The Autobiographer as Detective: Frederick Douglass's Epistemology of Self and Slavery

Abstract: This article analyzes the as-yet-overlooked tropes of detectives and detection in Frederick Douglass's autobiographies, letters, and speeches. Moving across an archive encompassing early popular detective fiction, legal warrants issued against Douglass, and nineteenth-century abolitionist writings, I argue that Douglass used these tropes to conceptualize his rigorous ratiocination of slavery as a crime and a mystery. While proslavery advertisements and warrants employed the emerging discourse of the detective profession to legitimize the slavery system, Douglass draws on these same detective tropes to narrate his own "investigations" into the structures of slavery and anti-Black racism. From a position of extreme epistemic disadvantage, Douglass's "detective work" constituted a philosophical method through which he deconstructed the existential mystification of slavery—in his own words, "an attempt to solve the mystery—why am I a slave?" The presence of these tropes proves the importance in his anti-racist work of questioning positivist epistemology, ultimately foregrounding Douglass's lifelong grappling with "the unknowable." Rereading Douglass's works through the lens of detection, this article offers a new understanding of the detective genre's affordances in nineteenth-century abolitionist discourses and reevaluates a vital chapter in the history of Black philosophy.