d ustin B reitenWischer The Creolization of the Aesthetic: Frederick Douglass’s Lectures on Haiti I. Introduction On 2 January 1893, Frederick Douglass visits Chicago to give two consecutive lectures on Haiti. He delivers the first lecture, “Haiti Among the Foremost Civilized Nations of the Earth,” as a guest of the Haitian government in front of the country’s pavilion during its opening ceremony at the World’s Columbian Exposition. In the evening, he gives his second lecture, “Haiti and the Haitian People,” in front of approximately 1,500 esteemed guests at Chicago’s Quinn Chapel, the oldest Black church in the city� 1 In my reading of these two lectures, I argue that Douglass, after having served as the US government’s Minister Resident and Consul General to the Republic of Haiti from 1889 to 1891, performs rhetorically and aesthetically what he had, until two years earlier, practiced diplomatically� He seeks to overcome the still prevalent effects of colonialism, slavery, and the hegemonic power of white supremacy, and he desires to forge a hitherto hardly existent relation between the Black diasporic subjects in the United States and Haiti� 2 Disguising his lectures in a politically agitated rhetoric, Douglass subtly engages in, what I call, a creolization of the aesthetic, which is, as I will unfold in more detail, Douglass’s way of relating aesthetically the unforeseeable self-liberation of the formerly enslaved citizens of Haiti and his own intimate relation with Caribbean culture to the Black American experience of living in a postbellum Jim Crow society� Douglass’s strategic decision to turn to the aesthetic as a mode of relating and mobilizing various apparently dissociated experiences is not the least bit surprising� Throughout his oeuvre—from his autobiographical writings and his political speeches to his lectures on pictures—, Douglass demonstrates a 1 Cf� Blight, Frederick Douglass 729� 2 It might sound paradoxical, but even though Douglass uses his lectures on Haiti to reevaluate his own stance on colonial annexation, his aesthetic creolization does not contradict his earlier support of possible US annexations of Caribbean territories in the 1870s as harshly as one would imagine� In fact, in a lecture on “Santo Domingo” (today’s Dominican Republic), which he delivered in numerous cities over the course of three years in the early 1870s, Douglass counters the imperial aspirations of many Americans—of “manifest destiny” as “manifest national piracy”—by advocating that any sort of annexation could only be successful for both parties when it relies on “the more poetic side” of human being (FDP 4, 344). On Douglass’s position on annexation, see Guyatt, esp� 316-319; Polyné, esp� ch� 1� 222 d ustin B reitenWischer remarkable openness to the aesthetic and its close relation to matters of social and political progress� Douglass recurrently presents his audiences and readers with a conceptualization of the aesthetic as a particularly inclusive and, at the same time, expansive relation to and with the world. And yet, scholarship on Douglass’s philosophical engagement with aesthetics is still remarkably scarce� Apart from John Stauffer’s scattered publications on Douglass’s view on art, picture-making, his modes of “self-fashioning” and his “aesthetics of freedom,” and Paul Gilmore’s chapter on Douglass in Aesthetic Materialism, there has been no systematic attempt to account for Douglass’s assessment of the aesthetic� 3 But if one seeks to comprehend and appreciate fully the multitudinous nature of Frederick Douglass’s thinking, one must not overlook his subtle but recurrent dedication to matters of visuality, form, and creative practice, or, to put it differently, to matters of aesthetics� Since the 1860s, as Paul Gilmore notes, Douglass “began to investigate how a kind of aesthetic stance might allow him simultaneously to express and suspend various tensions between the self and the other, humanity and nature, individual and society, freedom and slavery” (112), and, as will be seen, between the different experiences of the African diaspora in the Americas. However, since it is impossible for me to unfold the scope of Douglass’s aesthetics in a single essay, I will turn to his two 1893 lectures on Haiti, in which Douglass exemplifies a curious dimension of the politics of his aesthetic intuition. 