The Protocols of Dependency in Frederick Douglass' My Bondage and My Freedom (1855)

This article proposes a reading of Frederick Douglass’ My Bondage and My Freedom (1855) as a ‘relational autobiography’ (John Paul Eakin). Douglass strategically narrates a relational self and positions the (formerly enslaved) ‘I’ within a complex arrangement of labour relations. Douglass is attentive to the impact his slave labour has on other groups of labourers, such as poor white Southern wage workers and Irish immigrant workers. Taking up Édouard Glissant’s notion of a future-oriented, political poetics, I argue that My Bondage employs an abolitionist ‘poetics of relation’ that identifies shared dependencies to envision possible pathways towards interethnic coalition building and alliances which would help abolish slavery. Yet, because slavery not only affects relations to other labourers but also produces what I refer to as distinct protocols of dependency , considered in this context as a distinct set of conventions or codes of conduct, these relations fail to transform into actual mutual support. In other words, what Douglass draws attention to and tries to argue against in his life writing is how these protocols of dependency preclude coalition building and thus prevent the abolition of slavery from being supported by other dependent groups on a broad social scale.