'Emblems of Barbarism': Black Masculinity and Representations of Toussaint L’Ouverture in Frederick Douglass’s Unpublished Manuscripts

This article investigates representations of Toussaint L'Ouverture in the late unpublished manuscripts of Frederick Douglass. Douglass's four biographical versions were prompted by his meetings with the French abolitionist senator, the 'noble liberator' Victor Schoelcher, in Paris during his last European tour in the 1880s. In response to Schoelcher's statement that he was writing a French biography of Toussaint, later published as Vie de Toussaint l'Ouverture, Douglass expressed his desire to write an introduction for the English translation, intended for a North American market. This volume was never published; however four draft manuscript versions of Douglass's 'introduction' do exist. These untitled works demonstrate Douglass's continuing search for a form and style which would provide an accurate template within which to portray black male heroism and black masculinity. Douglass intended that his narration of this black historical leader's heroic prowess within a postemancipation context would be used to impress contemporary political concerns upon transatlantic audiences. This material exhibits Douglass's competing representations of the black and white abolitionist figure, and his development of a differing narrative framework within which to represent the black male body. His aim was to critique critique its appropriation as a spectacle for voyeurist consumption in contemporary discourse. Douglass's adaptations of Toussaint L'Ouverture as archetypal black hero across French, British, and North American contexts are preoccupied with forging diasporic links within turn-of-the-century discourses of black heroism. [Taylor & Francis Online]