Celeste-Marie Bernier

‘Several lives in one’: will the real Frederick Douglass please stand up?

So Frederick Douglass concludes the final edition of his last autobiography, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, published in 1892 a few years before he died and so Robert Levine effortlessly examines these ‘several lives’ in his inspirational study, The Lives of Frederick Douglass. As Levine demonstrates, despite the repeated assurances Douglass himself gave not only to himself but to others on a public as well as a private stage, his lifelong determination to define, let alone identify, his ‘several lives in one’ was one of never ending struggle. Writing in the 1890s as the Frederick Douglass – quintessential elder statesman, renowned celebrity, and political campaigner – despite all his protests that the ‘life of slavery’ let alone the life ‘of a fugitive from slavery’ was in the far and distant past, the memory of ‘Frederick Bailey, the slave’ lived on. No matter what Douglass did – deliver spell-binding speeches, pen manifestos of reform, participate in conventions, lead radical campaigns, and as Levine emphasizes, write his many ‘lives’ into existence – he was unable to extricate himself from a ‘life of conflict and battle.’ As his multiple lives and multitude of published and unpublished writings reveal, Douglass confronted the ongoing legacies of a bodily wounding as well as a psychological and emotional scarring that ensured that a ‘life of victory’ was always, as Langston Hughes was prophetically to declare decades later, a ‘dream deferred.’ As Levine argues, nowhere was this strain regarding the realities Douglass endured in a ‘life’ of only ‘comparative’ rather than unequivocal ‘freedom’ more in evidence than in his decision, for which read compulsion, to use every literary genre and narrative form available in which to write himself into existence across his lifetime.

Tracing Transatlantic Slavery: In Kimathi Donkor's UK Diaspora

41 • November 2017 108 • Nka DOI 10.1215/10757163-4271674

The Slave Ship Imprint: Representing the Body, Memory, and History in Contemporary African American and Black British Painting, Photography, and Installation Art

ion in a rejection of a socially determinist and seemingly clear-cut comprehensibility, black artists then and now give new life not only to the corporeal and visceral but also to the imaginative and artistic realities of black lives in order to extrapolate the untold and unseen histories, narratives, and memories of transatlantic slavery. On first glance, the prominence of the slave ship “diagram” turned “imprint” within the works

Slavery and memory in black visual culture: Introduction

Over the centuries, the imaginative inner lives of millions of enslaved African, AfricanAmerican and African Caribbean women, men and children bought and sold into transatlantic slavery have remained beyond the pale of a white racist imaginary. Simultaneously hypervisibilised and hyperinvisibilised according to white supremacist filters of perception and dominant modes of representation, slavery’s faces and bodies have remained both well-worn and under-researched territory. Alternately dehumanised and vilified by anti slavery and proslavery iconography, black bodies gained powerful currency as spectacularised objects of pornographic display, theatricalised entertainment, political propaganda, scientific enquiry and anthropological investigation. Circulating within and in relation to an array of white generated works of fine art (paintings, murals, statuary and drawings), popular propaganda (cartoons, caricatures and advertisements) and diverse material artefacts (shackles, commemorative pottery and miniaturised portraits), the physical and psychological realities of black men and women have been distorted and denied if not entirely eradicated. Regardless, the stranglehold of a white racist European and European American imaginary pales into political and aesthetic insignificance in the face of a centurieslong tradition of African, African-American and African Caribbean art-making and visual production. Imaging and imagining an array of black diasporic histories into existence, black artists have wrested control over the formal and thematic parameters of self-representation. Social, political and cultural critique fuse in their vast outpouring of paintings, sketches, prints, lithographs, woodcuts, statuary, murals, quilts, photographs, pottery, graffiti, performance and mixed-media installation art. Writ large across their eclectic bodies of work is a determination to implode polarised formal and thematic boundaries in order to establish an alternative visual language characterised by diverse practices of signification, multiplicity and patterns of exchange. Over a wide-ranging time-frame and geographical milieu, artists working across the black diaspora have liberated black bodies and souls from their widespread Slavery & Abolition, 2013 Vol. 34, No. 2, 197–201, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0144039X.2013.791170