Marine Encounters as Elemental Resistance: Frederick Douglass's and Charlotte Forten's Ecopoetics of the Atlantic

Abstract

This article explores elemental relations to the Atlantic Ocean and its coastal regions in two mid-nineteenth-century African American writers. While considerable work has been dedicated to African American environmental perspectives, there has been much less ecocritical engagement with relations to the Atlantic Ocean in nineteenth-century African American literature so far. This article addresses this gap by analyzing texts by Frederick Douglass and Charlotte L. Forten. It turns to their ecopoetics of the Atlantic through perspectives of elemental ecocriticism, i.e. approaches that focus on “elemental places, forces, and phenomena of the surrounding and sensuous world” (Macauley 1). After introducing theoretical premises of reading African American texts in the context of blue humanities thinking and through elemental ecocritical frameworks, this article turns to Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845) to demonstrate how his slave narrative deploys elemental language to make sense of marine encounters and builds on such encounters to gain and articulate Douglass’s individual agency. Forten’s writing, on the other hand, in the form of her journals and through published letters, presents a host of picturesque images of “Old Ocean” in order to enact resistance strategies that revolve around the creation of new collectivities. Both writers, this article demonstrates, entered into perceptual, affective, material, and elemental relations and created a deep emotional bond with Atlantic waters that significantly shaped their worldviews and helped develop their own marine narratives as elemental resistance to slavery and racism.