A Political Companion to Frederick Douglass, edited by Neil Roberts, is an important achievement that will no doubt become an indispensable resource for scholars of Douglass and those interested in African American political thought more generally. It brings together previously published essays and newly formulated chapters that together cover a diverse array of themes central to Douglass’s political thought: his philosophy of liberation, his conception of black leadership and politics, his views on the law, his conception of the United States’ founding, his approach to democratic citizenship, and the gender norms that inform his political ideas.
One of the strengths of Roberts’s editorial work in this volume is the skillful blending of existing and new essays, which together produce multiple and diverse readings of Douglass on similar topics. The first section, for instance, consists primarily of previously published texts that consider how Douglass envisioned freedom and the process by which one becomes free. They include classic texts such as Bernard Boxill’s essay on Douglass’s fight with his overseer Covey and Angela Davis’s lecture on liberation, alongside Paul Gilroy’s and Margaret Kohn’s readings of Douglass in relation to Hegel’s master–slave dialectic and Robert Gooding-Williams’s analysis of Douglass’s democratic approach to black leadership and adherence to different forms of black politics informed by prior declarations of freedom. Read alongside each other—juxtaposed if you will—these essays present the reader with a much more complex depiction of Douglass’s political thought on freedom than would have been possible by reading each on its own. When read together, the various essays that consider Douglass’s approach to the law—from Peter Myer’s claim that Douglass echoed (with certain modifications) the discourse of natural law in Western political thought, to Vincent Lloyd’s argument that in fact Douglass’s invocation of God’s law represents a distinctively African American intervention that makes affect central to mobilizations in favor of social justice, to Anne Norton’s brilliant reading of lawbreaking as central to Douglass’s vision of democratic citizenship and praxis of politics as a fugitive and rebellious slave—have the similarly felicitous effect of destabilizing any claim that Douglass had a singular view of or approach to the law. A similar productive juxtaposition is achieved in the section on democracy and citizenship by pairing Herbert Storing’s view of Douglass as a preeminent exponent of conventional understandings of the virtues of American political thought with Jason Frank’s reading of Douglass as exemplary of a more complex understanding of the people as the simultaneous invocation of a unified political subject and of those excluded from politics, what he calls the staging of a “dissensus.”
Although all the essays speak to the continued relevance of Douglass’s political thought, two essays in particular (both new contributions) illuminate why he remains a crucial reference point for contemporary philosophical and policy debates. Jack Turner’s essay draws on the speeches Douglass delivered after the end of Reconstruction to sketch a model “anti-racist form of political judgment” that could serve as an important resource in an era when claims of reverse racism abound and when previously enacted measures to dismantle racial hierarchy are themselves being dismantled, from affirmative action to voting rights protections. Similarly, Ange-Marie Hancock Alfaro’s innovative essay tracing the development of a “black male ethic of care” in Douglass’s autobiographical writings demonstrates that, contrary to those who argue that black feminism displaces concern for black men with a singular focus on black women, it is intersectional black feminist analysis that demonstrates that one can center gender in black political thought without reifying traditional patriarchal and heteronormative hierarchies. Hancock Alfaro argues that Douglass forged restorative relationships with other black men that allow us to reconceive “black masculinity as a rich resource for civic friendship” (p. 248).
Indeed, one of the achievements of the volume is its inclusion of female readers of Douglass, in contrast to another recent companion volume on Du Bois in the same series that includes no female authors. Nevertheless, only 2 of the 14 essays deal centrally with gender (the chapters by Hancock Alfaro and Paul Gilroy), and none focus on sexuality. This echoes a pattern common to the field of political theory as a whole whereby concern with gender and sexuality continues to be seen as the purview of feminist theory, queer theory, and so on, and those writing about other aspects of Douglass or any other figure’s political thought continue to be exempt from considering how gender and sexuality shaped his or her views of freedom, democracy, citizenship, or the like.
Roberts’s Political Companion to Frederick Douglass is an important compendium of scholarship on Douglass’s political thought that skillfully sheds lights on critical elements of his political ideas. There are several areas where it misses the opportunity to further dislocate Douglass in productive ways, however. Ironically, in his introduction to the volume Roberts himself identifies these areas as key challenges to assessing Douglass’s political thought. As he correctly observes, the issue of textual selection is key to how we understand any thinker’s contributions, and in Douglass’s case this is especially important given that he wrote across media and genres. Despite the preeminent place of his three autobiographies and speeches in scholarship on Douglass by political theorists and philosophers, “Douglass’s speeches, lectures, journalism, autobiographies, and visual arts commentaries all demand our attentiveness” (p. 4, emphasis in the original); to this list I would also add his novel, The Heroic Slave. Yet most of the essays in the volume draw precisely on the most often referenced texts, his autobiographies and his speeches, and thus do not demonstrate attention to a broader range of texts that could potentially destabilize our understandings of Douglass in productive ways, as called for in the introduction.
Another important omission in the volume is its lack of attention to Douglass’s hemispheric/transnational investments and how they shaped the arguments he made about U.S. politics. Roberts notes, “Scholarship by philosophers and political theorists over the past two decades overwhelmingly advance readings of Douglass as a preeminent thinker of America and American political thought” (p. 4). This persistent framing has the unfortunate effect of portraying Douglass (and other African American thinkers) as more provincial than he actually was. It is important to pay attention to Douglass’s hemispheric engagement with the Caribbean and Latin America not only because it gives us a more accurate understanding of his political ideas but also because those writings reveal Douglass as a theorist of a human right to migration and an advocate of multiracial immigration to the United States: this understanding can serve as a critical resource at a moment when nativism and anti-immigrant discourses have become ubiquitous in U.S. politics from the Trump administration to the ADOS (American descendants of slaves) movement for reparations.
Compiling a companion to such a prolific and wide-ranging thinker as Douglass is no easy task because he defies easy categorization. Roberts and the contributors to the Political Companion to Frederick Douglass have done an admirable job of presenting us with many diverse and compelling views of Douglass.
