Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction: Frederick Douglass and the Atlantic World
- 1 ‘The Republic of Letters’: Frederick Douglass, Ireland and the Irish Narratives
- 2 Friends and Allies: The Economics of the Text
- 3 An American Slave: Representing the Creole Self
- 4 The Hidden Ireland: Social Commentary and Public Witness
- 5 ‘Mask in Motion’: Dialect Spaces and Class Representation
- 6 Race, Civilization, Empire
- 7 Models of Progress: Ireland, Haiti and the Atlantic
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
7 - Models of Progress: Ireland, Haiti and the Atlantic
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction: Frederick Douglass and the Atlantic World
- 1 ‘The Republic of Letters’: Frederick Douglass, Ireland and the Irish Narratives
- 2 Friends and Allies: The Economics of the Text
- 3 An American Slave: Representing the Creole Self
- 4 The Hidden Ireland: Social Commentary and Public Witness
- 5 ‘Mask in Motion’: Dialect Spaces and Class Representation
- 6 Race, Civilization, Empire
- 7 Models of Progress: Ireland, Haiti and the Atlantic
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The extended version of Frederick Douglass's Life and Times was published in 1892 with chapters additional to those of the earlier editions. These later chapters deal with Douglass's tour of Europe and North Africa, and with his Haitian diplomatic experiences. Their inclusion in the final version of his last autobiography illustrates the importance of Douglass's engagement with the realities of US expansion and the underpinning myths of empire to his construction of nationhood and representative identity. Another autobiographical publication of Douglass's latter years was a text that reworked his early transatlantic experience, entitled ‘Thoughts and Recollections of a Tour in Ireland’. Published in the AME Review in 1886, just before he embarked on the journey that would retrace and extend the path of his earlier travels, this piece is more or less contemporaneous with Douglass's Egyptian writing. It reveals some of the political views that fed into his autobiographical project at the time. It also allows for a comparison between Douglass's political stance on Irish Home Rule, and his views on Haiti, to whose history and current condition Douglass had previously compared Ireland.
For Douglass, the issues of emancipation, racial equality and citizenship were directly and inextricably linked to questions of nationhood and identity. The traditions and tropes in which that identity was encoded were also crucial to his own self-fashioning throughout his career. The contrary, however, was also true: in his role as fugitive, cultural tourist and diplomatic emissary, Douglass was instrumental in mediating transnational sites of US interest, and defining their place in the American cultural imaginary. This was as true of his early overseas experience in Ireland as it was of his later position as agent and representative of state in Haiti.
‘Thoughts and Recollections’ forms part of Douglass's journalistic contribution to American public life, in the early stages of which, Shelley Fishkin Fisher and Carla Peterson contend, he established the ‘we’ behind his Emersonian ‘I’ as a demarcation of those within and outside the abolitionist community. This dynamic of inclusion and exclusion permeates Douglass's writing: well after the formal abolition of slavery at the end of the Civil War, he continued in this binary mode – which was based on élite, civilizationist models of morality – particularly in discussions of international politics.
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- Frederick Douglass and the Atlantic World , pp. 163 - 187Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2007