Pratt’s essay explores how Frederick Douglass responded to the expanding racial segregation of the United States and the inhospitality to “colored” strangers that it represented by occupying and then refiguring the persona of the stranger. Douglass, Pratt notes, also asked his readers to become strangers in return. In this way Douglass constructed a virtual realm conducive to encounters among strangers that were predicated on mutual self-revelation rather than cross-identification. The variable extant meanings of strangerhood in this period meant that such gestures were not without their risks. Yet Douglass undertook to construct a new account of the human in which a reformed vision of strangerhood could found a revitalized democratic culture.

Nineteenth-century readers familiar with the slave narrative's formal conventions would have expected Frederick Douglass's second autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), to offer a detailed account of the clear and simple facts of Douglass's enslavement, escape, and life as a free man. although the book's title encourages that expectation, Douglass nevertheless rejects the slave narrative's traditional rhetoric of full disclosure. When he describes the physical violence done to enslaved african americans, for instance, Douglass often stops short of a full revelation of these atrocities. He deflects his reader's attention at the last moment, dropping the curtain just as a violent scene reaches its climax. Douglass also calls attention to the factual deficiencies in his writing. He not only withholds that which his readers would know. He also captions these moments as significantly incomplete. For robert Stepto, this rhetorical opacity anticipates W. E. B. Du Bois's description of life behind the veil, and it marks the first glimmers of what William andrews calls the "novelization of voice" in african american writing.I propose that these deliberately captioned blind spots mark the emergence of a considered rhetorical form that links Douglass's autobiography to the romances of Herman Melville, the poetry of Walt Whitman, and several other instances of midnineteenth-century anglophone and Francophone american and african american writing. I also suggest that these seemingly incommensurate forms of writing are actually different articulations of a single rhetorical stance that contests the protocols of bourgeois liberalism, of racialism, and of civic republicanism. this literature repeatedly and self-consciously marks its own opacity while at the same time engaging its reader with the intimacy of direct address. Michael Warner has suggested that "[m]uch of the art of writing . . . lies in the practical knowledge that there are always many different ways of addressing a public, that each decision of form, style, and procedure carries hazards and costs in the kind of public it can define" (14). With its "forms, styles, and procedures," this literature in effect defines a public formed around repeated figurations of a limit to the cognitive availability of experiences other than one's own. In My Bondage and My Freedom, Douglass refuses to render either his own life experience or that of others transparent to his readers, while simultaneously addressing his readers as though they were standing near him in close quarters. the best-known american writers of this period adopt a similar stance of intimate opacity. this literature's intimate opacity represents an effort to counter first, I would argue, the anachronistic civic republicanism favored by white abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison. Its untransparent mode of address belies the view that all humans share consistent and easily communicated experiences and needs. In this regard, it rejects civic republicanism's universal man. this mode of address als...

lloyd pratt is Assistant Professor of English at Yale University, where he teaches American and African American literature. He is currently at work on a first book about time and social identity in nineteenth-century American and African American literature.

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This forum joins the numerous critical voices that have, in recent years, called for a renewed discussion of literary and aesthetic form and its present and future place in the field of literary study. Whereas many previous discussions have turned to questions of what exactly form is, this forum seeks to shift the ground from questions of being to questions of doing. Taking up Cold War Americanist criticism, the recipe form, Victorian painting, and the intersection of form with issues of race and disability, this forum demonstrates the astonishing variety of things that formalism has done and can do as a mode of critical practice.