Michael A. Chaney Heartfelt Thanks to Punchiort\]e Picture: Frederick Douglass and the Transnational Jokework of Slave Caricature I n the 1840s and 1850s, black abolitionism embraced satirical British cartooning as a visceral expression of the grotesquerie of slavery. The chief organ of this visual economy of moral outrage and cynical humor was the weekly magazine Punch, or the London Charivari. Citations of Punch cartoons were numerous in the clamorous outpourings of ex-fugitive speakers and writers. When William Wells Brown wanted lo defy what he saw as the whitewashing of African slavery in Hiram Powers's popular statue, "The Greek Slave," on display at the Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851, he staged his resentment at the exhibit with a dramatic presentation of "The Virginian Slave," a parodie engraving by John Tennie] of a denuded black slave woman that had appeared in Punch earlier that year.' Anticipating bourgeois antipathy for the crudity of Tenniel's lampoon among New England abolitionists, an editorial in the National Era accords pedagogical value to Punch cartoons, calling them "pictorial teachers" whose "satirical vein" reveals humanizing verities meant "to be pondered with shame, and not to be turned from with resentment."^ An editorial in Frederick Douglass' Paper further elaborates the affective mechanisms by which the British picture arouses American shame; "Americans in London must be dead to all sense of shame, if they do not feel burning mortification on account of the keen rebukes so justly and profusely showered upon them by the British press."^ Given its primary aim of discomfitures both droll and dark. Punch gave black abolitionism license to be hortatory and humorous at the same time, as seen in Douglass's editorial apology for ex-fugitive Samuel Ringgold Ward's "off-color" self-effacements upon arriving in England in 1853: "Samuel is by nature a laughing philosopher, and enjoys fun with a relAmerican Literature, Volume 82. Number 1, March 2010 DO! lÜ.t215/00029831-2Ü09-069 © 2010 by Duke University Press S8 American Literature ish equal to that of any constant reader oí Punch."* Douglass's remark expiates Ward—who had provoked suspicion among soberer abolitionists at home for calling comic attention to his skin color abroad — by restoring the scene to its appropriate transnational joking context, over which the more liberal ribaldries oí Punch held sway. Wlien the political leanings of Punch shifted from deprecation of slavocratic hubris in the 1840s and 1850s to distrust of Yankee tyranny in the 1860s, black abolitionists were less inclined to cite Punch cartoons. Yet neither the change in the political sympathies of the one nor the absence of citation in the other can measure adequately the degree of appropriative interchange that may have continued to bind African American readers, editors, and writers to Punch. In the following analysis, I want to revise Martha Baiita's claim in Barbaric Intercourse (2003) that periodicals such as Punch access what Julia Kristeva associates with the sovereign's prerogative to ignore strangeness; since "strangeness is for the 'subjects,' the sovereign ignores it.'"^ Banta continues, "To 'ignore' may be appropriate for popular periodicals that ' define themselves as the public arbiters of social, political, and moral structures, but not for The Crisis, and Crusader... alternative periodicals that devised their own modes of satiric attack and created their own fantasies to counter those of the mainstream imagination" (Bl, 9). Although Banta does not include organs of black abolitionism in her catalog, her argument indicates that they too would produce modes of satire that compete more than they collaborate with those of mainstream periodicals, an assumption this essay questions. My aim is to reconsider Douglass's relationship to images from Punch and their hyperbolic efforts to make slavery visible, an effect Douglass worked to achieve through verbal descriptions.^ Douglass's sustained encounter with Punch cartoons demonstrates their infinite potential for his own intertextual transformations. And while they ' work to intensify his celebrity and outrage, these Juvenalian images also function pedagogically as lessons in allegorical seeing. By entering into dialogue with Punch caricature at the risk of becoming one himself. Douglass practices a transformative visual satire. Relentlessly juxtaposing social and racial relations, he reveals the complexity of • constructs such as nations and international crises through distortion.^ Intertextual and transatlantic, this dialogue with Punch enables Douglass to renegotiate inscriptions of racialization, authority, and t iconic celebrity, setting him upon an increasingly iconographie stage Frederick Douglass and the Jokework of Slavery 59 of global politics in defense of the "Negro." Through ekphrasis and (self-)caricattire, Douglass thus participates in a transnational visual discourse of slavery that coordinates celebrity in proportion to caricature, a discourse that inaugurates states of emancipation both metaphorical and literal. To explain the way this discourse works, let us return to a more stable interchange between Funch and Douglass, before the increase of racist depiction on one side and the absence of citation on the other. Generally "dependent on other publications for exchanges of news and information." the black press often included fare that, according to Frankie Hutton, "was simply taken from white newspapers and publications."** Nevertheless, the promiscuous adoption and redistribution of previously printed material situated black editors like Douglass at the hub of a global network of circulation to commandeer informational flows through citation. In 1848 Douglass praised Funch in his North Star twice, each time pointing out the cartoon's prescient ability to expose U.S. hypocrisy. In the 15 December issue, under the heading "A Significant Picture." Douglass describes a Funch image by John Leech of a "whipping-post, with the emaciated form of a miserable slave tied to it, over whose naked shoulders a figure of Liberty, in a dress ornamented with stars and stripes, is brandishing a cat-o'nine-tails" (fig. I).'* Earlier that year, in the North Star of 14 January, Douglass cites "The Land of Liberty: Recommended to the Consideration of'Brother Jonathan,'" a cartoon drawn by Richard Doyle for the 4 December 1847 issue oi Funch (fig. 2). Typical of U.S. abolitionist strategies of iconography, this primal scene of brutality operates as a national counterintelligence, representing slavery as a masquerade whose dramatis personae literalize dichotomies of white and black. North and South, national idealism and global shame. And the popularization of national emblems in early-nineteenth-century print culture offered ample opportunity to travesty the global meaning of America: as Albert Shaw virites, "For years Brother Jonathan, or 'Columbia'— representing the United States—was almost never pictured in Funch without a whip."'" As I note in previous work, for African American abolitionists, "to recommend these nightmare visions is to dissect, deploy, and divert the loaded politics of looking."" Significantly, neither image accompanies its citation in the North Star, where Douglass's words alone both substitute for and seize the picture's symbolic power through ekphrasis. At ekphrastic points of 60 American Literature ,S<^ Figure 1 "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity," cartoon by John Leech, Pmct\ 15. 4 November 1848, 205; cited in the tionh Star 15 December 1848. contact, the picture's translation occasions a form of knowledge regulation similar to its revision of the meaning of the United States. To start his ekphrasis, Douglass personifies the magazine as "Mr. Punch": Of all the intelligent and distinguished persons whom we had the honor to meet in London, none seemed to possess more complete Frederick Douglass and the Jokework of Slavery 61 THE LAND OF UBEBTY, HCOKJIKSUtlll TO TJLC CuSfilllEBiTRií OF "WynHBlt Figure 2 "The Land of Liberty: Recommended to the Consideration of 'Brother Jonathan,'" cartoon by Richard Doyie, Punch 13, 4 December 1847, 215: cited in the Horth Star, 14 January 1848. Courtesy Dartmouth College Library. 82 American Literature information respecting our "peculiar institutions," than this same Mr. Punch — It is not now, however, our purpose to draw a picture of Mr. Punch, but to give our readers some idea of the picture he draws of the present aspect of our "glorious country."'