4 II. The Process of Creolization and Douglass’s Doubled Disposition Before I begin my discussion of Douglass’s creolization of the aesthetic, it is necessary to provide a brief outline of my particular understanding of creolization and to allude to the continuous differentiation and problematization of the term in recent Cultural Studies� My understanding of creolization relies significantly on Édouard Glissant’s transhistorical definition of the phenomenon because it provides us with a viable concept to grasp and problematize the production and evolution of intercultural contact and transcultural relations (especially in the context of Caribbean post/ colonialism)� Thus steeped in the violent history of colonialism and slavery in the Caribbean, creolization, according to Glissant, is “the process originated by the contacts and conflicts of cultures” (“Creolisation and the Americas” 13) 3 Cf� Gilmore, ch� 3; Stauffer, “Frederick Douglass’s Self-Fashioning and the Making of a Representative American Man”; “Douglass’s Self-Making and the Culture of Abolitionism”; “Frederick Douglass and the Aesthetics of Freedom”; Stauffer, Trodd, Bernier. And, needless to say, Douglass has at no point in his extraordinary career as writer and orator put forth a treatise, or at least a speculative essay, on aesthetics or the aesthetic as such, apart from the three published lectures on pictures and picture-making� 4 In my analysis, I will rely on the versions in The Frederick Douglass Papers (Series One, Volume 5). On the complex publication history of Douglass’s Haiti lectures, see Mcclish. The Creolization of the Aesthetic 223 in the West Indies and elsewhere� 5 As a virtually untraceable amalgamation of transcultural modes of expression, communication, and culturalization, creolization is a sociocultural (and, even though I will leave aside that dimension, of course, a linguistic) reaction to African diasporic being and, as such, both a force of resistance against and an expression of the subjugating powers of slavery and colonialism� “Creolisation is unpredictable” (Glissant, “Creolization” 13-14) and—which is crucial to my discussion of Douglass’s lectures—it “opens on a radically new dimension of reality” (14)� Creolization contains, conflates, and, at times, contradicts the “colonizer/ colonized paradigm,” as Stuart Hall puts it; it is “reciprocal, and mutually constituting” (15)� It is as much a utopic vision of community-building in the postcolonial Americas as it is the legacy of these communities’ past (and often violently suppressed) interactions� As such, creolization, despite Glissant’s assumption that all of its cultural elements are of “equal rank” (Kultur und Identität 13; translation mine), 6 “always entails inequality, hierarchization, issues of domination and subalternity, mastery and servitude, control and resistance� Questions of power, as well as issues of entanglement, are always at stake” (Hall 16)� 7 In the context of this essay, then, creolization—not despite but due to its highly conflicted definability—curiously matches the conflicted nature of Douglass’s lectures on Haiti and his attempt to link the civilizational destinies of the United States and that particular Caribbean nation� It is therefore important to note that, in the following, the term ‘creolization’ is not merely used as an affirmative reaction to Douglass’s rhetorical unfolding of a transnational Black experience—as a self-serving aesthetic gesture, that is. Rather, creolization may help us integrate the paradoxically hegemonic and resistant character of Douglass’s cultural analysis in this historically specific moment of transcultural communication� In both of his lectures, Douglass is put (and puts himself) in a peculiar position: the former slave, the Black American man and celebrated social reformer, is asked to serve simultaneously—and on native soil—as a representative of his country and as the chosen representative of another country� But Douglass acknowledges his doubled position, as he dares to walk the tightrope of initiating a transcultural dialogue between the “Black Republic” of Haiti (Douglass, FDP 5, 510) and the United States, the very country in which countless lawmakers and citizens deemed him “unfit” and “not rightly colored” to hold the office of Consul General, as he notes in the Appendix of Life and Times (1023). In the first of his two lectures, he clearly draws on this 5 Glissant himself translates the French term “créolisation” with the English “creolisation�” Apart from direct references to Glissant, I will keep to “creolization�” 6 Glissant’s Introduction à une Poétique du Divers (1996) has not been translated into English� Therefore, I use the German translation� 7 In his political desire for annexation of Santo Domingo (today’s Dominican Republic), Douglass himself testifies to the fact that creolization is not merely a bulwark against colonial hegemony, but, in many ways, also its producer and promoter� 224 d ustin B reitenWischer dehumanizing experience and he begins to relate his past struggle for appropriate recognition as politician and diplomat (and human being) to Haiti’s place in the World’s Columbian Exposition (and in the world as such). “The nations of the Old World can count their years by thousands, their populations by millions and their wealth by mountains of gold,” Douglass notes� “It was