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Ed. Angela Y. Davis. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written By Himself: A New Critical Edition. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2009. 256 pp. $12.95.
In his "Editor's Note," Greg Ruggiero describes this book as an exciting and most timely way to reintroduce Angela Davis and Frederick Douglass together as "two of the most important abolitionist intellectuals in U. S. history." Many younger readers will be familiar with Douglass's role in the mid-nineteenth century as a leader of the movement to abolish African American chattel slavery, but some may be puzzled by the reference to Davis as a twenty-first-century "abolitionist." What, they may wonder, is she trying to abolish? Just as Douglass was dedicated to abolishing the institution that imprisoned him and his people, Davis is dedicated to abolishing the institution that imprisoned her and still imprisons millions of Americans, mostly people of color: the modern American prison system. This volume suggests how these two heroic figures embody a continuum of struggle for freedom, from the America of the slave plantation through the America of the prison-industrial complex.
A mainly rural society with a political economy based on slavery, the America of the 1840s was also a hodgepodge of ex-colonies with no sense of a national literature and a kind of cultural inferiority complex in relation to England and Europe. But then came the discovery that the United States was actually contributing a new genre to world literature: the slave narrative. As the Reverend Ephraim Peabody put it in 1849: "America has the mournful honor of adding a new department to the literature of civilization-the autobiographies of escaped slaves." Preeminent among the hundreds of these works was the 1845 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself. Douglass went on to become a major figure in nineteenthcentury American life and letters.
But during the 1940s and 1950s, Frederick Douglass was expunged from the pages of American literary history. Even as late...