^ Uninterested in the supposed artist of the image. Douglass provides an explanatory description that verges on depiction. He does not operate under the normative assumption that "words can 'cite,' but never "sight' their objects," as W. J. T. Mitchell says of the first phase of ekphrastic indifference, which presupposes the utter difference between verbal and visual representation.'^ Rather, Douglass complexly engages with the latter two phases of Mitchell's schema: he performs ekphrastic hope so that "the estrangement of the image/ text division is overcome," but he does so perhaps in anticipation of the third phase of ekphrastic fear, the "counterdesire that occurs when we sense ihat the difference between the verbal and visual representation might collapse and the figurative, imaginary desire of ekphrasis might be realized literally and actually."'^ The ensuing description then translates for Atnerican readers what the British Mr. Punch sees in the United States, rhetorically sketching the picture that Mr. Punch has drawn. Using a plural pronoun, Douglass describes the picture methodically, beginning at the bottom and moving his way up: Under his arm is a knotted "cat-o'-nine tails." On the left of him is a chest, upon which are papers labelled, [sic] Texas—Oregon—Dollars. Behind, Is a woman half naked, tied to a whipping-post. In front of him is a group of slaves and slave-drivers. Prominent in the group are two female slaves kneeling with their hands closely tied behind their backs... . ,. , Cataloging tableaus of U.S. transgression—from dueling practices to the war with Mexico—Douglass concludes, "At the hazard of making many enemies, and losing some friends, we extend our heartfelt thanks to Punch for the picture, and beg him, in the name of three millions of our enslaved brethren, to continue to notice us, in his worldread journal."'^ An anxiety of epistemology familiar to many African American antebellum authors underpins Douglass's extra-ekphrastic asides. Note that Douglass must veriiy the actuality of Mr. Punch by admitting to Frederick Douglass and the Jokework of Slavery 63 having met him, praising Mr. Punch not solely for his "complete information" but for the "use of [his] knowledge." How can anyone familiar with the predicaments of slave authorship fail to notice the subtle parody here? In a rhetorical bait-and-switch, Mr. Punch, like a slave narrator, gains credibility for his existence and his information only through his authenticator. Mr. Douglass, who not so long before was similarly dependent. Here, however, the relay of accreditation is reciprocal and moves according to the inverse logic of comedy. Indeed. Douglass's brand of humor often initiates, in Granville Ganter's formulation, "an active shift in perception which is simultaneously a means of identification and alienation.""* Even so. there is always the prospect of this joke within a joke turning back on Douglass, since it conjures the very thing its reconfiguration of relations denies—not the Douglass who does the vouching, but the one who must be vouched for. Just what is it about Punch or the image or their ekphrastic possibility together that summons, even in jest, the paradigmatic authorcomplex of the slave narrative? If translation of the image initiates a performance of authorship, it also demands a re-performance of what may well have included for Douglass the psychic residue of an originary authorial subordination that here gets sloughed off onto the cartoon's displaced illustrator. As a vacated, coopted site of pictorial authority. Richard Doyle's unnamed position as author of the image in Douglass's account is both misattributed to Mr. Punch and nominally given over to the supervening authority of the press. Wliile that position is made available to the periodical Pttnch through ekphrasis, it ultimately seems to fall under the global jurisdiction of Douglass. More evidence for Douglass's rhetorical seizure of Punch's credibility arises in the editorial's deictic tensions. Despite a repeated use of the plural personal pronoun within the editorial, only Douglass's initials subscribe it. In this instance, he alone speaks for the picture and its claims. He creates its author and impersonates authorities proper to that figure—Mr. Punch, a phantasm. And because he is a phantasm so like the fungible personhood of the slave. Mr. Punch's properties naturally transfer to his masterful chaperone. Mr. Douglass.'^ Still, there is a level at which this ghostly Mr. Punch coheres with an equally iconic Mr. Douglass, the soon-to-be titular persona of Frederick Douglass' Paper. It is on this level that a different incorporation takes place, in which the Trojan horse of ekphrastic praise conceals ambitions for corporate takeover. In other words, when Douglass ani- 64 American Literature mates Mr. Punch he likewise gives animus to the periodical celebrity he aspires to during this time. In the process he shows how an object of the ?M«i-A-text—whether it be Mr. Pimch. the racialized American, or the picture itself—can be made into the subject of its intertext: Frederick Douglass as coauthor, chief reader, and sole interpreter.'^ In fact, Douglass emphasizes his role as visual interpreter in later uses of the same image. A speech delivered to the Anti-Slavery Society in 1848 describes the picture but plays down the citational context. Rather than personify Funch or use the plural form, Douglass introduces the picture this time by drawing attention to his bestowal of it: I would like to hold up to you a picture; not drawn by an American pen or pencil, but by a foreigner. I want to show you how you look abroad in the delectable business of kidnapping and slavedriving. Sometimes since—I think it was in the December number of "Punch,"—I saw an excellent pictorial description of America.— What think you it was? It was entitled, "Brother Jonathan."'" In a space of interracial communication that prefigures W. E. B. DuBois's veil. Douglass divines the picture's message, as moral as it is political, and prepares auditors hereby reassigned as spectators for a curative shaming characteristic of abolitionist rhetoric. What follows is Douglass's second ekphrastic encounter with the same Brother Jonathan image in a speech eventually transcribed in the National Anti-Slavery Standard of 18 May 1848 (FDF, 2:120-21). This more compressed, impressionistic version scarcely mentions Funch—\e\ alone a "Mr. Punch." It bears less perspectival fidelity to the image, seldom indicating composition and arrangement. Where gender specificity intensifies the horror of slavery in the earlier version, which enumerates "a woman half naked." "two female slaves kneeling," and "the act of flogging a woman," this one replaces pornotropic violations of the slave woman with more abstracted cruelties inflicted upon anonymous slave groups.^" Their plural and unmarked anonymity mirrors that of Douglass's audience. In this second pass at ekphrasis, Douglass enacts a similar form of integrative revision that Robert Stepto associates in slave narrative with Douglass's Narrative of the Life (1845), wherein "the narrative and moral energies of the former slave's voice and tale so resolutely dominate the narrative's authenticating machinery (voices, documents, rhetorical strategies) that the narrative becomes, in thrust and purpose, far more meta- Frederick Douglass and the Jokework of Slavery 65 phorical than rhetorical."^' Moreover, the transcription of this version reports Douglass's performance, his words as well as the audience's reactions to them, so as to make it more play script than prose, especially where parentheses designate a final moment of laughter: "Still further back in the distance was the picture of the achievements of our gallant army in Mexico, shooting, stahbing, hanging; destroying property, and massacreing [sic] the innocent with the innocent, not with the guilty, and over all this was a picture of the Devil himself, looking down with Satanic satisfaction on passing events. (Laughter)"-^ But what ai^e they laughing at? Punch's ludic contortions, the twin effects of the sermon's inducement of guilt and catharsis, or maybe Douglass's delivery of a national portrait that screams "God damn America" at just the right moment to just the right crowd? Whatever the cause, by the end of the speech no one is laughing. Here Douglass again encodes the picture as a mirror of national ignominy, but he disabuses his listeners of any misconceptions regarding its manner of refiection. Less exaggeration than euphemism, this is a "picture of America [that] falls far short of the real facts, and of the aspect we bear to the world around us." How different these final lines than the bonhomie of those of the first acknowledgment: "[Olur heartfelt thanks to Punch for the picture." For Douglass, textual and corporate conjunctions with Punch inspire a visual oratory, a theory (literally in the sense of a way of looking) that sees and makes its audience see through three distinct modes of conceptualization: first, subject-object reversibilities that render every master a slave and vice versa; second, invisible structures working beneath surface spectacles {Douglass's preferred phrase for this in speeches at this time was, "These are but the hands of the clock. The moving machinery is behind the face"); and third, the nation as ineradicably tied to slavery and thus in a perpetual state of suspicion, under surveillance, having become an icon of its own incrimination before the globe.