Frederick Douglass In Ireland

In the summer of 1845, a man named Frederick Douglass disembarked ship in Dublin. It marked the start of a two-year lecture tour of Britain and Ireland by the celebrated author, orator - and escaped slave. Advised to leave America for his own safety after the publication of his eloquent and incendiary abolitionist memoir, Douglass proceeded to spend four months in Ireland describing and denouncing the horrors of slavery: packing full halls with his oratorical skill; sharing a stage with 'The Liberator' Daniel O'Connell; and taking the pledge from 'The Apostle of Temperance' Fr. Theobald Mathew.

The story of the anti-slavery movement in Ireland is little known, yet when Frederick Douglass visited the country in 1845, he described Irish abolitionists as the most ‘ardent’ that he had ever encountered. Moreover, their involvement proved to be an important factor in ending the slave trade, and later slavery, in both the British Empire and in America. While Frederick Douglass remains the most renowned black abolitionist to visit Ireland, he was not the only one. This publication traces the stories of ten black abolitionists, including Douglass, who travelled to Ireland in the decades before the American Civil War, to win support for their cause. It opens with former slave, Olaudah Equiano, kidnapped as a boy from his home in Africa, and who was hosted by the United Irishmen in the 1790s; it closes with the redoubtable Sarah Parker Remond, who visited Ireland in 1859 and chose never to return to America. The stories of these ten men and women, and their interactions with Ireland, are diverse and remarkable.

This critical edition documents Frederick Douglass's relationship with Britain through unexplored oratory and print culture. With an unprecedented and comprehensive 60,000-word introduction that places the speeches, letters, poetry and images printed here into context, the sources provide extraordinary insight into the myriad performative techniques Douglass used to win support for the causes of emancipation and human rights. Editors examine how Douglass employed various media - letters, speeches, interviews and his autobiographies - to convince the transatlantic public not only that his works were worth reading and his voice worth hearing, but also that the fight against racism would continue after his death.

'An excellent book.' Irish Voice (New York)Ties between political activists in Black America and Ireland span several centuries, from the days of the slave trade to the close links between Frederick Douglass and Daniel O'Connell, and between Marcus Garvey and Eamon de Valera. This timely book traces those historic links and examines how the struggle for black civil rights in America in the 1960s helped shape the campaign against discrimination in Northern Ireland. The author includes interviews with key figures such as Angela Davis, Bernadette McAliskey and Eamonn McCann.

This book tackles a hitherto neglected topic by presenting Ireland as very much a part of the Black Atlantic world. It shows how slaves and sugar produced economic and political change in Eighteenth-century Ireland and discusses the role of Irish emigrants in slave societies in the Caribbean and North America.

This book takes as its subject the effect of extraterritorial sites - Ireland, Haiti, Egypt - on Frederick Douglass’ writing, self-construction, national, class and racial identity, and status as representative US American man. The most prolific African American writer of the nineteenth century embarked, after his escape from slavery in 1838, on a public career that would span the century and three continents. The narrative of his life in slavery remains a seminal work in the literary and historical canons of the United States, and has recently been included in the corpus of the American Renaissance. Much critical attention has been placed on Douglass’ activities within the United States, his effect on socio-political reform, and relationship to an oppressed and marginalized community of African Americans. Yet much of his literary and political development occurred outside the United States. This innovative book focuses specifically on Douglass’ Atlantic encounters, literal and literary, against the backdrop of slavery, emancipation, and western colonial process. Sweeney’s study will be of interest to those working in the fields of history, literature and cultural studies; to scholars of Douglass; those interested in American and Irish Studies, Black Atlantic studies and postcolonialism; and those engaged in critical work on the literary and historical implications of the United States as empire.

Frederick Douglass’s changeable sense of his own life story is reflected in his many conflicting accounts of events during his journey from slavery to freedom. Robert S. Levine creates a fascinating collage of this elusive subject—revisionist biography at its best, offering new perspectives on Douglass the social reformer, orator, and writer.

This is a book about Irish nationalism and how Irish nationalists developed their own conception of the Irish race. Bruce Nelson begins with an exploration of the discourse of race--from the nineteenth--century belief that "race is everything" to the more recent argument that there are no races. He focuses on how English observers constructed the "native" and Catholic Irish as uncivilized and savage, and on the racialization of the Irish in the nineteenth century, especially in Britain and the United States, where Irish immigrants were often portrayed in terms that had been applied mainly to enslaved Africans and their descendants. Most of the book focuses on how the Irish created their own identity--in the context of slavery and abolition, empire, and revolution. Since the Irish were a dispersed people, this process unfolded not only in Ireland, but in the United States, Britain, Australia, South Africa, and other countries. Many nationalists were determined to repudiate anything that could interfere with the goal of building a united movement aimed at achieving full independence for Ireland. But others, including men and women who are at the heart of this study, believed that the Irish struggle must create a more inclusive sense of Irish nationhood and stand for freedom everywhere. Nelson pays close attention to this argument within Irish nationalism, and to the ways it resonated with nationalists worldwide, from India to the Caribbean.