Sandy's Root, Douglass's Mêtis: "Black Art" and the Craft of Resistance in the Slave Narratives of Frederick Douglass

IF 0.1 0 LITERATURE, AMERICAN
John Brooks
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引用次数: 0

Abstract

Abstract:This essay shows how Frederick Douglass's first two autobiographies, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845) and My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), ambiguously represent the power of African cosmologies in ways that might disorient the nineteenth-century white readership into rethinking the illogic of slavery. I argue that Douglass evokes Yorùbá folk knowledge in his characterizations of Sandy Jenkins and his supernatural root, and that the narratives' performance of objectivity and neutrality when representing them creates a sensibility of conceptual instability in the narratives. In his cryptic representations, I explain, Douglass enlivens mêtis—a technique in which speakers feign one purpose to cleverly achieve their opposite—as a radical rhetorical appeal. By showing how the narratives' treatment of African cosmologies can implant uncertainty that raises questions about the logic that legitimated chattel slavery, this essay establishes Douglass's autobiographies as early experiments with radical black aesthetics.
桑迪的根,道格拉斯的Mêtis:弗雷德里克·道格拉斯的奴隶叙事中的“黑色艺术”和反抗工艺
摘要:本文展示了弗雷德里克·道格拉斯的前两部自传《美国奴隶弗雷德里克·道格拉斯的一生》(1845年)和《我的奴役与自由》(1855年)如何模糊地代表了非洲宇宙观的力量,从而可能使19世纪的白人读者迷失方向,重新思考奴隶制的非逻辑性。我认为道格拉斯在对桑迪·詹金斯及其超自然根源的刻画中唤起了Yorùbá民间知识,而叙事在表现它们时对客观性和中立性的表现在叙事中创造了一种概念不稳定的敏感性。我解释道,在他的隐晦表述中,道格拉斯激活了mêtis-a技巧,演讲者假装一个目的,巧妙地达到相反的目的——作为一种激进的修辞诉求。通过展示叙事对非洲宇宙论的处理如何植入不确定性,从而引发了对使奴隶制度合法化的逻辑的质疑,这篇文章将道格拉斯的自传确立为激进黑人美学的早期实验。
本文章由计算机程序翻译,如有差异,请以英文原文为准。
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