February 15, 2017 - 10:06
I found an article this morning that speaks to one of the questions we were worrying y'day afternoon: the degree to which Douglass' Narrative was edited by the abolitionists. See
Rachel A. Blumenthal, “Canonicity, Genre, and the Politics of Editing: How We Read Frederick Douglass,” Callaloo 36, 1 (Winter 2013):178-190:
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/507658/pdf
[Although Garrison says in the introduction to Douglass’ Narrative, “It is…entirely his own production,”] Frederick Douglass explains in his second autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), that his white abolitionist advocates wanted only “facts” from Douglass so that they could “take care of the philosophy”….
Garrison delivered speeches by “taking me as his text,” writes Douglass, reminding the reader that text—whether human or written—is a fragile and mutable object of analysis, and that his own life…was partially co-opted by Garrison as one strand of evidence in a larger abolitionist project….
suggest[ing] a difficulty of African American, ex-slave life-writing—how do readers, editors, and critics settle on a representation of a life history which risks being absorbed in political projects (such as white abolitionism) that read and edit black writing as representative of black experience?
…. Douglass forcefully counters white editorial and managerial politics as early as the 1845 Narrative….disembodies himself in the appendix by inhabiting the role of literary critic. In doing so, he is…an outsider who claims the right to comment upon and judge his foregoing work…..He is not just the subject of the narrative, but its author and its reader....His brief analysis of the “tone and manner” of his autobiography marks his presence outside of the text.
In [the] 1855 edition, Douglass mounts a sharp critique of his state of freedom and the white abolitionists who shaped it. He quotes John A. Collins, an agent of the Massachusetts anti-slavery society, as dubbing Douglass a “graduate from the peculiar institution with my diploma written on my back!” Nowhere does Douglass chafe more explicitly against his status as a textual object for the white abolitionists than when he writes of his experience in the lecture circuit:
'I was generally introduced as a “chattel”—a “thing”—a piece of southern “property”—the chairman assuring the audience that it could speak. Fugitive slaves, at that time, were not so plentiful as now; and as a fugitive slave lecturer, I had the advantage of being a “brand new fact,” the first one out…..'
It is…undesirable to imprison [texts] in generic categories that violate the very politics of text, authorship, and philosophy they work so hard to espouse.