not to be expected that Haiti with its limited territory, its slender population and wealth could rival, or would try to rival here, the splendors created by those older nations … In this she has shown her good taste not less than her good sense” (FDP 5, 504; emphasis mine)� And Douglass goes even further when he, “as an honorary Haitian” (Blight, Douglass 728), includes himself in the whole of the Haitian community and thereby excludes himself from the group of his fellow American citizens—“[t]hey have given us one of the very best sites which could have been selected”—only to relate his individual re-positioning to a greater aesthetic expressivity of sovereignty and Black diasporic pride within the Mid-Western landscape� 8 “We are situated upon one of the finest avenues of these grounds, standing upon our verandah we may view one of the largest of our inland seas, we may inhale its pure and refreshing breezes, we can contemplate its tranquil beauty in its calm and its awful sublimity and power” (FDP 5, 504-05)� Considering Douglass’s (strategically aesthetic) identification with Haiti and his dissociation from the United States, his enthusiastic celebration of Lake Michigan’s sublime beauty effectively serves as a reflection, as a trans-American mirroring, of the inherent beauty and humble graciousness of Haiti, its pavilion, and its citizens, “the brave people” who will be viewed with anything other “than sympathy, respect and esteem” (505)� 9 As I seek to relate this mode of (self-)reflection to processes of creolization, it is crucial to bear in mind the moment of “unexpectedness” that Douglass refers to above. Douglass stresses the expressivity of a particular interplay of aesthetic sensitivity (“good taste”) and self-reflection (“contemplate its tranquil beauty”) that turns the aesthetic into a mode of unforeseen and erratically productive cross-cultural communication, which he, in turn, sees paradigmatically expressed both in himself and in the cultural history and sublime beauty of Haiti� I thus argue that Douglass engages in an oratory performance of creolizing the aesthetic as a strategy to walk successfully the 8 In the 1860s, Douglass was tempted to strengthen his ties to Haiti beyond the status of being her “honorary” representative� As Robert S� Levine notes in his book on Douglass and Martin Delany, Douglass was so “disturbed” by Lincoln’s 1860 inaugural address that he considered emigration to Haiti as a viable option� Only the outbreak of the Civil War gave Douglass hope that slavery would end and all Black Americans would be liberated under Lincoln’s leadership� Cf� Levine, Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass 216-17� 9 The recurrent appearance of the sublime in Douglass’s writing is certainly not surprising, considering that “Douglass’s sublime aesthetic was a black aesthetic,” as John Stauffer astutely notices (“Frederick Douglass and the Aesthetics of Freedom” 118)� In a unique reassessment of Kantian aesthetics, Douglass contrasts the sublime and, ultimately, unsettling aura of the Black aesthetic with the traditional premises of ideal (i�e� white) conceptualizations of beauty as harmony� The Creolization of the Aesthetic 225 aforementioned tightrope� In his efforts to understand, promote, and accelerate the dynamics of universal Black liberation, Douglass seeks to diminish the experience of white supremacy at home and abroad. In Douglass’s lectures on Haiti, the intrinsic struggle in processes of creolization that Hall alludes to above, i�e� the struggle between “control and resistance,” breaks forth in at least two—remarkably interrelated—ways: on the one hand, Douglass performs, what Ifeoma C� K� Nwankwo’s calls, a “twice-doubled double consciousness” in his relationship to “‘foreign’ people of African descent” (146) and their “implicit othering” (157)� 10 He is thus caught in a self-evoked interplay of aesthetic creolization (by drawing the cultural expressivity of Creole into the sphere of the aesthetic) and, more importantly, a creolization of the aesthetic (by exploring the aesthetic within the expressivity of the cultural logic of Creole). Such an interplay allows Douglass to move beyond questions of identity and into the broader realm of transcultural mobility and self-relation, i�e� into an intricately inclusive and expansive reassessment of representing and communicating Black diasporic experiences. Douglass’s political—and, ultimately, aesthetic—disposition as Haiti’s American representative and as a public orator has him, as Nwankwo further notes, “caught between the imperialist designs of his country and his desire to help maintain the independence of a country replete with large numbers of his racial kin” (154)� This, in turn, also forces us to understand Douglass’s lectures as attempts to include, to inject, “poor Haiti” (Douglass, FDP 5, 524) into