Amoral Abolitionism
Frederick Douglass and the Environmental Case against Slavery
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3320070 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Cristin Ellis (University of Mississippi, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2014 |
| Volume | 86 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 275-303 |
| Publication date | 2014-06-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | American Literature (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0002-9831 • E-ISSN: 1527-2117 |
| Publisher | Duke University Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1215/00029831-2647000 |
| OpenAlex | W2006852940 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 4 |
| References cited | 36 |
Ellis's essay reconstructs the history of environmental crisis-the crisis of Southern soil exhaustion-at the heart of the antebellum slavery debates. Through readings of landscape in My Bondage and My Freedom, the essay argues that in the 1850s, Douglass displaces the moral and sentimental antislavery rhetorics for which he is known in favor of a newly pragmatic antislavery logic focused on slavery's unsustainability-its tendency to exhaust the soil. This argument has two main aims: to explore Douglass's engagement with ecological and economic antislavery rhetorics, and, more broadly, to consider the relevance of his pragmatic turn to modern ecocriticism as it reexamines the role of ethical sentiment in its project going forward
Abolitionism · Argument (complex analysis · Ecocriticism · Ecological crisis · Environmental crisis · Environmental ethics · Political science · Politics · Relevance (law · Sociology · American Environmental and Regional History · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature · History · Law · Philosophy · Religion, Ecology, and Ethics
To tell a free story
To wake the nations
Free soil, free labor, free men
The Environmental Imagination
Dirt
Alien Phenomenology, or What It's Like to Be a Thing
Ecology without Nature
The Slave Power
The Ecological Thought
Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor
Slavery, Capitalism, and Politics in the Antebellum Republic. Volume 1, Commerce and Compromise, 1820-1850
Drift toward Dissolution
Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men
Drift Toward Dissolution
Slavery and American Economic Development
Slaves as Fixed Capital
Modernizing a Slave Economy
A Sand County Almanac with Essays on Conservation
Antebellum Agricultural Reform, Republican Ideology, and Sectional Tension
Soil and Southern History
Sense of Place and Sense of Planet
"Free Soil and the Abolitionist Forests of Frederick Douglass's "The Heroic Slave
Soil Exhaustion as a Factor in the Agricultural History of Virginia and Maryland, 1606-1860
Vibrant Matter
| Unique citing works | 4 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0.5 |
| Citation span | 2018 - 2022 (5) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 2 |