“Douglass’s Black Atlantic: The Caribbean”

About This Research

Description: Dr. Ifeoma Nwankwo’s chapter in this text discusses the life of the multi-talented social reformer and abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who eventually became a US consul to Haiti.

Douglass’s “double-consciousness” is explained in terms of how complicated it is and how it should actually be termed “twice-doubled consciousness.” The text also articulates the ways in which Douglass’s arguments about US African Americans identity and relationship to the United States were formed, strengthened, or weakened with the “Black world” outside of the U.S.