^'' Provocative and thriving in 1848, exchanges between Douglass and Punch reached an apex in the 1850s and were seemingly finished by the outbreak of the war. In his thorough analysis oí Punch cartoons, Marcus Wood cogently explains why Punch would lose its appeal for black readers: "[A]n assumed negrophobia operates as the backdrop for the representation of southern slavery, and comes to saturate representations of the American South in European graphic satire."^" Although N American Literature Wood's daims are fundatnental to any atialysis of the journal's visual satire, they are also narrowly informed by the politics of reception I want to emphasize here. By extirpating Punch cartoons from a context of reception, Wood forecloses the possibility of a response, or at the very least, a resignification of the meanings and effects he ascribes to them. Nor is Wood alone in this regard. Because Banta is more interested in a conception oï Punch from the perspective of the Victorian middle class (when a subject of reception is implied at all), her view of Punch's political change stresses the enervation of its generous spirit of radical reform rather than the sharpening of its racial sting: "IBly the 1850s Punch began its steady and consistent drift away from satirizing political wrongdoing and toward making mild comic stabs at social foibles" {BI, 66). And \i Punch cartoons "create situations that make it difficult at times to know precisely what is being mocked and what receives sympathy," as Banta rightly argues (BI, 66). then must we not track their reception by particular viewers rather than their essential meanings as though in a rhetorical vacuum? My argument— that an absence of citation cannot prove that Douglass stopped reading or resignifying PMMC/I—restores to the image those properties of its signification that are not contained by it, but which can be found in sites of rhetorical relay where Douglass continues to respond to the "moving machinery" beneath the clock faces oí Punch cartoons. But before analyzing this appropriative clockwork, let us first turn to those offending caricatures that coincide with the cessation oí Punch references in Douglass's rhetoric. British Punch cartoons of the 1860s link African Americans to the visibility of US. domestic politics according to a logic of histrionic juxtaposition. In their convergence of race difference and situational reversal, these pictorial satires theatricalize U.S. political relations as so much tragic comedy, Shakespearean performances gone awry in new worlds of absurdity. One of the first of these cartoons, from 16 May 1861, enlists Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis as gladiatorial combatants standing toe-to-toe with swords and identifying shields in hand (fig. 3). That a black Caesar and an imperial court of slaves preside over these rival executive officers of a fracturing government yields a joke of incongruity. Not only is the United States associable to Rome as an imperial power on the make, but its imperial ambitions are thwarted by and, in a twist of projection, officiated by its internal racial others, those African American slaves whose acquisition partly justi- Frederick Douglass and tbe Jokework of Slavery 67 Figure 3 "Caesar Imperator! Or tfie American Gladiators," cartoon by John Tenniel, Punch 40, 18 May 1861, 203. fies the US. analogy to the Roman Empire and over whose unsettled status the republic divisively wavers. The other uncertain future on prominent display, of course, is the British emporium of cotton bales upon which the hlack American imperium rests—a clue to one of the economic motives behind the shift in British attitudes toward the U.S. Civil War. Although an examination of these and other motives is 68 American Literature beyond the scope of this essay, telling evidence of their effect may be found in the cartoon's recalibration of the iconic slave.^* Wood has shown that Punch cartoons from this period repeatedly position the slave "as a figure with no political agenda . . . who enjoys malicious delight in witnessing the process of mutual destruction that the unionists and secessionists are going to begin."^*' To be sure, the slave operates as an iconic threshold of referentiality within the Punch cartoon; this becomes even clearer when parodie intertextuality structures the visual joke. Take, for example, the following caricature of Lincoln from 1862 (fig. 4). Endowed with fairy wings and a magic wand, a spritely Lincoln entreats Virginia, his fairy queen, to give over her slave. The image produces humor through incongruity (of a primarily sartorial nature) but also perhaps through an unexpected parallelism of circumstance: the viewer is invited to test the parodie equation of Lincoln with Shakespeare's Oberon from A Midsummer Night's Dream Act II, Scene I.-' Assuming an audience well-versed in the play, the image presents Lincoln as a "jealous Oberon" who demands possession of—in Puck's words—"A lovely boy stol'n from an Indian king" so that the "changeling" may become the "Knight of his train, to trace the forests wild." By visually casting the American slave as Shakespeare's contested changeling, the cartoon creates a wry distance from the Civil War, whose leaders and presumed objects of liberation become farcical targets of deflation and estrangement. Picturing a black American slave child as the disputed "lovely boy" exerts disniptive pressure on the proposed linkages of the parody. Curiously, in being shown at all, the boy becomes a vulgar materialization of a figure who in the Elizabethan imaginary was one of those "shadowy presences"—in the words of Ania Loomba—"that were evoked btit never appeared on stage."^" More than giving sight to a false dichotomy of love for the Negro versus love of union, the image goes so far as lo invoke a strain of abolitionist maternal hagiography as Virginia shields her vulnerable offspring from the ravenous speculations of the slave trader, whom Lincoln ironically resembles in this restaging. Two other Punch images from 1863 cast the ubiquitous Sambo figure in visual parodies of Shakespearean Civil War drama. Like the prior cartoons, these create focal centrality for two subjects by including the tertian quid of a peripheral figure: the sleeping banjo player in the background of "Brutus and Caesar" and the disgruntled Confeder- Frederick Douglass and the Jokework of Slavery 69 íï¿i^ Figure 4 "Oberon and Titania." cartoon by John Tenniel, Punch 42,5 April 1862.137, ate officer in "Scene from the American 'Tempest'" (figs. 5 and 6). In "Brutus and Caesar," the ghost stands with a visual grandeur inversely proportional to the textual indignities that follow in the caption's sardonic treatment of black vernacular. Looking closely at the image of the slaves' heads in these pictures reveals a shocking similarity. They are the same head, slightly tilted back, with the same receding cranium and protruding teeth. How curi- -(• — 70 Anierican Literature Figure 5 "Brutus and Caesar (from the American Edition of Shakespeare)," cartoon by John Tenniei, p£/w/í45,15 August 1863,69. ous then that the same head which activates with equal insistence a racist review of presumed physical inferiority produces two very different types of humor. In "Brutus," the erect stance of the figure bespeaks an air of refinement not regularly ascribed to black figures in Punch cartoons of this decade. In "Tempest," the opposite is the case; there, a comedy of convention provides viewers with culturally Frederick Douglass and the Jokework of Slavery 71 Figure 6 "Scene from the American Tempest,'" cartoon by John Tenniei. Punch 44.24 January 1863,35. legible signs of that which has already been deemed funny, the telltale posture of the Sambo type: stooping with appendages at awkward angles, most commonly with feet turned inward, one foot raised in unrestrained giee. It is reasonable to suspect Douglass's knowledge of these cartoons, given his prior dissection oí Punch specimetis of U.S. slavery and his lifelong interest in Shakespeare. Kim Sturgess points out that aside from including an epigraph from Shakespeare in his only work of fiction, The Heroic Slave, "as a newspaper editor, Douglass supplied his readership with stories of the struggle for emancipation, frequently interspersed with the name and subject of Shakespeare."