A Quest for Being:
Analysing the obstacles Frederick Douglass had to overcome to establish an autonomously emancipated and intelligible African American identity in his autobiographical writing

Table of Contents
1. Douglass' Conflict - "Double Consciousness"
2. Factual Inconsistencies in the Crafting Process of African American Identity
2.1. Douglass' Silences on the World beyond the US
2.2. Contradictions in Douglass' Autobiographies
3. The Challenge of Establishing Douglass' Intended African American Identity
3.1. The Contented Slave
3.2. Slave Laws and Types of Mankind
3.3. Heteronomous Submission vs. Autonomous Emancipation
4. An Intelligible Paragon of African American Identity

Written Outline
Frederick Douglass, though encountering various obstacles, "went from being not even considered fully human according to US law to representing the US government" (Nwankwo 146) in Haiti as consul. His autobiographical writing is considered to be a paramount example of the southern slave's "quest for being" (Baker 34), however, in regard to W.E.B. Du Bois' conception of "double consciousness", Douglass, in his autobiographies, is virtually silent on the Black world beyond the United States to be able to emancipate African Americans, which he characterized as "a nation, in the midst of a nation which disowns them" (Dixon 251), on US soil. To gain a better understanding of Douglass arguments about Black identity in the United States, these silences on the world beyond the US deserve to be investigated thoroughly. Furthermore, in regard of the complications of establishing an autonomously emancipated and intelligible African American identity, this paper serves to point out this particular and further social obstacles, Douglass had to overcome to become a paragon of this striven for identity, which in turn blazed the way to freedom. In his second autobiography, Douglass "suggests that slaves are inherently resistant to thinking about [...] migration because of their history of forced placement and displacement" (Nwankwo 148). He further states that "the slave is a fixture; he has no choice, no goal, no destination" (Douglass, MB 238). To overcome the psycho-terror inflicted upon the African American's mind, that made him perceive any suggestion of migration in a negative way, was a tough challenge. In addition to that, as Lincoln complained that "the world has never had a good definition of the word liberty" and that a vast part of society thought that liberty meant "for some man to do as they please with other man, and the product of other men's labor" (Shields 15), to achieve citizenship and freedom meant to change a whole nation's conception of law and philosophy. Considering the impact Douglass' autobiographical writing had on US society despite "factual inconsistencies" (Nwankwo 148) in the crafting process of his intended African American identity, exposes his ingenuity, as well as the way he changed the dominant discourses on Slavery, Philosophy, and Literature, to name a few, by his self-taught intelligibility.

Bibliography
Baker, Houston A. The Journey Back: Issues in Black Literature and Criticism. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1980. Print.
Dixon, Chris. African America and Haiti: Emigration and Black Nationalism in the Nineteenth Century. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2000. Print.
Douglass, Frederick. Autobiographies: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave ; My Bondage and My Freedom ; Life and times of Frederick Douglass. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1994. Print.
Douglass, Frederick, William L. Andrews, and William S. McFeely. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism. New York: W.W. Norton, 1996. Print.
Gilroy, Paul. "Multiculture, Double Consciousness and the ‘war on Terror’." Patterns of Prejudice 39.4 (2005): 431-43. Web. Lee, Maurice S. Slavery, Philosophy, and American Literature, 1830-1860. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005. Print.
Nwankwo, Ifeoma C.K. "Douglass's Black Atlantic: The Caribbean." The Cambridge Companion to Frederick Douglass. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009. 146-59. Print. bShields, Johanna Nicol. Freedom in a Slave Society: Stories from the Antebellum South. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2012. Print.

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