It shows how Douglass used God’s work to fight against slavery and looks at passages from the Declaration of Independence to show the connection between freedom as a right and God’s law. It examines Douglass’s views on natural law in conjunction with his views and use of God’s law to create a complex portrait of both. Concluding with Douglass’s fight with Edward Covey, this chapter shows how Douglass grappled with the fear of death before he managed to cease alienating his “soul” from himself. From this moment, Douglass began to imagine God and how God’s law names the possibility for the world to be more just.

Douglass’s Declarations of Independence and Practices of Politics

This chapter takes Frederick Douglass’s work My Bondage and My Freedom and brings it into conversation with W. E. B. Du Bois’s essay collection The Souls of Black Folk. This comparison is intended to complicate the traditional understanding of African American political thought by looking at Du Bois’s reliance on the authority of Douglass in his critique of other black leaders, such as Booker T. Washington. This reliance has caused the two to be lumped together as assimilationists despite the fact that Douglass shows himself to be more a reconstructionist than an assimilationist. Also contrasting the two, this chapter takes a critical look at Du Bois’s defense of the politics of expressive self-realization, which is predicated on the anomaly theory of white supremacy, and shows how Souls argues against this expressivist viewpoint and reveals white supremacy as a nonanomalous form of domination. Furthermore, the chapter describes plantation politics and the ramifications of it for unfreedom and struggles to achieve the free life.

Law-breaker

This chapter goes over the history of Fredrick Douglass’s early life, especially his fight with and escape from Edward Covey, the slave breaker. It starts with his birth on Maryland’s treacherous Eastern Shore and delves into his time as a slave and the time he was forced to serve Covey. It chronicles his escape from slavery in a context of uncertainty as well as some of the interesting views that derived from his ability to read and educate himself. The chapter then goes on to show how Douglass’s background as a law-breaker informed his political views and how lawbreaking contributes to slaves’ process of becoming free. Douglass recognized the imperative authority of the law while understanding that each individual has sovereignty over himself or herself.