Fionnghuala Sweeney

Visual Culture and Fictive Technique in Frederick Douglass's The Heroic Slave

The Heroic Slave (1853) was perhaps the most significant of Douglasss responses to Harriet Beecher Stowes abolitionist blockbuster, Uncle Toms Cabin (1852). Working against the sentimental abstractions inflecting white narrative and visual aesthetics in the period, Douglasss fictive technique invokes the visual realism of the daguerreotype. Written at a moment at which the very existence of African American freedom seemed to be under threat, the novella produces enabling fiction of self-emancipation directed not only at the slave South, but seeking to generate a futurist political vision, based on inclusive citizenship, for free black people in the North. In doing so, it marks a retreat from the celebratory transnationalism that had infused Douglasss earlier politics.

Domestic Institutions: Transatlantic Gender Politics and Economic Power in Frederick Douglass' Variant Narratives

Shortly after Frederick Douglass arrived in Ireland in September 1845, his autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself was republished in Dublin by Webb and Chapman. The reasons for the republication were both dogmatic and economic. Aside from providing an opportunity for the dissemination of an anti-slavery argument of impact and importance, proceeds from the sale of the book provided Douglass with a degree of financial independence. While Douglass was in Europe, it was doubly important that he have an assured source of income with which to support himself and his family in the United States. For although tours by United States abolitionists in Europe were often used to promote and increase financial as well as moral support for the anti-slavery cause by encouraging contributions to anti-slavery Bazaars and other fund-raising activities, the out-of-pocket expenses of speakers on that circuit might not necessarily be met in full by anti-slavery organizations. Sales of the Narrative in Ireland significantly augmented Douglass’ overseas returns, providing him with a sizeable income above and beyond payment for his immediate expenses. Lecture tours appear to have proved lucrative for black speakers in Ireland, who aroused uncommon sympathy and support throughout the country. Writing in early 1842 shortly after Charles Lennox Remond’s departure for the United States, Richard D. Webb claimed that ‘Remond carried more money out of Ireland for himself than Collins got for the American Anti-Slavery Society. This was, first, because he was a coloured man; then because he was eloquent – then because he has good manners – then because he is young, handsome and interesting.’ Younger, by all accounts extremely handsome, and correspondingly more interesting, Frederick Douglass could expect, and indeed received, substantial support from the abolitionist community and its satellites in Ireland.

Memory, Mobility, Modernity: Archibald Motley's Portraits and the Art of ‘Serious Painting’

This article considers Archibald Motley Jr.s academic portraiture as an address to the conjoined difficulties of the African-American as a subject of representation and the African-American body as an artefact of slavery. It argues that his work, by marshalling the conventions of this conservative, patriarchal form, stages scripted performances of critical citizenship that situate the work of art as a cosmopolitan site of diasporic memory, transforming the language of genre into an aesthetic of black identity. Cognisant of the relationship between African-American visual and literary culture, of their cooperative relationship in facilitating the telling of tales, the making of subjects and the transformation of those subjects into works of art, Motley chose a form whose precedents, the series of frontispiece portraits to literary works that emerged in the eighteenth century, were embedded in a radical history of self-making. Rather than remaining locked in nineteenth-century models of representation, unable to enter fully into an expressive understanding of the value of modernist aesthetics and their detemporalised symbolist codes, Motley stages a sophisticated challenge to new art practices, resisting the easy universalism of primitivist expression and its depoliticising relationship to constructions of modern subjectivity. His painting confirms that, for the black artist in the 1920s, the aesthetics of time, space, politics and citizenship were conjunctural, mutually complicating and interlinked.

The black Atlantic, American studies and the politics of the postcolonial

Abstract Twelve years of scholarship in the field of black-Atlantic-meets-American studies has resulted in a substantial body of knowledge around the extraterritorial excursions of US subjects and their cultural output. Despite the opportunities that the black Atlantic offered, it has begun to seem that the repositioning of academic perspective it stems from has itself become part of the discursive problems surrounding US American studies. This article suggests that it is time to rethink (black) Atlantic studies in the context of its partial institutionalization within the academy. First, it revisits the methodological and theoretical possibilities the field offered. Second, it examines some of the shortcomings which, in the early stages of the project, it was possible to overlook if not entirely ignore. Third, it looks at developments in the field of postcolonial studies, suggesting some conceptual tensions of relevance to postcolonial, US American, and American studies more generally.

