The Conflict and Concord in Self-Representation of Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth.

Abstract

Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth as writers and speakers would consistently obfuscated permissible discourse, subverting the expectations as imposed on African Americans during nineteenth-century America. By obfuscating prevailing stereotypes, they perpetuated a new Black man- and womanhood in their portraiture, challenging pseudoscientific claims of what African Americans ought to appear like. They inverted the prevailing racial caricatures by manipulating recognized signifiers of race, class and gender in their rhetoric as they visualized, narrated and created public self-representations that became symbolic to reforming American mentality. By employing their physiognomies and rhetoric tropes, Douglass and Truth were simultaneously in conflict and concord with one another for even though they shared ideologies, advocated for same issues, their styles were widely separate from one another. Douglass was apt in emphasizing his vast knowledge of politics and history as he relied in eloquence to appease the audiences into a false sense of security before unleashing sanguinary doctrines. Truth as an illiterate woman was confident in spontaneous delivery which in its brevity and evangelical message seemingly less threatening of white supremacist and paternalist status quo. Together they created alternative iconography advocating for a change in mentality away from the kneeling image of a slave, asking to be recognized as a man/woman and brother/sister, imagining an equal creative and physical existence.