Visual Culture and Fictive Technique in Frederick Douglass's The Heroic Slave

Abstract

The Heroic Slave (1853) was perhaps the most significant of Douglass's responses to Harriet Beecher Stowe's abolitionist blockbuster, Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852). Working against the sentimental abstractions inflecting white narrative and visual aesthetics in the period, Douglass's fictive technique invokes the visual realism of the daguerreotype. Written at a moment at which the very existence of African American freedom seemed to be under threat, the novella produces enabling fiction of self-emancipation directed not only at the slave South, but seeking to generate a futurist political vision, based on inclusive citizenship, for free black people in the North. In doing so, it marks a retreat from the celebratory transnationalism that had infused Douglass's earlier politics.