On Racial Frontiers: The New Culture of Frederick Douglass, Ralph Ellison, and Bob Marley

by Gregory Stephens

• ISBN13: 9780521643931
• ISBN10: 0521643937
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1999-06-28
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

Frederick Douglass, Ralph Ellison and Bob Marley each inhabited the shared but contested space at the frontiers of race. Gregory Stephens shows how their interactions with mixed audiences made them key figures in a previously hidden interracial consciousness and culture, and integrative ancestors who can be claimed by more than one 'racial' or national group. Douglass ('something of an Irishman as well as a Negro') was an abolitionist but also a critic of black racialism. Ellison's Invisible Man is a landmark of modernity and black literature which illustrates 'the true interrelatedness of blackness and whiteness'. Marley's allegiance was to 'God's side, who cause me to come from black and white'. His Bible-based Songs of Freedom envisage a world in which black liberation and multiracial redemption co-exist. The lives of these three men illustrate how our notions of 'race' have been constructed out of a repression of the interracial.

Table of Contents

List of illustrations	viii
Preface	ix
Introduction: the contemporary rear-view mirror	1	(11)
Interraciality in historical context: return of the repressed	12	(42)
Frederick Douglass as integrative ancestor: the consequences of interracial co-creation	54	(60)
``A sort of half-way place'': Douglass as biracial ``black culture hero''	54	(25)
``Antagonistic cooperation'' and ``redeemable ideals'' in Douglass' July 5 Speech	79	(15)
Douglass' interracial marriage as ``mediatory symbol''	94	(20)
Invisible community: Ralph Ellison's vision of a multiracial ``ideal democracy''	114	(34)
Bob Marley's Zion: a transracial ``Blackman Redemption''	148	(73)
Roots	148	(19)
Structure	167	(15)
Fruits	182	(30)
Legacy	212	(9)
Afterthoughts: ``integrative ancestors'' for the future	221	(6)
Acknowledgments	227	(2)
Notes	229	(75)
Select bibliography	304	(15)
Index	319