-^ Of the three Shakespearean references in the Narrative of 1845, one is in William Lloyd Garrison's prefatory letter and the other, from Hamlet, is in the narrative proper, as Douglass considers escape. According to Keith Botelho, "Douglass's appropriation of Shakespeare after having the white endorsers of his narrative appropriate the bard in similar ways 72 American Literature calls into question to whom Shakespeare 'belongs.' "^" Needless to say. witnessing two significant vehicles of Douglass's appropriative claims to culture—PMKC/Ï and Shakespeare—retailored for minstrel purposes must have inspired passionate indignation. Douglass's denunciation of minstrelsy as an assault on the manhood of the slave is well known, and we can certainly see why he would refuse to draw attention to these representations. In the next sections of this essay, however, I will suggest evidence for Douglass's continued, even if elusive, reply to Mr. Punch. Douglass's last overt reference to Punch appeared in 1861, at which time the magazine became conspicuous evidence for Douglass's claitn in "Pictures and Progress" that the caricature is an unrivaled instrument of critique on a geopolitical scale: "No where is this power better understood, or where it is practiced better than In England. Punch is a power more potent than parliament." High praise may be an indirect appeal for it to live up to Douglass's paradoxical injunction that "it never repeats, and is never exhausted" but remains "always on the side of liberal ideas" (FDP, 3:456, 3:457). Nevertheless, the published speech includes bracketed words crossed out of the manuscript that indicate ambivalence in Douglass's praise. Of Punch Douglass writes: "It not only has the art of laughing contagiously, but what is more important it knows how to laugh in the right place, and in the right time. John Bull reports all its wise sayings at the breakfast table—and only laughs when Punch gives the word—[He is sure to laugh then even if] though that be at his own expense" {FDP, 3:457). The bracketed phrasing under erasure may be less elegantly worded, but it is also less sure of the caustic backlash of Punch humor. The revision moves from a conditional—"even if" laughter comes at one's own expense—to the certainty of that latighter's self-refiexive. selfinjurious barb. Whereas "even if" calls to mind cases of laughter that forfeit no self-injury in the very act of calling upon those that do, the existential form of the verb "to be" in the final phrasing conjures a laughter that comes not "even if" but despite always being "at his own expense." On no other issue would Douglass have been more inclined to feel the expense of Punch's laughter than that of black conscription. The viability of African American soldiers in the army so impassioned Douglass that he let it overtake the immediate subject of "Pictures and Progress" (1861) and that of "The Proclamation and A Negro Army" Frederick Douglass and the Jokework of Slavery 73 Figure 7 "The Black Conscription: When Black Meets Black Then Comes the End (?) of War," cartoon by John Tenniel, Putich 45,26 September 1863,129. (1863). This latter speech, which both celebrates the Emancipation Proclamation and champions black national service, came at a time when Douglass may have had an opportunity to see one of Punch's visual assaults on the efficacy of black conscription (fig. 7). Discussing the "semiotic centrality" of black figures after conscription to symbol- 74 American Literature ize "both North and South," Wood notes that "their roles are invariably absurd and belittling," rendering blacks no longer "as tragic and homeless victims of the turmoil of war, but as a comic conundrum the North cannot solve."^' In "The Proclamation," Douglass mocks those who like Mr. Punch attempt to discredit black soldiers with threats so opposed, because so inanely fabricated, that they cancel each other out like Kilkenny cats, who fought among themselves so viciously that they skinned each other to death: 1 know it is said that the Negroes won't fight. But I distrust the accuser. In one breath they tell you that the slaves won't fight and in the next they tell you that the only effect of the proclamation is to make the slaves cut their masters' throats (laughter) and stir up insurrections all over the south. The same men tell you that the Negroes are lazy and good for nothing, and in the next breath tell you that they will all come North and take the labor away from the laboring white men here. (Laughter and cheers). In one breath they tell you that the Negro can never learn the military art, and in the next they tell you that there is a danger that white men be outranked by colored men. (Continued laughter). I may be pardoned if I leave these objections to their own contradictions and absurdities. They are like the Kilkenny cats and there is a fair probability of their reaching the same result (Great laughter). (FDF, 3:564-65) As in the "Picttu-es and Progress" speech of 1861 and others in 1862, Douglass interjects an advertisement for black participation in the military. Black conscription had become Douglass's passion and Mr. Punch took notice. That the "American Edition of Shakespeare" travesties occur with some frequency in 1863 strongly suggests that in making fun of black soldiers. Mr. Punch was also, if not really, making fun of their world-renowned advocate, Douglass. In the 1863 conscription satire, Douglass is the subject of a caricature that lies invisibly beneath Sambo stereotypes.^^ There is no Brother Jonathan there; no Mr. Lincoln triangulates the representation—grounding the critique in a politics that distorts through personalization. Also absent is good old Mr. Shakespeare, whose violation is staged as an American injury to British empire with a metaphorical slap across the bard's face that Mr. Punch seems to take great pleasure in witnessing again and again. If there is any iconic politician behind Funches joke of black conscription, it could only be Mr. Douglass, who may have anticipated this final Frederick Douglass and the Jokework of Slavery 75 punch line of being caricatured in Punch and thus officially noticed. According to Douglass in "Pictures and Progress," there is a cache in being caricatured. Like a nineteenth-century version of Ashton Kutcher's television show Punk'd magnified to an international scale, being "Punch'á" is to have one's public greatness cruelly endorsed: "[Al man not great enough to be caricatured in Punch, is not great enough to carry a measure in Parliament" {FDP. 3:457). To thank Mr. Punch for the caricature of hiinself instead of slavery, their once common enemy, Douglass shed a few unflattering lights on the British. In the "Black Man's Future in the Southern States" of 1862, Douglass responds to the charge that blacks may be naturalized to a state of bondage and unfit for freedom by reminding his audience that slavery is a historical process that unravels national mythologies of natural character: "Take any race you please, French English Irish or Scotch. Subject them to slavery for ages—regard and treat them as having no rights, and I venture to say that the same doubt would spring up concerning either of them which now confronts the Negro" (FDP, 3:500). Douglass goes on to discuss the medieval history of serfdom, quoting French historian Jacques Thierry on the Norman Conquest, to paint a disquieting portrait of the English in strokes often reserved for the 'Negro' slave. Enacting the very hy])othetical scenario he asks of the audience—to take any race and make them slave—Douglass obliges himself by taking the English. Of the medieval Saxon he says, "Their very language made no account of, and of themselves wearing brass collars on their necks like dogs, bearing the names of their masters. They were bought and sold like the beast of the field, and their offspring born doomed to the same wretched condition" (FDP, 3:502). If there were a pictorial game of one-upsmanship going on here, Douglass's image of an animalized