Common ground: positioning Ireland within studies of slavery, anti-slavery and empire*

ABSTRACT This article positions Ireland as a significant literary and political space for fugitive slaves, and for black anti-slavery activism more generally. William Wells Brown, Frederick Douglass, Samuel Ringgold Ward, Henry Highland Garnet and Amanda Smith were amongst those who visited and wrote about Ireland in the antebellum and postbellum periods. Their writing portrays Ireland and their Irish experience quite differently, but in ways that help position Ireland within the wider political currents of slavery, anti-slavery and empire. It considers Ireland as a literary space which facilitated the publication of black and abolitionist literature in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The article also evaluates some of the literary and historical opportunities that exist to elaborate the theme of Ireland, slavery, anti-slavery and empire, and situates the following articles as examples of this emerging body of work.

It Will Come at Last: Acts of Emancipation in the Art, Culture and Politics of the Black Diaspora

For enslaved African Americans in the antebellum period, emancipation was writ large as the most pressing of political imperatives stemming from the most fundamental obligations of justice and humanity. That it could be achieved individually was clear from the activities of countless runaways, fugitives and cultural and political activists, Douglass and Jacobs included, who escaped territories of enslavement to become self-emancipated subjects on free soil. That it could be achieved collectively was evidenced by the success of the Haitian Revolution, with its army of enslaved and free black persons. This piece explores the ways in which emancipation is understood 150 years after US Emancipation at the end of the Civil War, and provides an introduction to the new scholarship on the many acts of emancipation, memorialization and practices of freedom discussed in this special issue.

‘Beautiful, radiant things’: Aesthetics, experience and feminist practice A response to Kathy Davis

Many thanks to Kathy Davis for her provocative exploration of the possibility of tango and the immanent pleasure of performance as objects of enquiry in a paper that opens up a rich range of discursive and critical possibilities that challenge models of feminist practice and understandings of social scientific analysis alike. At the risk of being too reductive for even an inevitably cursory response, I would like to try to think into and around just one of the key questions here, which concerns the ways in which experience and pleasure can be factored into social scientific models of analysis, reversing current critical tendencies that, as she puts it, ‘place politics before experience’. How might Davis’ reflections on the question, ‘Should a feminist dance tango?’ help derive a strategic model of expressive dissent, a radical driver for intellectual activism in contemporary feminism? Is such a shift in paradigm either desirable or possible? How might we place experience before politics, and in doing so begin to generate a new politics of experience? Let me begin with the misquotation attributed to anarchist feminist Emma Goldman, the famous phrase, ‘If I can’t dance I don’t want to be in your revolution’. The statement is an imaginary paraphrase of her response to criticism from fellow anarchists, who reproached her for dancing with carefree abandon on the grounds that it ‘did not behove an agitator to dance’. ‘I did not believe’, Goldman later wrote, ‘that a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal, [ . . . ] for release and freedom from conventions and prejudice, should demand denial of life and joy. [ . . . ] If it meant that, I did not want it. I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody’s right to beautiful, radiant things’ (2008: 56). That ‘wanting’, the right to self-expression Goldman claims as the basis of a selfsovereignty whose origin is in desire, is marked by its resistance to frameworks of

Liberating Sojourns? African Americans and Transatlantic Abolition 1845–1865

In October 2009, in front of Leeds City Museum, a black British artist emerged from a packing box, in which he had been placed for nearly three hours, to a crowd of onlookers and local media. Dressed in Victorian garb, he ventriloquised a speech that had been made close to that spot over 150 years before. Simeon Barclay had determined to do the journey from Bradford to Leeds in the box in homage to the escaped slave Henry ‘Box’ Brown. Brown, who had escaped in a packing box from Richmond, Virginia, to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1849, made the performative potential of his escape methodology the centrepiece of an abolitionist ‘roadshow’ he brought across the Atlantic and then toured throughout Britain. In West Yorkshire, he had determined to make the emergence from the box even more spectacular by having himself mailed and conveyed on the train from Bradford to Leeds. In May 1851, ‘he was packed up . . . at Bradford’ and forwarded to Leeds on the 6 p.m. train.

Other Peoples' History: Slavery, Refuge and Irish Citizenship in Dónal O Kelly's The Cambria

The 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade has gone officially unmarked in the Republic of Ireland. Although remaining outside the historical narratives of all political traditions in the state, however, both slavery and anti-slavery had significant impact on the economics of this corner of what was the British Empire. Recently, following four centuries of population haemorrhage, the state has sought to limit the citizenship rights of its new immigrant population. Dónal O Kellys play, The Cambria, is one of the few contemporary responses to the Irish exceptionalist tradition. This article argues that the play seeks to insert one peripheral memory of slavery into a contemporary narrative of Irish republicanism. As an intervention, it presents a challenge to narrowly defined narratives of citizenship. As importantly, it reconsiders the meaning of the social contract within republicanism, and the degree to which history may enable it.