The Process of Literacy as Communal Involvement in the Narratives of Frederick Douglass

Abstract

Harvey Graff has argued convincingly that faith grand promises of literacy has, more often than not, gone unrewarded. The nineteenth century, he contends, provided a fertile climate for educators such as Horace Mann to promulgate belief that literacy inevitably leads to financial and social success. Literacy's failure to satisfy these expectations, Graff points out, is one of social and cultural contradictions present in developing social relationships that make up essence of history and sociology. Stating a central point of his revisionist understanding of history of literacy, Graff observes that the clearest lesson of nineteenth century as 'origins of our own time' constitutes much of what I deem a 'literacy myth.' This myth involves a pattern of contradictions which he points to saying, We may merely reiterate role of post-Enlightenment ideologies and clusters of social thought and theory providing grounding for most of our current notions about literacy, and stress that many, though not all, of facts of development contradict those assumptions and (Legacies 265). Graff also relies on concept of continuity order to interpret history of literacy. To focus on historical continuities, Graff maintains, means eschewing an exaggerated emphasis on change, and rejecting persistent cultural dichotomies. Slave narratives exhibit many of cultural contradictions and continuities present social relationships of nineteenth-century America. When we look closely and examine role literacy played these slaves' lives, patterns of continuity and contradiction serve as analytic and interpretive concepts which help us to reinterpret these roles and better understand slave's relation to ruling culture of nineteenth-century America. Much of what is revealed these narratives is way which literacy enabled and empowered blacks to gain freedom from, and control over, ruling culture that enslaved them. The narratives also, however, reveal ways which literacy, as a tool of white hegemony, sought to exclude and dominate illiterate blacks. This contrast marks one of contradictory ways which literacy developed among slaves. To emphasize continuity, on other hand, we must eschew literacy / orality dichotomy and look at black culture's historical legacy of literacy--conceived as a holistic development--as another way that literacy developed among blacks nineteenth century. Graff's interpretive terminology The Legacies of Literacy suggests a framework for examining role of literacy American slave narratives. Too often, readers conceive literacy these narratives as an emancipating skill which leverages slave out of bondage and into freedom. When critics conceive literacy more complex ways, it is frequently problematized by attendant poststructuralist conundra which pit language, and hence process of acquiring literacy, against narrator's being or authentic self. Or, following lead of Henry Louis Gates, literacy is conceived as mastery of a system of self-referential signs which, as Houston Baker explains, imply an ideal critic whose readings would summon knowledge only from literary system of Afro-America. The semantics endorsed by his ideal critic would not be those of a culture. They would be specially consecrated meanings of an intertextual world of 'written art' (Blues 103). Frederick Douglass's antebellum autobiographies have been focal point of recent debates over significance of acquisition of literacy for slaves. The Narrative of Life of Frederick Douglass (1845) and My Bondage and My Freedom (1855) exhibit, an exemplary way, a long tradition of slave autobiography that continually sought new ways to mediate relation between writer and reader. This mediation, however complexly conceived, has elicited from several scholars a discussion that often turns on contemporary theories of language which decenter speaking subject and suspend autonomous discourse alone above nitty-gritty pragmatic social interaction. …