slave as the forebear of English greatness does more than simply degrade. It fiips the script on racial essentialism to buffoon the English, while acknowledging their cultural greatness as well as the likelihood of the same for emancipated African Atnericans. However, to verbally limn this caricature, Douglass must hazard the potential for racial recontainment: the English slave conjures all too well the degradations of the African slave, thus leaving open the possibility that at the moment of utterance Douglass would become the screen on which to project the curiosity of the despoiled Saxon. In earlier dealings with Mr. Punch, Douglass may have learned to 76 American Literature put into practice what he saw professed in the cartoons, bracing himself for the left-handed kick-back of a joke that wounds the joker as it hurls forth its travesties ("He is sure to laugh then even if... that be at his own expense"). We may measure the grip of this left hand of the joke in a peculiar statement Douglass makes in "The Proclamation" about what emancipation feels like: "1 feel that we are living in a glorious time. 1 felt so on the first of January, and been feeling so ever since. I felt whiter, and I have combed my hair with less diiliculty. (Cheers and laughter)" {FDP, 3:567-68).The cheers and laughter that follow indicate a successful reception of the joke. But what is this audience, called into being only through the extratextual parenthesis of the word "laughter," really laughing at? Is it Douglass's inverted minstrelsy or his insinuation that the privilege of remaining a citizen, even while exhibiting difference from whiteness, still feels like whiteness? To feel whiter is to experience through a humor of analogy the instantiation of a new condition of legal enfranchisement, which can only be articulated with reference to the old condition. Once again Douglass precariously solicits a minstrel gaze from his audience, who in order to get the joke must skirt an encroaching set of minstrel kinks abuut the difficulty with which he might comb his hair. Perhaps it is a public injoke about the visual presence of Douglass—about his partial claim to whiteness or the amplitude of his hair, which by then had become an emblem of his celebrity, as seen in Douglass's carte de visite (fig. 8). Even before his definitive split with Garrisonian abolition, Douglass cultivated an image conducive to his role as a representative member of the oppressed black race, and a preeminent racial signifier of that role was his hair. In an 1846 letter to Francis Jackson, for example, Douglass quips, "I find I am hardly black enough for British taste, but by keeping my hair as woolly as possible I make out to pass for at least half a Negro at any rate."^^ It was in England where he recalls years later in Life and Times of Frederick Douglass that "[flor a time I was made to forget that my skin was dark and my hair crisped."'" Although the image of Douglass at this time, made familiar by the frontispiece of Narrative of the Life, emphasized his buttoned-up prétentions to bourgeoisie respectability, those tufts of hair we routinely see carefully parted to one side were also posed to signify Africanicity. Peter Dorsey tracks evidence for Douglass's self-image management, arguing that the shift toward a stronger pose in Ills frontispieces "signals Frederick Douglass and the Jokework of Slavery 77 Figure B Carte de visite of Frederick Douglass, By S- M. Fasset!. Circa 1862-65. Frederick Douglass National Historical Site, Washington. O.C. 78 American Literature Douglass's growing awareness of the performativity of his selfrepresentations and maps his bolder claim to conventional sources of authority (and authorship) in antebellum culture."''^ Of course, styles of conventional authority change, as do hairstyles, and just as a quotable knowledge of both Shakespeare and Punch conveyed authority in mid-nineteenth-century America, so too did long hair. Particulai"ly during the Civil War years when longer hair became fashionable for white men of distinction, well-to-do black men accordingly emulated their dominant cultural counterparts, ironically, to the dismay of whites. As Ayana Byrd and Lori Tharps note. " [W] hen Black men allowed their hair to grow and stopped shaving oif their facial hair (tliink Frederick Douglass), they were considered uppity and wild."-'** Evidence for the concentration of racist derision in the lengthy "wool" of black men may be found in reports from the infamous expulsion of abolitionists from Boston's Tremont Temple in December of 1860, in which "[olne man grabbed Douglass by the hair while another called out gleefully. 'Wool won't save him.' "^^ And while the excesses of this "wool"—in tacit opposition to hair, which presumably only whites possess—may have instigated the rioters' negrophobic aggression toward Douglass, who wore his wool with self-aggrandizing pride, we must be careful not to presume an invariant connection between Douglass's afro and his sense of African Identity. Within the antebellum free black community, hairstyle was an issue of racial allegiance as well as subjection. In "White is Beautiful," an editorial from the 11 March 1853 issue of Frederick Douglass' Paper, William Wilson launches a two-pronged attack against whitened images of cultural beauty that hints at placing figures like Douglass in the same category as white oppressors: "We despise, we almost hate ourselves, and all that favors us. Well we scoff at black skins and woolly heads, since every model set before us for admiration has a pallid face and fiaxen head." Wilson's barbed identification of the "pallid face and flaxen head" as the source of black self-loathing yokes resentments of both race and class, implicating not just whites, but also, as Noliwe Rooks observes. "African Americans with white ancestry, and therefore with a higher class status."^" Douglass remained fervently opposed to what he saw as the unfortunate currents of color-phobia running throughout African and AngloAmerica during his lifetime, but he was also ambivalent aboutfixingthe phenotypical characteristics of a largely mixed-race black America to Frederick Douglass and the Jokework of Slavery 79 Africa. Soliciting the very scopic protocols of racialization that would condemn his interracial marriage to a white woman, in the Washington Fost Douglass self-reflexively comments on his observed bodily difference to unsettle the charge of miscegenation by exculpating his hair and himself of African ancestry: "I am not an African, as may be seen from my features and hair, and it is equally easy to discern that I am not a Caucasian."^^ How can Douglass's skin color be associatively African and overtly non-Caucasian, while his hair is associatively Caucasian and overtly non-African? Formulating a grammatical algebra of denial, Douglass assigns contrapuntal value to "hair and features" that are clearly not African without explicitly defining that value as Caucasian—though the associative resonance of the equation certainly suggests as much. To be neither African nor Caucasian is not to deny that which excludes him from Caucasian status—his skin color—as African, nor to deny that the pallor or hair texture that excludes these from the status of African as being Caucasian. To anatomize himself in this mode of deconstructive blason allows Douglass to demystify the erroneous singularities of racial identity perpetuated by miscegenation anxieties and to locate the anxious tensions of the miscegenated body in himself, thereby displacing his second marriage to the Caucasian Helen Pitts as the etiological site of the disputed race mixture. Never simply the locus of either black or white affiliation, the meaning of Douglass's hair thus lies between two racial denials that together refute systems of racialization that presume an either-or classification as a norm of identity. Undoubtedly, these semiotic entanglements of race and hair are in play when Douglass mentions a bodily transformation in "The Proclamation" that provokes a peal of laughter significant enough to be indicated in the text. Comparable to the off-color humor of the "laughing philosopher" Samuel Ringgold Ward (fig. 9), such joking opens onto a space of emancipation by presupposing racial disenfranchisement to be defunct. No longer poised between de facto and de jure property, former slaves who rhetorically invoke such emancipatory spaces often recur to modes of humor familiar, as Douglass says of Ward, to readers oí Funch. Indeed, for many antebellum abolitionists, such performative spaces of emancipation were concretized in physical expatriation to Britain or Canada as Ward declares in the closing statements of his 1853 address before the Congregational Union in England, in which he compares "the leap of the slave to Canada" to "a leap from chattelhood 80 American Literature Figure 9 Frontispiece oí Samuel Ringgold Ward, Autobiography ota Fugitive Negro: His AntiSlavery Labours in ttte United States, Canada, and England {London: John Snow, 1855), 253. to manhood" that is "like a sort of resurrection, and the man becomes another being altogether.""' Similarly, in his 1855 narrative, Autobiography of a Fugitive Negro, Ward celebrates the egalitarianism of Canada, which enabled him to become a functionary of various social and religious organizations: "Never, as an equal brother man. was I welcomed to the national platforms of any of them, until I became a resident of Canada.""" Yet when recounting his feelings upon arriving in England in his autobiography. Ward qualifies the triumphal rhetoric of English resurrection that he lavishes upon the Congregational Union in the closing remarks of his speech: Frederick Douglass and the Jokework of Slavery 81 I was in a land of freedom, of true equaUty. 