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Frederick Douglass (1818--1895) was a prolific writer and public speaker whose impact on American literature and history has been long studied by historians and literary critics. Yet as political theorists have focused on the legacies of such notables as W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington, Douglass's profound influence on Afro-modern and American political thought has often been undervalued. In an effort to fill this gap in the scholarship on Douglass, editor Neil Roberts and an exciting group of established and rising scholars examine the author's autobiographies, essays, speeches, and novella. Together, they illuminate his genius for analyzing and articulating core American ideals such as independence, liberation, individualism, and freedom, particularly in the context of slavery. The contributors explore Douglass's understanding of the self-made American and the way in which he expanded the notion of individual potential by arguing that citizens had a responsibility to improve not only their own situations but also those of their communities.A Political Companion to Frederick Douglassalso considers the idea of agency, investigating Douglass's passionate insistence that every person in a democracy, even a slave, possesses an innate ability to act. Various essays illuminate Douglass's complex racial politics, deconstructing what seems at first to be his surprising aversion to racial pride, and others explore and critique concepts of masculinity, gender, and judgment in his oeuvre. The volume concludes with a discussion of Douglass's contributions to pre-- and post--Civil War jurisprudence.

Frederick Douglass was born a slave and lived to become a best-selling author and a leading figure of the abolitionist movement. A powerful orator and writer, Douglass provided a unique voice advocating human rights and freedom across the nineteenth century, and remains an important figure in the fight against racial injustice. This Companion, designed for students of American history and literature, includes essays from prominent scholars working in a range of disciplines. Key topics in Douglass studies - his abolitionist work, oratory, and autobiographical writings – are covered in depth, and new perspectives on religion, jurisprudence, the Civil War, romanticism, sentimentality, the Black press, and transatlanticism are offered. Accessible in style, and representing new approaches in literary and African-American studies, this book is both a lucid introduction and a contribution to existing scholarship.

American political thought has been shaped by those who fought back against social inequality, economic exclusion, the denial of political representation, and slavery, the country's original sin. Yet too often the voices of African American resistance have been neglected, silenced, or forgotten. In this timely book, Alex Zamalin considers key moments of resistance to demonstrate its current and future necessity, focusing on five activists across two centuries who fought to foreground slavery and racial injustice in American political discourse.Struggle on Their Mindsshows how the core values of the American political tradition have been continually challenged-and strengthened-by antiracist resistance, creating a rich legacy of African American political thought that is an invaluable component of contemporary struggles for racial justice.Zamalin looks at the language and concepts put forward by the abolitionists David Walker and Frederick Douglass, the antilynching activist Ida B. Wells, the Black Panther Party organizer Huey Newton, and the prison abolitionist Angela Davis. Each helped revise and transform ideas about power, justice, community, action, and the role of emotion in political action. Their thought encouraged abolitionists to call for the eradication of slavery, black journalists to chastise American institutions for their indifference to lynching, and black radicals to police the police and to condemn racial injustice in the American prison system. Taken together, these movements pushed political theory forward, offering new language and concepts to sustain democracy in tense times.Struggle on Their Mindsis a critical text for our contemporary moment, showing how the political thought that comes out of resistance can energize the practice of democratic citizenship and ultimately help address the prevailing problem of racial injustice.

This essay explores the evolution of Black identity through the lens of political activism and contemporary theoretical frameworks. By analyzing the contributions of Robert and Mabel Williams and Huey P. Newton of the Black Panther Party (BPP), our analysis delves into how resistance and cultural production have shaped the discourse on Black identity. Additionally, we consider the role of post-humanism to understand the impact of evolving technologies such as AI, on Black experiences. Our study also investigates innovative approaches to AI ethics, highlighting how cultural competence and community-driven technologies can address systemic biases. The integration of these insights and modern technological considerations aims to introduce a comprehensive understanding of Black identity in the present and future.

An understanding of tragedy has proved critical to scholars working on Haitian history or its representation in Caribbean literature. This scholarship, however, has typically centered on the tragic figures of the Haitian Revolution (Toussaint Louverture), or on the early post-independence period (Henri Christophe). This paper focuses instead on Haitian literary representations of Hispaniola's indigenous period (1492-1530s), since these texts have been understood as tragic quasi-allegories of the Haitian Revolution. In this paper, I analyze the play La fille du Kacik [The Daughter of the Taino Chief] (1894) in light of recent work on tragedy by David Scott and others. Specifically, I argue that the play disrupts tragic expectations for this period throughout, most notably by reading the central Taino chief, Kaonabo, as the allegorical double of Dessalines. This reframing of Haiti's indigenous past as an anticolonial success, I contend, speaks specifically to the limits of Haitian anticolonial discourse after independence.

Recent scholarship on Frederick Douglass has emphasized the extent to which he understood public culture in juridical terms, as a form of pleading before the court of public opinion. This essay calls into question the sufficiency of this juridical model of publicness for estimating Douglass's literary-historical significance. Although Douglass never fully abandoned the rhetoric of the court of public opinion, he departed from his abolitionist colleagues in developing, alongside that older rhetoric, a more person-centered style of publicness that sought to compel readers to acknowledge Douglass's individual agency. This more expressive mode of publicness, which Douglass began refining as a speech-maker, would by the 1890s transform his understanding of print culture.

A Choice Academic Book of the Year: The Sweeping Story of the Men and Women Who Fought to End Slavery in America Drawing on decades of research, and demonstrating remarkable command of a great range of primary sources, William S.

William Wilberforce and his coterie of evangelical activists have regularly attracted research. Attention, however, has focused almost exclusively on the group's efforts in Britain, with little scholarly work to date on its connections and trajectories overseas. This article examines the influence of Clapham thought and activity in the early American republic. By tracing transatlantic correspondence and reconstructing international relationships, it unveils the direct influence of Clapham theological understandings, notably in their challenge to received interpretations of racial inequality and competing national virtues. Less directly, as Clapham principles shaped Britain's policing of the seas and became enacted in diplomatic decisions, British moralism created friction and resentment with the U.S. government. Although the threads of overt ideological influence by the Clapham Sect appear thin with respect to antislavery, more nuanced influences in terms of race, theology, and empire reveal profound contextual challenges. Yet, the factors limiting the Clapham Sect's impact are as instructive as the influences because they illuminate the contrasts across the Atlantic, which turn out in this case to be more important than the continuities. Transnational approaches to history have often erred by overlooking the transformation of religious and moral ideas across borders, leaving our understanding of transatlantic abolitionism theologically impoverished. By situating Britain's most famous abolitionist group in a wider context, this article exposes the neglected role of race and competing moralities in nineteenth-century international religious history, confounding notions of simple transference of ideas and intellectual continuity across the Atlantic.