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This book takes as its subject the effect of extraterritorial sites - Ireland, Haiti, Egypt - on Frederick Douglass’ writing, self-construction, national, class and racial identity, and status as representative US American man. The most prolific African American writer of the nineteenth century embarked, after his escape from slavery in 1838, on a public career that would span the century and three continents. The narrative of his life in slavery remains a seminal work in the literary and historical canons of the United States, and has recently been included in the corpus of the American Renaissance. Much critical attention has been placed on Douglass’ activities within the United States, his effect on socio-political reform, and relationship to an oppressed and marginalized community of African Americans. Yet much of his literary and political development occurred outside the United States. This innovative book focuses specifically on Douglass’ Atlantic encounters, literal and literary, against the backdrop of slavery, emancipation, and western colonial process. Sweeney’s study will be of interest to those working in the fields of history, literature and cultural studies; to scholars of Douglass; those interested in American and Irish Studies, Black Atlantic studies and postcolonialism; and those engaged in critical work on the literary and historical implications of the United States as empire.

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Many thanks to Kathy Davis for her provocative exploration of the possibility of tango and the immanent pleasure of performance as objects of enquiry in a paper that opens up a rich range of discursive and critical possibilities that challenge models of feminist practice and understandings of social scientific analysis alike. At the risk of being too reductive for even an inevitably cursory response, I would like to try to think into and around just one of the key questions here, which concerns the ways in which experience and pleasure can be factored into social scientific models of analysis, reversing current critical tendencies that, as she puts it, 'place politics before experience'. How might Davis' reflections on the question, 'Should a feminist dance tango?' help derive a strategic model of expressive dissent, a radical driver for intellectual activism in contemporary feminism? Is such a shift in paradigm either desirable or possible? How might we place experience before politics, and in doing so begin to generate a new politics of experience? Let me begin with the misquotation attributed to anarchist feminist Emma Goldman, the famous phrase, 'If I can't dance I don't want to be in your revolution'. The statement is an imaginary paraphrase of her response to criticism from fellow anarchists, who reproached her for dancing with carefree abandon on the grounds that it 'did not behove an agitator to dance'. 'I did not believe', Goldman later wrote, 'that a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal, [. .. ] for release and freedom from conventions and prejudice, should demand denial of life and joy. [. .. ] If it meant that, I did not want it. I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody's right to beautiful, radiant things' (2008: 56). That 'wanting', the right to self-expression Goldman claims as the basis of a selfsovereignty whose origin is in desire, is marked by its resistance to frameworks of