Abstract
This article examines the geographical and metaphorical journeys of such nineteenth-century antislavery lecturers as Frederick Douglass and William Wells Brown, who crossed the Atlantic to visit Great Britain, France, and Italy. Black travellers crossed the ocean, as Douglass put it, to combat ‘American prejudice against the darker colored races’. Douglass and Brown used different strategies that were available to black men to perform racial protest against discrimination and prejudice. As they moved across the ocean, they challenged American white supremacist ideology by reinventing their identities as cultured cosmopolitans engaged in a journey from discrimination to acculturation, moving toward acceptance and equality.
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Martha Schoolman, ‘Violent Places: Three Years in Europe and the Question of William Wells Brown’s Cosmopolitanism’, ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 58, no. 1 (2012): 3; italics original.
A. Leon Higginbotham Jr. and Barbara K. Kopytoff, ‘Racial Purity and Interracial Sex in the Law of Colonial and Antebellum Virginia’, in Interracialism: Black-White Intermarriage in American History, Literature, and Law, ed. Werner Sollors (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 89.
Cheryl Harris, ‘Whiteness as Property’, in Black on White: Black Writers on What It Means to Be White, ed. David R. Roediger (New York: Random House, 1998), 104.
James Clifford, ‘Mixed Feelings’, in Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation, ed. Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 369; for definitions, see also
Pheng Cheah, ‘Introduction Part II: The Cosmopolitacal - Today’, in Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation, ed. Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 22.
Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), xv
Kwame Anthony Appiah, ‘Cosmopolitan Patriots’, in Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation, ed. Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 98.
Alan Rice, Radical Narratives of the Black Atlantic (London: Continuum, 2003), 175.
Douglas H. Maynard, ‘The World’s Anti-Slavery Convention of 1840’, Mississippi Valley Historical Review 47, no. 3 (1960): 452.
Stephen Knadler, ‘At Home in the Crystal Palace: African American Transnationalism and the Aesthetics of Representative Democracy’, ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 56, no. 4 (2011): 334–5.
See also Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 35.
Harris, ‘Whiteness’, 114.
F. M. Holland, ‘Frederick Douglass’, Open Court 393, no. 9 (7 March 1895): 4416, https://doi.org/opensiuc.lib.siu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4922&context=ocj (accessed January 11, 2015.
J. Madison Davis and A. Daniel Frankforter, The Shakespeare Name Dictionary (New York: Garland, 1995), 131
David Bevington, ed., The Oxford Shakespeare: Henry IV, Part 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 131, 277.
Frederick Douglass, ‘The Color Line’, North American Review 132, no. 295 (June 1881): 568, 571.
Douglass, ‘Color’, 571.
Douglass, ‘Color’, 571.
R. J. M. Blackett, Building an Antislavery Wall: Black Americans in the Atlantic Abolitionist Movement 1830-1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983), 40.
Douglass, ‘Color’, 572-3.
Paul Giles, ‘Douglass’s Black Atlantic: Britain, Europe, Egypt’, in The Cambridge Companion to Frederick Douglass, ed. Maurice S. Lee (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 138.
Theodore Stanton, ‘Frederick Douglass in Paris’, Open Court 1, no. 6 (1887): 151, 153.
William Wells Brown, Three Years in Europe; Or, Places I Have Seen and People I Have Met, [1852] (London: Dodo Press, 2009), 4.
Brown, Three, 4.
See also Arthur Riss, Race, Slavery, and Liberalism in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 1.
Brown, Three, 88, 124.
Shirley J. Yee, Black Women Abolitionists: A Study in Activism, 1828-1860 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1993), 49; for more about the importance of education, see also Gilroy, Black, 123
Michael F. Higginbotham, Ghosts of Jim Crow: Ending Racism in Post-Racial America (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 56.
Brown, Three, 88.
See also Rice, Radical, 174-81.
Brown, Three, 9; Charles Baraw, ‘William Wells Brown, Three Years in Europe, and Fugitive Tourism’, African American Review 44, no. 3 (2011): 462.
During the same overseas tour, it saddened him to realise that in Egypt women were ‘kept in ignorance and degraded’ by men who ‘own them as slaves are owned’. Frederick Douglass, Frederick Douglass Diary (Tour of Europe and Africa), https://doi.org/www.loc.gov/resource/mfd.01001/?st=gallery (accessed January 15, 2015), 8-12; 40, 42; underlining original.
William W. Stowe, Going Abroad: European Travel in Nineteenth-Century American Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 133.
Baraw, ‘Brown’, 455.
Brown, Three, 17, 27-8, 62; italics original; Éliane Lucas, Étude sur Victor Hugo: Le Dernier Jour d’un condamné (Paris: Ellipses, 2000), 6–13.
Brown, Three, 18.
Brown, Three, 27.
Brown, Three, 22.
Brown, Three, 41, 69, 72, 76, 92.
Angela G. Ray, ‘Frederick Douglass on the Lyceum Circuit: Social Assimilation, Social Transformation?’, Rhetoric & Public Affairs 5, no. 4 (2002): 638.
Robert S. Levine, ‘Road to Africa: Frederick Douglass’s Rome’, African American Review 34, no. 2 (2000): 219.
Baraw, ‘Brown’, 454.
Blackett, Building, 41.
Frederick Douglass, The Frederick Douglass Papers, Vol. 5: 1881-95, ed. John W. Blassingame and John R. McKivigan (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 330.
Diane Barnes, ed., Frederick Douglass: A Life in Documents (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013), 167.
Douglass, Diary, 20-2; for Douglass’s tour, see also Gilroy, Black, 60.
Douglass, Diary, 24-5; Levine, ‘Road’, 223.
Douglass, Diary, 26.
For clothes as racial markers, see Mary McAleer Balkun, The American Counterfeit: Authenticity and Identity in American Literature and Culture (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2006)
Douglass, Diary, 25; Papers, 308.
Douglass, Diary, 40.
Douglass, Diary, 57-8.
Douglass, Diary, 60.
Frederick Douglass, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass Written By Himself (New York: Collier Books, 1962), 589.
see also William L. Andrews, To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography 1760-1865 (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 17–8.
Brown, Three, ‘Introduction’, n.p.
Henry Louis Gates Jr., Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the ‘Racial’ Self (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 103, 110.
Douglass, Life, 590.
Holland, ‘Douglass’, 4416.
Holland, ‘Douglass’, 4416.
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Sirpa Salenius is a Project Assistant Professor at the University of Tokyo, and she is also affiliated with the University of Eastern Finland. Her publications focus on Transatlantic Studies, on examining the presence of American artists and writers in Italy and on exploring gender, sexuality, and race in the transatlantic context. Among her recent books is Rose Elizabeth Cleveland: First Lady and Literary Scholar (2014) and An Abolitionist Abroad: Sarah Parker Remond in Cosmopolitan Europe (University of Massachusetts Press, forthcoming, 2016).
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Salenius, S. Troubling the white supremacy-black inferiority paradigm: Frederick Douglass and William Wells Brown in Europe. J Transatl Stud 14, 152–163 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1080/14794012.2016.1169872
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/14794012.2016.1169872