The Existential Dimensions of Frederick Douglass’s Autobiographical Narrative: A Beauvoirian Examination  

Oleh:

Yancy, George

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: Philosophy & Social Criticism vol. 28 no. 3 (Mei 2002), page 297–320.
Topik: American slavery ; Simone de Beauvoir ; Frederick Douglass ; existentialism ; Michel Foucault ; genealogy ; Lewis Gordon ; the ‘serious man’ ; value code ; whiteness ; womanism ; Richard Wright
Fulltext: 297PSC283.pdf (98.96KB)

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Frederick Douglass’s socio-political narrative is explored through an existential lens, arguing that Douglass is contesting the proposition that essence precedes existence. Douglass, through his fight with Covey, a white ‘slave breaker’, and his escape to freedom, affirms his existence (etymologically, ‘standing out’) as being for it-self (pour-soi) over and against the reduction of his existence to that of being in-itself (an-soi). Drawing from the work of Simone de Beauvoir, who was greatly influenced by the phenomenological and politico-praxic work of Black novelist Richard Wright, it is argued that Douglass disrupts the power/knowledge regime of white American slavery, exercising his existential capacity for transcendence. Examining whiteness as a species of what Beauvoir calls ‘the serious man’, it is argued that whites within Douglass’s text are in a state of flight, performing their whiteness as ‘the serious man’, that is, where whiteness is accepted as an unconditioned state of being. Douglass’s narrative depicts whiteness as a flight from freedom (bad faith); for his very act of protestation against whiteness demonstrates that whiteness is not an objective, hypostatized thing, but a performative choice that sustains white hegemony.

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