Abstract:

The article places Frederick Douglass in the tradition of African American writers responding to Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia. In doing so, it reveals Douglass’s keen understanding of how visual racialized affect was bound up in questions of slavery, freedom, and citizenship. By displaying his own affective legibility, revealing that black affective illegibility is an accomplishment of consciousness rather than a natural racial distinction, and highlighting that white feeling relies on Jeffersonian racial vision, Douglass reimagines a nation in which shared affect, regardless of the body’s racialized visual aesthetics, becomes the basis for interracial American kinship.

摘要：

这篇文章将弗雷德里克·道格拉斯（Frederick Douglass）置于非洲裔美国作家对托马斯·杰斐逊（Thomas Jefferson）的《弗吉尼亚州笔记》的回应中的传统。在这样做的过程中，它揭示了道格拉斯（Douglass）对视觉种族化的影响如何与奴隶制，自由和公民身份相关联的敏锐理解。通过展示自己的情感易读性，揭示黑人情感难以辨认是意识的成就而不是自然的种族区分，并强调白人感觉依赖于杰斐逊主义的种族视野，道格拉斯重新构想了一个共享情感的国家，而不论身体的种族化视觉如何美学，成为美国人种间血缘关系的基础。