what Stuart Hall so aptly calls the “external noise” of the colonizing hegemon (17)� As such, Douglass’s creolization of the aesthetic is insofar truly ‘creolizing’, as it is entrapped, self-aware, and creatively accelerating in the force-field of subaltern resistance. And it is, at the same time, coming to terms with the tradition of Euro-American ideals of beauty and the sublime� On the other hand, Douglass acknowledges his own role in Haiti’s colonial past, drawing on the presumptuous “simplicity” with which he, as consul, hoped that the Haitian government would simply give up her most important harbor to the United States� “Until I made the effort to obtain it [the harbor; D� B�] I did not know the strength and vigor of the sentiment by which it would be withheld,” but, vibrantly expressing all of her self-liberating power, Haiti “has no repugnance so deep-seated and unconquerable as the repugnance to losing control” (Douglass, FDP 5, 513)� Douglass actively performs the conflicted role of the US representative of the Caribbean nation. He realizes that the self-reliant habitus of the creolized subject as a creolized subject can and must not be separated from the historical circumstances and the hierarchical power structures that have provoked and enabled dynamics of creolization in the first place. For as a mode of cultural and communal self-defense, creolization is always already tied to the forces from which protection is needed� 10 On Douglass’s “double consciousness,” see Blight, “Up from ‘Twoness’�” 226 d ustin B reitenWischer As I have already mentioned, in the first of the two lectures, Douglass moves right into the midst of this struggle, as he includes himself in the Haitian community by speaking of a “we” (the Haitians) that is provocatively juxtaposed with a “they” (the Americans). Douglass is held in the force-field of his own aesthetic relation since he is merely able to evoke an allegedly self-contained “we” by drawing on an encroaching and potentially overpowering “they�” He thereby creates a rhetorical mode of contraposition that gains even more momentum when it is contrasted with another “we” that Douglass alludes to in his Introduction to Ida B� Wells’s fascinating pamphlet The Reason Why the Colored American is Not in the Columbian World’s Exposition� Here, Douglass notes, “[s]o when it is asked why we are excluded from the World’s Columbian Exposition,” and this time, Douglass uses “we” to refer to the community of Black Americans, “the answer is Slavery” (10)� 11 What is more, in his second 1893 lecture on Haiti, Douglass includes himself in a “we” that may, at times, seem indeterminate but that basically entails the entire US American and Western population� “Before we decide against the probability of progress in Haiti,” Douglass, for example, writes, “we should look into the history of progress of other nations” (FDP 5, 533)� In three simultaneously composed addresses—in his two lectures and in the pamphlet—, Douglass thus explores and presents himself as a torn and essentially unsettled diasporic subject—as a Black man who counts himself among the vanguard of American republicanism, among the proud population of self-liberated Haitians, and among the oppressed community of formerly enslaved Black Americans� He appears as a man whose skin color affords him the curious chance and the heavy burden to oscillate in the in-between spaces of crosscultural transition and communal trans-identification. Douglass draws on the multifaceted dimension of the Black American experience, as he rhetorically and performatively reveals that the color of his skin not only enables him to explore and reflect upon these different subject positions, but that it existentially forces him to do so� And even though Douglass’s lectures on Haiti never escape the confining realm of ‘proper’ colonial English—even though they are truly not an experimentation with the linguistic play of Creole—his mode of creolization is, nonetheless, the communicative realization of coming to terms with his rhetorically multiplied (collective, vernacular) identity, and it serves as the most promising mode of aesthetic resistance against the unsettling fragility of that identity� Creolization, in Douglass, is as much a gateway as it is a gatekeeper� In his attempts to creolize the aesthetic, Douglass therefore 11 Or, to contrast it with the Black Caribbean experience and put in the words of Stuart Hall, “it would be strange to describe the thematics of Caribbean vernacular culture without also including the notions of trauma, rupture and catastrophe: the violence of being torn from one’s historic resting place, the brutal abruptly truncated violence in which the different cultures were forced to coexist in the plantation system, the requirement to bend and incline to the unequal hegemony of the Other, the dehumanization, the