Lewis, J (2021) Getting to the root of the matter: what Frederick Douglass can tell us about extended corporeality. In: British Association for American Studies 66th Annual Conference, 5-11 April 2021, online.
(Request more information)Abstract
Frederick Douglass’s autobiographies are generally speaking, masterful. They shape and present Douglass’s experiences through rhetoric that is authoritative and self-aware. A partial exception to this mastery is Douglass’s representation of the root he carries, as protection against the violent overseer, Covey. In all of his narratives Douglass expresses ambivalence over, both what the root represents, and what part it had played in his transformation from a slave to ‘a man’. Most critics read Douglass’s root as symbolic; a figure that represents the African cultural practices that circulated among slaves on plantations. In this paper I take a different view and develop an argument that retains a sense of the root’s physicality, seeing the troubling significance of the root as its material presence, in Douglass’s pocket. I argue that, unlike almost every other trace of the physical world in Douglass’s work, the root resists easy transition to a symbolic realm. It remains, in Douglass’s memory and in his narratives, stubbornly material; insignificant, yet unforgettable; slight, yet pressing. Using the work of Don Ihde, Linda Martín Alcoff, and Tim Ingold, I argue that Douglass’s root reveals something important about materiality and corporeality: about the push and pull of extrasomatic objects on an always emerging sense of self.
| Item Type: | Conference or Workshop Item (Paper) |
|---|---|
| Divisions: | School of Creative and Cultural Arts |
| Date Deposited: | 14 Oct 2026 16:11 |
| Last Modified: | 14 Oct 2026 16:11 |
| URN: | https://researchspace.bathspa.ac.uk/id/eprint/17998 |
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