Our Bondage and Our Freedom: Struggles for Liberty in the Lives and Works of Frederick Douglass and His Family (1818-1920)

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Working to develop an alternative interdisciplinary framework, this project investigates the legendary example of Frederick Douglass as a renowned formerly enslaved and self-emancipated liberator in conjunction with the under-researched biographies and writings authored by his daughters and sons: Rosetta, Lewis Henry, Frederick Jr., Charles Remond and Annie Douglass. By reinterpreting the writings of the mythologised figure of Frederick Douglass within the context of his neglected family members, it is possible to reconceptualise dominant scholarly paradigms according to which the iconic and exceptional few are theorised over and above the individual and invisibilised many when it comes to black lives. An interdisciplinary project drawing together early, mid and senior career academics, activists, archivists and artists and aimed at specialist and general audiences, this proposed research consists of a literary biography, a family biography/scholarly anthology, a UK exhibition, 2 US companion exhibits, guided exhibition and Edinburgh black history city tours, a public educational programme, an academic conference, a US workshop on engaged scholarship, 2 refereed journal special issues, a commemorative plaque, an exhibition guide and 4 educational learning guides and online resources for use in universities, schools, adult-learning environments and by the general public. At the heart of this project is the conviction that the only way in which to do justice to the under-researched writings and artworks produced by black women, children and men bought and sold into transatlantic slavery, and for whom the written word and the image remained contested terrain, is to develop a cross-, multi- and inter- disciplinary scholarly practice. Dominant theoretical models do not apply. Researchers must develop alternative analytical approaches in order to examine black authored literary and visual arts traditions forged in the interstices of legal, physical, cultural, historical, psychological and imaginative subjugation. Just as black authors and artists developed self-reflexively experimental textual and visual practices as they took on the burden of representation by acknowledging that, as Douglass insisted, "language has no power" and "images are mute" when faced with the impossibility of representing the tragedies of chattel slavery and its traumatising legacies, we as scholars must take on the burden of interpretation by developing a new theoretical language. I take the view that we are not there yet by arguing for the intellectual and political necessity of working with interdisciplinary methodologies within Black Studies, African Diasporic Studies, Slavery Studies, American Studies, Memory Studies and Social Justice Studies as the only way in which to investigate the otherwise missing historical, social, cultural, philosophical, ideological, political, psychological and aesthetic contexts of black lives. I take inspiration from Audre Lorde to argue that an interdisciplinary examination of black literary and visual arts traditions establishes that it is not the "master's tools" but the "slaves' tools" that succeed in "dismantling" the "master's house." During the two-hundred year anniversary of his birth in 2018 and in a Black Lives Matter era, the Douglass needed now is no representative self-made man but a fallible, mortal individual. It was not only Douglass but his family members who despaired of "committing to paper the pain" they experienced as the "wounds upon the soul" defied textual or visual expression. The onus is on academics, archivists, artists and activists to harness every intellectual tool available in order to tell the story not only of the enslaved but of black women and men experiencing freedoms that were in name only in a post-emancipation era. For Douglass' rallying cry, "My Bondage and My Freedom" it is possible to read: "Our Bondage and Our Freedom."