loss of freedom� So there are also, always, within créolité, the recurring tropes of transplantation and forced labor, of mastery and subordination, the subjugations of plantation life and the daily humiliations of the colony” (19)� The Creolization of the Aesthetic 227 uses a rhetoric that, very similar to the linguistic phenomenon of ‘Creole’ itself, aims to establish a “proper language in its own right” (Hall 13)� In fact, Douglass expands some of the stricter territorial limitations of creolization as a linguistic and sociocultural phenomenon by linking it aesthetically to a transnational narrative of Black struggle and to the conflated histories of emancipation in the United States and Haiti� Ultimately, then, creolization needs to be understood as its own (that is, intrinsically motivated) mode of cultural self-problematization, which Douglass’s lectures on Haiti remarkably unfold in their conceptual intricacy and their aesthetic potentiality� III. “the only self-made Black Republic in the world” - Douglass Creolizes the Self In his two lectures, Douglass seeks to discuss “the many reasons why a good understanding should exist between Haiti and the United States” (FDP 5, 510), and he is interested in forging such a relationship aesthetically� If we reconsider the specific historical case of Frederick Douglass—a formerly enslaved Black man, a social reformer, a politician, thinker and writer, and, toward the end of his life, the US government’s Minister Resident and Consul General to Haiti—the turn to the concept and process of creolization does not “erode[ ] its strategic conceptual value” (Hall 13) as a methodological tool to conceptualize and understand processes of cultural mixing and hybridity in the French Caribbean� Rather, reading Douglass within and through the methodological framework of creolization and against the backdrop of a US society, in which, as Douglass puts it, “the asserted spirit [of slavery] still remains” (“Introduction” 9), affords us with an intricately more expansive and inclusive conceptualization of the aesthetic in the Black diaspora� Douglass is determined to overcome the established and, to him, well-known “discourse of the plantation,” to use the words of Glissant (“Creolisation and the Americas” 17), by way of drawing on a creolized aesthetic� Such an aesthetic, his two lectures suggest, provides a formidable entry point into processes of cross-cultural recognition and communication that simultaneously undermine and transcend the harmful and essentially dehumanizing rhetoric and imagination (i�e� the aesthetic) of US (and postcolonial) white supremacy� Haiti as such—even more so than the “Haitian revolutionaries,” as Robert S� Levine suggests—is an “inspiration” for Douglass (“Frederick Douglass” 1865)� Haiti allows the trans-American thinker to reassess the promise of a Black aesthetic as an aesthetic that testifies to Black sovereignty and universal equality� In his celebration of Haiti as point of orientation for all future attempts to facilitate Black sovereignty, Douglass does not distinguish between the depictions of Haiti’s “strikingly beautiful” land, the “sublimity of this country,” and the creative force of its Black citizens’ “manliness, courage, and self-respect” (FDP 5, 512), but he instead actively conflates them in the image of the “only self-made Black Republic in the world” (510) and his own presence as Black American orator� 228 d ustin B reitenWischer In Douglass’s attempts to relate aesthetically his Haitian experience, the Black Republic and her Black inhabitants intersect in equal rank, and they appear— or rather, they are made apparent by the Black orator—in stark contrast to the white supremacist society of the United States and the white architecture of the exposition grounds. 12 What is more, as he draws on the self-made being of Haiti as a “Black Republic,” Douglass strategically (and somewhat ironically) conflates the latter with the orator himself, for, to this day, Douglass is still regarded as one of the paradigmatic self-made men in US cultural history� 13 In the two lectures—lectures that “simmered throughout with the tense politics of race” (Blight, Frederick Douglass 728)—, orator, audience, and the discussed subject matter (i�e� Haiti and its sublime beauty) are thus integrated in reciprocal (and self-yielding) aesthetic processes, in which the creolization of the aesthetic forges cross-cultural and transhistorical relations and transcends experiential boundaries. In fact, the creolizing effect of this conflation becomes even more apparent when we consider Douglass’s sincere rejection of the idea of “Self-Made Men” in his 1893 address with the same title� Here, Douglass notes that “[p] roperly speaking, there are in the world no such men as self-made men� That term implies an individual independence of the past and the present