1 did not feel as some blacks say they felt, upon landing—that I was, for the first time in my life, a man. No. I always felt that; however wronged, maltreated, outraged—still, a man. Indeed, the very bitterness of what I had suffered at home consisted chiefly in the consciousness I always carried with me of being an equal man to any of those who trampled upon me.*" Nevertheless, when this interîorized emancipation finds external validation before the audience of English Ci)ngregationalists, Ward seems to succumb to that laughing philosophy for which Douglass gently chides him. He makes a few self-refiexive jokes just before his closing remarks, which tacitly hinge upon the spectacle of the size, gender, and color of his body: I intend, please God, to return to my country, to go to my farm, and to work for the sustenance of my small wife and large family (laughter) with my hoe, and then preach the gospel as opportunity may offer. (Hear, hear.) . . . . I take my seat, sir, thanking you for the kind sentiments you have entertained towards black people. (Go on, go on.) I am devoted to them; I have none of the prejudices against their colour that some people have (laughter); I married a black woman, sir (renewed laughter); and if you will excuse me, sir, I must say that I have seen no people, not even my own people in the United States, exhibit such marks of improvement, as these people have since they have come to Canada. (Applause.)^^ It is not difficult to understand why the speech would have angered black U.S. abolitionists. To be sure. Ward's humor requires an absurd separation of subject and object positions of race and nation. Ward seems suddenly to objectify black people as though he were not himself black, and to speak of black improvement in Canada as though he were suddenly an abstract, unraced American and not himself an expatriated black American living in Canada. Nor is it difficult to decipher in these juxtapositions of statement and spectacle traces of a visual humor that Douglass associated, by way of mitigating Ward, with Punch. Like Douglass's comments about feeling whiter and combing his hair with less difficulty, this moment in Ward's speech— perhaps misunderstood as private, insider infelicities paraded before a respectable public of eminent outsiders—is better understood as issu- 82 American Literature ing from a space of ontological transformation manifest in the event that gives rise to Douglass's Emancipation Proclamation address and latent in that of Ward's speech or in the ludic eventfulness that may be imagined as calling forth any Punch cartoon. What links all of these incidents in the dialogical system of Punch and black abolitionism is not so much the wild inversions of comedie discourse but rather the logic of emancipation. Both of these conditions of freedom are organized around heterology; to borrow from Jacques Rancière, "the process of emancipation is the verification of the equality of any speaking being with any other speaking being."*'* Not coincidentally, the reversal of stibjective authority and the object of the utteratice in Ward's humor similarly assumes an equality with predominantly white listeners. But just because this assumption of equality cannot find verification in the visual field of its utterance does not disqualify the emancipatory dimension of the performance. It is precisely because of the disturbing incompleteness of this assimiption of equality with white Englishmen that Ward's speech satisfies the emancipatory heterology described by Rancière, which "is always enacted in the name of a category denied either the principle or the consequences of that equality: workers, women, people of color, or otbers."^^ If the visible utterance of Ward's dark body leads to one type of category that denies the equality of his verbal utterance, his size and gender lead to another. As with most jokes, the one about his wife renews the laughter by soliciting through opposition a recognition, in this case, of his mascufine girth in contrast to her status as "my small wife." Likewise, one can only assume that such "sustenance" as he provides her in the production of an equally contrastive "large family" is better left to the private imaginings hinted at in the parenthetical laughter. Opposition and denial also structure this subtle vaunt of virifity. The subject itself is a public taboo, made all the more so in the presence of such moral dignitaries as Thomas Challis, the lord mayor of London, and the Reverends Henry Allon, John Angelí James, and George Smith. Interestingly, then, the figure of the small but (re)productive body of the wife both magnifies and defiects the denial of equality that Ward's overly present body signifies in the space of the utterance, making figurally present the absent body of the black woman whose permanent exclusion from the scene of Ward's momentary inclusion among an imaginary community of equals only deepens the association between his racial discourse of visual humor and the Frederick Douglass aad the Jokework of Slavery 83 logic of emancipation. As Cecilia Sjöholm points out, the introduction of the absolute alterity of the wife typifies political, social, and psychic forms of emancipation that require "a simultaneous presence and absence of the ground through which emancipatory discourses produces [sic] its'other.'"*'^ The inscape of otherness visualized in both humor and emancipation discourse explains the rather odd anecdote that finalizes "The Proclamation." After mentioning feeling whiter and combing his hair with less difficulty—jokes which a decade earlier might have aroused the same accusation of infelicity and apology through Punch that Ward received— Douglass paints a verbal picture of emancipation whose tints strangely approximate those of Punch's minstrel cartoons: There was one black man who stood in a comer, and I thought I never saw a blacker man and I think I never saw whiter teeth. Occasionally he would bound up like a fish out of water, and as he was standing in a dark place, you could see nothing going up but a little white streak. (Loud laughter.) About the last he said he must speak, and I will make you his speech. It was all in place "When I got to be grown up to a man's estate I wanted to marry a wife, thank God!" (Laughter.) And said he: "I courted no less than sixteen women, thank God!" (Great laughter.) And said he: "The woman 1 married is here to-night, thank God!" We all rose up to see this little woman, and she was told to get up. and we looked at her, and she was nothing extraordinary (laughter); but it was ail in place. The feeling of this black Congregation—for it was mainly black—was that they were ready to offer their services at any moment this Government should call for them. And I want to assure you, and the Government, and everybody, that we are ready, and we only ask to be called into this service. {FDP, 3:569) In prologue to the minstrel caricature, the black man whose antics are "all in place" emerges symbolically from a "dark place." just as black America by virtue of the Proclamation arises from the civic shadow of slavery to offer a pledge of service that may yet appear enshrouded with a similar bathos. Like the eager man reduced to the white streak of his teeth in the dark or the anticlimactic presentation of a nonextraordinary wife, the value of black America's pledge of service may be mocked and easily underrated. If