Who’s Afraid of Virginia’s Nat Turner?

Stowe learned from Douglass about the preemptive violence that could be generated through emotional relays and Chapter 2 shows how her second abolitionist novel Dred recasts The Confessions of Nat Turner through her unique use of the mesmeric crisis. That she does so by turning away from her familiar sentimental focus in Uncle Tom’s Cabin tells us something about the shadow archive that she begins to explore after reading “The Heroic Slave.” With its titular pun, Dred attempts to defuse the white fear of black supremacy that came with the legacy of Haiti and the tradition of Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner. In the process Stowe steps beyond her usual resort to personal feeling, with its familiar dyadic structure, to take up the collective and electric properties of the “crisis state” where sentimental distance is collapsed in uncontained transmissions of terror. The influence of Douglass is manifest in Stowe’s reconsideration of the word “thing” and her understanding of the contaminating power of a threat that always comes from the future.

Postlude

Du Bois borrows the idea of the interrupted lecture to develop his case study of Andrew Johnson in Black Reconstruction. Johnson represents the type of man that John Brown did not expect to find in the slave-holding world: someone who began his political career by hating the aristocrats responsible for slavery. Du Bois finds a potential for cross-racial alliance in a famous Tennessee lecture where Johnson is interrupted and hailed as a “Moses” of the color line. Even though the record of the lecture also exhibits traces of Johnson’s well-known racial prejudice, Du Bois momentarily suspends judgment in an effort to invite his reader into an anarchic space. Johnson would later perversely brag to Douglass about this stunning encounter but Du Bois rehearses Johnson’s positive response to the demands of his audience in order to challenge his reader to “demand the impossible” for themselves: the black reconstruction of democracy.

Interlude

“Interlude” aligns Mesmer’s “crisis state” with Freud’s 1909 discussion of the interrupted lecture. Intended to explain psychoanalysis to an America audience, Freud’s analogy also informs the psychological insights Douglass engages when describing the many interruptions he experienced. Two examples—an encounter in Five Points and at a political convention in Philadelphia—show his traumatic theory in action. The public account of such exchanges generates a form of immediacy that Douglass strives to recreate in his telescoping autobiographical narratives. With an assist from Kaja Silverman and Sara Ahmed, “Interlude” follows two analogies in the Douglass archive where he compares people to things (a speeding train, Paganini’s violin) in a vibrant new way. Thinking of his final work as an experiment in new media thickens their archival value and reveals the intersection of media and memory that Douglass enlists to transform the impossible demands of freedom into a “willful ecology” of support.

“More than Lynched”

Reading John Brown together with Black Reconstruction, Chapter 3 exposes the join of psychological and material concerns that Du Bois learns from Douglass. The anarchistic energy that Du Bois adopts to describe Brown is best articulated in Walter Benjamin’s early essay “On Violence.” As Judith Butler has argued, Benjamin borrowed the idea of the general strike from Georges Sorel to theorize a destructive power that is ironically pitched at violence itself. Such an idea matches the mesmeric notion of the “crisis state”: structurally it has a homeopathic dimension where an anticipated violence is reproduced to unmoor and undo its terror. Douglass shows his understanding of this unique destructive power when he expresses ambivalence about Brown’s invitation to join the raid on Harper’s Ferry, something Du Bois highlights by dwelling on the attention Douglass gives to Shields Green, the man who decided to “go down with the old man.”

Crisis and Rehearsal in Frederick Douglass

Chapter 1 shows Douglass increasingly sensitive to the way that abolition turned democracy into a traumatic genre for those in power. Seeking the elusive “thing” to be abolished for emancipation to be achieved, Douglass reworks the affiliation of mesmerism with the Haitian revolution through a variety of eclectic influences, as we see in “The Heroic Slave” and in his application of the early brain theory of George Combe. Defusing the hasty association between abolition and race war required careful rehearsals (or in Mesmer’s terms, the generation of a “crisis state”) in order to expose the dangerous power of such fears. With his future taken from him by slavery, Douglass studies the violent behavior of his masters and later audience members interrupting his abolitionist lectures. In the process he exposes the social horizon of temporal disruptions later informing the Freudian notion of afterwardsness.

Introduction

Mesmerism first arrived in the northern hemisphere through Haiti, and the link between mesmerism and slave insurrection that Douglass and Stowe revive before the Civil War is part of the fugitive archive of modernity. Because mesmerism is important to the early history of psychoanalysis, its affiliation with insurrection widens the psychic horizon to include the crisis triggered by the “impossible demands” of emancipation. Recognition of that enduring sense of crisis unites the work of Douglass, Stowe, and Du Bois and opens to view the environmental power shaping early trauma theory. Hegel believed that the transmission of affect at the center of the mesmeric crisis could supersede normal channels of communication while Douglass and Stowe found such relays alternately promising and threatening for democratic practice. Significantly, the temporal dimensions of Mesmer’s crisis state allowed for an extended recalibration of the ongoing moment, or “the future in the present.”