which can never exist” (FDP 5, 549)� 14 Inadvertently, Douglass detects and expresses one of the essential characteristics of creolization—its drive toward cultural independence by emerging in crossand intracultural dependence—, which does not so much unsettle his description of Haiti as a “self-made Republic,” but which rather highlights the implicit structural fragility of Haiti as an allegedly self-made republic� And it is particularly crucial for Douglass to entertain the idea of tradition� In “Self-Made Men,” he therefore continues that “[w]e have all either begged, borrowed or stolen� We have reaped where others have sown, and that which others have strown, we have gathered” (549)� Which, in turn, means that, even though the Haitian revolution may be deemed unique, it must nonetheless be suited to fit “in the line of civilization,” as he notes in the second of his Chicago lectures (FDP 5, 510)� In Douglass’s logic of creolization, Haiti is not self-made because she has emerged from nowhere� She is self-made because she opened a “radically new dimension of reality,” to use again Glissant’s extraordinary phrase. “[T]he freedom of Haiti was not given as a boon, but conquered as a right! ”, Douglass exclaims (530). Much like his recurring depictions of his liberating fight with Covey, Douglass’s creolization of ‘self-made narratives’ thus emphatically draws on the simultaneous dissolution of old, detaining boundaries (the power of colonial occupation and white supremacy) and the formation of new, reassuring, and essentially relating boundaries (the transnational self-made 12 The “whited sepulcher,” as Douglass sarcastically notes (“Introduction,” 9)� 13 Stauffer, “Frederick Douglass’s Self-Fashioning and the Making of a Representative American Man�” 14 In her essay on “Frederick Douglass’s Exceptional Position in the Field of Slavery” (esp. 177ff.), Christa Buschendorf offers an extraordinary cultural-sociological interpretation of this passage� The Creolization of the Aesthetic 229 Black community), and it underscores the existential relation between those boundaries� Loosely following Juri Lotman’s idea of semantically charged boundaries as “the transformative processing of the external to the internal” (210)—in our case, the processing of the subaltern to the hegemonic discourse (of the aforementioned “us” to the “they”)—, creolization, in Douglass’s lectures, is an aesthetically enforced interconnectivity of demarcation and selfpositing� In more concrete aesthetic terms, Haiti needs to appear in Chicago while Douglass—as an American representative man—needs to communicate in and through what he believes is the Haitian experience. But this simultaneously demarcating and transcending process is not merely the result of a rhetorical or narrative practice� Rather, it is the performative appearance of an aesthetic act—in the words of the earlier Douglass, it must be understood as the “soul-awakening self-revelation” of a diasporic community (“Pictures and Progress” 169), “the marvelous power of enlarging the margin and extending the boundaries of [its] own existence” (“Age of Pictures” 142). One could, in fact, argue that in his rhetoric and his oratorical performance, Douglass produces an aesthetic ‘third space’ between Haiti and the United States, which is not only alluding to the physical reality of a diasporic relation but which itself becomes such an unsettling relation� And Douglass’s aesthetic ‘third space of creolization’ is indeed marked by a curiously creative mode of what Stuart Hall refers to as “unsettledness” (18), by a transitory impulse that anticipates and pushes toward an unforeseeable future� IV. From the Process to the Progress of Creolization Exposed to a US society that still revolves around “prejudice, hate and contempt in which we [Black Americans; D� B�] are still held by the people, who for more than two hundred years doomed us to this cruel and degrading condition” (Douglass, “Introduction” 10), Douglass retreats into the transnational and utopic spirit of the World’s Columbian Exposition and its “magic to dazzle and astonish the world” (FDP 5, 503)� At this surreal site, he contrasts the still prevalent “ignorance and prejudice” in the United States with the splendid description of Haiti as this uniquely ‘self-made’ nation with “no Past at [her] back,” to rephrase the Emersonian dictum (TCW 2, 188)� While the American “war of the Revolution had a thousand years of civilization behind it,” the Haitian revolutionaries “were slaves accustomed to stand and tremble in the presence of the haughty masters�” And yet, “[t]his precious inheritance they hold to-day, and I venture to say here in the ear of all the world that they never will surrender that inheritance” (FDP 5, 506)� So, even though Douglass embraces Haiti’s central role in shaping the diasporic experience of Africans in the Americas in the past (“She has in many things been first,” FDP 5, 521), his representation of Haiti is remarkably future-oriented� Particularly in his second lecture, Douglass is mostly interested in carving out scenarios of Haiti’s “probable destiny” (510), an undertaking not uncommon for the chronicler and the poetic prophet of the Black American experience. 