This book idea is Douglass on the Grand Tour. Have I mentioned it? This was the reason for some of those posts from his travel diary last year. From 1886-1887, Douglass and his second wife, Helen embarked upon the Grand Tour of Europe. This journey took them through England, France, Italy, and Greece, and they made a detour through the Suez Canal and up the Nile River in order to, as Douglass put it, “determine if the pyramids were built by the ancestors of white or black people.” While much Douglass literature has focused on his tours of England, Scotland, and Ireland in the two decades before the U.S. Civil War (1861-65), and some have considered his interest in Egypt, little scholarship has seriously considered the purpose or importance of Douglass, an African-American travelling through Europe with his white wife at that particular moment in the history of race and ethnology.
On the scholarship, let me clarify: little scholarship that I know of in my admittedly limited scouting thus far. I do know that Robert Levine wrote about Douglass's Roman trip, and there is a growing body of literature on African Americans travelling abroad. This would also have to fit in with Douglass's later and earlier sojourns to the Caribbean.
Throughout the nineteenth century, the Grand Tour of the European continent represented the pinnacle of intellectual sophistication which tourist acquired through encounters with the great art and artifacts of ancient civilizations claimed by Europe. Many American used the opportunity both to connect themselves to the vestiges of this heritage and to contrast the monarchies of Europe with the democracy of the United States. Douglass participated in this ritual, but he also occupied a more complicated position in relation to Euro-centric ideas of "civilization" and American exceptionalism.
Douglass contrasted the monarchical and Roman Catholic influences of Europe unfavorably with the greater democracy and secularism of the U.S., but he found less racism, particularly in the social acceptance of his interracial marriage. He also searched for signs of others from the African diaspora, hoping to challenge the racial determinism aimed at former slaves in the United States by contrasting American racial prejudice with what he perceived as its absence in Europe. Yet, he did this while European nations justified their imperial "Scramble for African" as the "White Man's Burden."
This quest for African influences developed as he travelled further south, noting folkways closer to the Mediterranean that resembled those he recalled from slavery, and led him to venture to the African continent. His purpose in visiting the pyramids, which he climbed only weeks after his seventieth birthday, was a response to the nineteenth-century, pro-colonial, anthropological debates that refused to recognize Egypt as African in order to cast Africans and their descendants as inherently incapable of creating great civilizations.
I'm still toying with ideas -- or perhaps gathering ingredients since my metaphor is actually that this is all half-baked. Heck, it's hardly half-mixed at this point. Whenever I am in Europe, especially outside of northern Europe, with my own awareness of my own internal, racial classification systems and the ways that they formed, I wonder at theirs. This year Spain intrigued me because of its history in the Americas, and the byzantine racial history of the U.S. southwest. Douglass walked in with his own racial history and context at a different period in Europe's racial history, which was more clearly tied up with nationalism. How did he experience it? In the breach between the two contexts -- Europe and the U.S. -- what nuances can we see in both, or at least in U.S. racial history?
I'm not sure that I have the tools to tell that story; but I will keep thinking about it.
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