William Gregson, Breaking the 'Invisible Chains of Slavery' скачать в хорошем качестве

William Gregson, Breaking the 'Invisible Chains of Slavery'

Breaking the 'Invisible Chains of Slavery': Recognition's Motivational Problem and Frederick Douglass's Abolitionist Politics of Shame Abstract: This paper reads Frederick Douglass as a theorist of recognition and examines one of the counterintuitive ways that he navigates what I call the “motivational problem.” Struggles for recognition encounter the motivational problem when there is no clear desire or need on the part of powerful individuals or dominant groups to confer affirmative recognition to those struggling for recognition. While most studies of the political and moral salience of recognition focus exclusively on the misrecognition of the oppressed, Douglass confronts the motivational problem by orienting the attention of his readers and audiences to a form of misrecognition experienced by white slaveholders: a recognition of a humanity that is falsely assumed to remain intact and undistorted as a result of slaveholding. Douglass rhetorically leverages this discrepancy for an abolitionist politics of shame. By demonstrating how slaveholders alienate their humanity, Douglass seeks to not only shame slaveholders but erode their external sources of recognition and persuade his white northern audiences to dis-identify with the slaveholders and thereby implicitly recognize their own misrecognition of the master’s humanity. Douglass sought to make slaveholding appear to white Americans (among others) as unappealing as it is in reality and thereby persuade his white audiences to adopt abolitionist principles.