the figure of the elated black man who rises from obscurity is representative at all, the defiation of his 84 American Literature enthusiasm also signifies doubly, as if to say, "We are excited by what government finally gives, but this present, like the materialized wife who is privately cherished but publicly insignificant, tnay be nothing much, scarcely worth the excitement that heralds it." As with the epiphenomenal exclusion of the wife in Ward's humor of emancipatory self-inclusion, Douglass's anecdotal black man overcome by his new condition is paired with a silent other, his wife, along a gender axis of difference, and he is simultaneously joined with her as a compound other to Douglass across an axis of class. This self-cartooning gesture allows the speaker to rise above the power relations inherent to the scene of the cartoon's inscription — that of the embodied black buJJbon object and the abstract authority of the disembodied cartoonist. Douglass, like Ward in England or himself years before in ekphrastic relation to Funch, entertains a new affective context along with the new juridical context for the meaning of black embodiment, by way of the old. A contemporary example can be tbund in President Barack Obama's first press conference, in which he noted off-handedly. " ¡A] lot of shelter dogs are mutts like me" (7 November 2008). These jokes are "off-color" but also off-temporal, off-ontological. And it is the same affective release to which Douglass succumbs in the Emancipation address, becoming his own cartoonist, allowing the cultural screen of race discourse mediated so powerfully by cartoons to reembody the cartoonist. He thus draws himseff in the same cartoon strokes and tints that he elsewhere so vehemently defies. But while these speculations are compelling in a general sense, they implicitly affirm the Marxist dictum that every emancipation entails the reinvention of the human being in such a way as to leave out those human beings that Douglass qualifies as composing "this black Congregation—for it was mainly black." Revising Marxist foundations for thinking of emancipation as "a restoration of the human world and of human relationships to man himself," Anthony Bogues argues that for radical anticolonial thinkers, the moment of emancipation is not simply when "the individual man reabsorbs himself into the abstract citizen" as Karl Marx suggests, but when the human being is made anew, apart from hegemonic models: "Acts of emancipation in radical anticolonial thought set out both to overthrow the existing conception of man and to set the ground for a new one."^' Rather than leave the human being in an uncomplicated state of equivalence to hegemonic Frederick Douglass and the Jokework of Slavery 85 models, the laughter Douglass induces cedes entry into a civic community that radically alters the grounds of political membership. If. as the typescript's "Laughter" festively indicates, a cotnmunity is created in this moment of black emancipation that Douglass strives to explain to a white audience, it is one that tenders membership parenthetically, in a moment of rupture and return, in celebration of the demotion of whiteness as a standard of citizenship. In roguish tune with the pitch imd punch of British satire, the ideological tensions inherent to Douglass's self- and other-directed humor cross and recross race and gender boundaries of political decorum and render anew the human being who would otherwise be made over again in accordance to the hegemonic, European subject of modernity. For it is perhaps only in this moment that Douglass may feel not just freer in the sense of being whiter, but free to enjoy a public adjoinment of his social and political being, as Mai-x says of political emancipation vis-àvis the individual who "no longer separates the social power from himself as political power."^" And, as we have seen, the visual stereotypes disseminated by Punch supplied figures like Douglass and Ward with a culturally legible form of social ontology to both redact and revise. Dartmouth College Notes Support for this research was made possible by a Dartmouth College Class of 1962 Fellowship and Dartmouth's "No Laugliing Matter" Humanities Institute, where it received generous feedback from Angela Rosenthal, David Bindman, aiid the rest of the fellows. I atii also indebted to Don Pease and the Futures of American Studies Institute, where an early version received commentary that was both probative and probing. 1 William Wells Brown, "The Virginian Slave, Intended as a Companion to Powers's 'Greek Slave,'" Punch, January-June 1851, 236. For more on this illustration, see Joy Kasson. "Mind in Matter in History: Viewing The Greek Slave," Yale Journal of Criticism 11 (spring 1998): 79-83; and Jennifer DeVere Brody, Impossible Purities: Blackness. Femininity, and Victorian Culture (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 1998). 69-71. On Brown's dramatic use of the cartoon at the exhibition, see Michael A. Chaney, Fugitive Vision: Slave Image and Black Identity in Antebellum Narrative (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 2007). 49-79. 2 "Punch for June 14th Contains a Couple of Admirable Illustrations," National Era, 17 July 1851, n.p. 86 American Literature 3 4 5 Erederick Douglass' Paper, 26 June 1851. Erederick Douglass'Paper,"^June 1853. Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1991). 190; quoted in Martha Banta, Barbaric Inter, course: Caricature and the Culture of Conduct, 1841-1936 (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press. 2003), 9. Further references to Barbaric Intercourse will be cited parenthetically in the text as BI. 6 William S. McFeely, Erederick Douglass (New York: Norton, 1995), 167. 7 For this approach to Dotiglass's dialogic relation to Punch. I am indebted to Banta's relational definition of caricature: "Caricature is held as proof of the presumed rightness and literal value of the etenial ideals it visually challenges. Thus, it is political, social, and—in the most basic sensecultural. It guides relations between those who appear to look like caricatures inhabiting cartoon settings and those who deny they might be caricatures, yet who are doomed to be defined by representations of what they say they are not" [BI. 8). 8 Frankie Hutton, The Early Black Press in America, 1827 to I860 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1992), 18. Compared to standard newspapers of the time, however, the black press was not unusual in its frequent borrowing from Punch. Many midcentury periodicals such as Massachusetts's Pittsßeld Sun and Barre Patriot regularly included epigrammatic snippets from Punch, often beginning with "Punch says" followed by the quotation. Nor is it uncommon to find American quotations of Punch cartoons in such newspapers moving beyond mere description to include critique. The 15 December 1859 issue of the Pittsfield Sun reverses the joke of a Punch caricature showing Louis Napoleon facing down a British lion with a toy dog by noting, "The picture is significantly inscribed "Bow. Wow!" and is indeed a burlesque; for England is decidedly no such superior animal as the caricaturist represents her. nor is France a poodle to be sniifed at with impunity." For more on reprinting in antebellum America, see Meredith L. McGill. American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834-1853 (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2002). 9 Frederick Douglass, North Star, 15 December 1848. For more on the nineteenth-century iconography of liberty, see Jean Fagan Yelliii, "Caps and Chains: Hiram Powers' Statue o f Liberty/'Mmeriian Quarterly 38 (winter 1986): 798-826. 10 Albert Shaw. Abraham Lincoln: A Cartoon History, Volume 1: His Path to the Presidency (New York: Review of Reviews, 1929), 65. According to Winifred Morgan, Brother Jonathan appeared in countless iconographie and dramatic representations between the American Revolution and the Civil Wiir; the character "developed from an earlier notion of America embodied in the figure of Yankee Doodle lAnd it] gave way to Uncle Sam" (17). For the origin of Brother Jonathan, see Winifred Morgan, An Frederick Douglass and tbe Jokework of Slavery 87 American Icon: Brother Jonathan and American Identity (Nevrark: Uoiv. of Delaware Press, 1988), 18-21 Chaiiey, Fugitive Vision, 3. Dotiglass, North Star, 14 January 1848. W. J. T. Mitchell. Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1994), 152. Mitchell's ekphrastic phases move beyond word aiid image differences to consider the subjectobject differences these two presumably opposed symbol systems come to represent. Mitchell. Picture Theory. 154. The suggestion here is that Douglass's seeming lack of interest in the artist partners with his oratorical skills during such moments of description to realize Mitchell's third phase of ekphrasis whereby the verbal supplants the visual altogether—replacing not simply what the picture shows, but its means of showing. Douglass, North Star, 14 January 1848. Granville Ganter, "'He Made Us Laugh Some'; Frederick Douglass's Humor," African American Review 37 (winter 2003): 547. In addition to Ganter, Gregory P. Lampe historically contexttializes Douglass's humor with great lucidity, examining his oratory and varied uses of "rhetorical devices such as anaphora, metaphor, simile, allegory, alliteration, parallelism, mimicry, and antithesis" (Frederick Douglass: Freedom's Voice, 1818-1845 lEast Lansing: Michigan State Univ. Press, 1998], viii). Saidiya V. Hartman defines "fungibility" as the property of the slave as a commodity that "makes the captive body an abstract and empty vessel vulnerable to the projection of others' feelings, ideas, desires, and values; and. as property, the dispossessed body of the enslaved is the surrogate for the master's body since it guarantees his disembodied universality and acts as the sign of his power and dominion" (Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America [Oxford, Eng.: Oxford Univ. Press, 1997]. 21). Before the foutiding of Frederick Douglass' Paper in 1851. Douglass contemplated merging the North Star witli the Syracuse (N.Y.) Standard: however, because Douglass was to cede full editorial control, according to McFeely he "understandably held on to his own prerogatives land] the merger did not take place" (Frederick Douglass, 168). For more on Douglass's editorial ambitions and the controversy surrounding the name change of the North Star, see Waldo E. Martin Jr., The Mind of Frederick Douglass (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press. 1986). 44-45. Speech to Anti-Slavery Society, 9 May 1848. in The Frederick Douglass Papers, 5 vols., ed. John W. Blassingame (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1986), 2:117-28. Further references to Douglass's writings are to this collection and will be cited parenthetically in the text as FDP. Put simply, pornotroping is a representational process derived from 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 88 American Literature slavery that transforms persons into flesh. In her discussion of pornotroping. Hortense Spillers makes distinctions between body and flesh and between culture and cultural exclusion—which she dubs "vestibularity" ("Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe," Diacritics 17 tsummer 1987]: 67). Robert Stepto, From Behind the Veil: A Study of Afro-American Narrative (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1979). 4-5. FDP,\2\. FOP, 3:465. Douglass repeats this formulation in "Fighting the Rebels with One Hand: An Address Delivered in Philadelphia. Pennsylvania, on 14 January 1862" (3:478). A less sanguine version of the same principle appears in "Hope and Despair in These Cowardly Times: An Address Delivered in Rochester. N.Y., on 28 April, 1861": "There is a general feeling among us that the control of events has been taken out of our hands, that we have fallen into the mighty current of eternal principlesinvisible forces, which are shaping and fashioning events as they wish, using us only as instruments to work out their own results in our National destiny" (FDP, 3:425). Marcus Wood. "The American South and English Print Satire. 17601865," in Britain and the American South: From Colonialism to Rock and Roll, ed. Franklin T. l^mbert and Joseph P. Ward (Jackson: Univ. Press of Mississippi. 2001), 133. A number of factors impacted British altitudes toward U.S. slavery during the tumultuous years just prior to the Civil War. including but not limited to the Irish famines of 1847-1852. the Sepoy Rebellion of 1857 in India, and the increasing instability in the Caribbean colonies evidenced in conflicts such as the Indian Rebellion of 1857 and the Morant Bay Rebellion of 1865. For further insights into the impact of these events on the British press and its various representations of race, see Michael de Nie, The Eternal Paddy: Irish Identity and the British Press, 1798-1882 (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press. 2004); Julie F. Codell. Imperial CoHistories: National Identities and the British and Colonial Press (Madison. N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ. Press, 2003); and Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Colony and Metropole in the English Imagination, 1830-1867 (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2002), 338-434. Wood, "Tlie American South," 131-32. This image and the other Civil War caricatures discussed are by John Tenniel, who later illustrated Alice in Wonderland (1898). While I don't intend to reproduce the same strategic indifference lo the illustrations' authorship that I ascribe lo Douglass, a thorough treatment of Tenniel's role remains outside the scope of this essay. To view his caricatures, see "John Tenniel and the American Civil War, Political Cartoons from PMMCÄ, 1860-1865." www.arthist.umn.edu/aict/Tennielweb/splash.hlml. For more on Tenniel's politics, see Frankie Morris. Artist of Wonderland: 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 Frederick Douglass and the Jokework of Slavery 89 The Life. Folitical Cartoons, and Illustrations of Tenniel (Charlottesville: Univ. of Virginia Press. 2005). Ania Looniba. Shakespeare. Race, and Colonialism (Oxford, Eng.: Oxford Univ. Press. 2002), 8. Kirn C. Sturgess. Shakespeare and the American Nation (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge Univ. Press. 2004), 154. Keith M. Botelho. '•'Look onTliis Picture, And on This': Framing Shakespeare in William Wells Brown's The Escape," Comparative Drama 39 (summer 20Ü5): 191. Wood, "The American South," 139. One reason to press the point that the conscription caricature is of Douglass is that Douglass himself may have thought so. Ü the issue was notably his bailiwick, then its visualization may be seen as an objective form of his subjective properties. Evidence for Douglass's beliefin the picture'sability to maintain an equivalence between "subjective consciousness . . . landj objective form" may be found in "Pictures and Progress" {FDF. 3:461). Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, ed. Philip Foner, 5 vols. (New York: International Publishers. 1950), 1:135. Autobiographies: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave: My Bondage and My Freedom; Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (New York: Library of America, 1996), 366. Peter A. Dorsey. "Becoming the Other: The Mimesis of Metaphor in Douglass's My Bondage and My Freedom," FMIJ^ 111 (May 1996): 435. Ayana D. Byrd and Lori Tharps, Hair Story: Untangling the Roots of Black Hair in America (New York: Macmillaii. 2002), 22. McFeely, Frederick Douglass. 211. Noliwe M. Rooks. Hair Raising: Beauty, Culture, and African American Women (Rutgei-s, N.J.: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1996), 36. Frederick Douglass, "Fred Douglass on His Marriage: He Is Neither an African Nor a Caucasian and Has No Apology to Offer." Washington Post, 26 January 1884; reprinted in the New York Times, 27 January 1884. and in Blassingame. ed.. Frederick Douglass Fapers, 5:146. "Speech by Samuel Ringgold Ward Delivered at the Poultry Chapel, London. England. 9 May 1853," in The Black Abolitionist Fapers, 5 vois., ed. C. Peter Ripley (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Cai-olina Press. 1985). 1:337. Samuel Ringgold Ward, Autobiography of a Fugitive Negro: His AntiSlavery Labours in the United States, Canada, and England (London: John Snow. 1855). 253. Ibid., 236. "Speech by Samuel Ringgold Ward." in Black Abolitionist Fapers, ed. Ripley, 336. Jacques Rancière, "Politics. Identification, and Subjectivization." October 61 (summer 1992): 59. 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 90 American Literature 45 Ibid., 59. 46 Cecilia Sjöholm, Kristeva and the Political {London: Routledge, 2005), 71-72. 47 Anthony Bogues, Black Heretics, Black Prophets: Radical Political Intettectuats (London: Routledge, 2003), 119. 48 Marx-Engels Reader, trans. T. B. Bottomore (New York: Norton. 1972), 44. Copyright of American Literature is the property of Duke University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. 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