230 d ustin B reitenWischer In line with this orientation toward the future, Douglass’s turn to the aesthetic becomes all the more apparent� For Douglass, prophecy, reform, and poetry (which includes all modes of artistic expression) are essentially the same, and when Douglass speaks of the one he implicitly refers to the others� Furthermore, in earlier writings, Douglass assumes that within this three-fold aesthetic relation all three phenomena are fundamentally progress-driven� In fact, they are progress, and, as such, they turn the aesthetic into a mode of perpetual mobilization and unforeseeable communication� Paradigmatically exemplified in his aforementioned lectures on pictures, which Douglass delivered recurrently between 1861 and 1865, Douglass turns to picture-making as the exemplary practice to explore progress as the result of sociopolitical and aesthetic communication and relation� 15 And while “[p]oets, prophets and reformers are all picture-makers” (“Pictures and Progress” 171), picture-making as such is foremost a (radically egalitarian) process of “self-revelation” (“Lecture on Pictures” 132), an expression of the “sublime, prophetic, and all-creative power of the human soul—proving its kinship with the eternal sources of life and creation” (“Pictures and Progress” 167)� At which point it is crucial to comprehend fully this development in his thinking because I am convinced that the creolization of the aesthetic in Douglass’s lectures on Haiti is essentially based on his established understanding of the aesthetic as a relation of and to progress, as a relation of form and reform, as I have elaborated elsewhere� 16 Progress, for Douglass, is not merely a social, political, or technological dynamic, but—always already—an aesthetic relation� He therefore not only compares the virtues of progress and art with each other, he insists that they emerge in a dynamic of indivisible equiprimordiality� Progress and art, much like prophecy and poetry, conflate and emerge in an aesthetic relation because they are based on and cater to the same civilizing forces of human creativity� Hence, Douglass’s creolization in his lectures on Haiti is, in turn, marked by the aesthetic relatability of geopolitical, trans-racial, civilization-historical, and transcultural processes of progress� The prophetic habitus of his lectures thus uses the narrative and aesthetics of progress to retrace the unsettled boundaries of the Black diasporic experience. In his lectures on Haiti, Douglass ultimately relies on an already established understanding of the intricate relation between progress and aesthetics, and he recognizes that relation in the fortitude and the sublime aesthetics of the Caribbean republic of Haiti� In fact, Douglass makes use of his time as diplomat in Haiti to come to terms with something that Stuart Hall, in a discussion of Glissant’s understanding of creolization, calls “cultural ‘transculturation’”—a process, that is, which creates a 15 For a cultural-historical introduction to Douglass’s lectures on pictures, see the contributions by Hill and Wexler in Maurice O. Wallace’s and Shawn Michelle Smith’s important edition Pictures and Progress. 16 Cf� Breitenwischer, esp� 58ff� The Creolization of the Aesthetic 231 vernacular space, marked by the fusion of cultural elements drawn from all originating cultures, but resulting in a configuration in which these elements, though never equal, can no longer be disaggregated or restored to their originary forms, since they no longer exist in a ‘pure’ state but have been permanently ‘translated’. (15) And Douglass’s creolization of the aesthetic is indeed a curious configuration, disaggregation, restoration, and translation of forms, in which he moves back and forth between images of slavery and subjugation and between images of majestic beauty and communal pride until those images become inseparable and almost indiscernible� He describes Haitian women as “elastic, vigorous and comely� They move with the step of a blooded horse” (FDP 5, 514), only to notice that “in the management of … animals we see in Haiti a cruelty inherited from the old slave system” (515)� “No other land has brighter skies� No other land has purer water, richer soil, or a more happily diversified climate”; but “there she [Haiti] is … floundering her life away from year to year in a labyrinth of social misery” (515)� In Haiti, sublime beauty and misery do not exist in opposition but in fluctuation; they are incessantly immersed in dynamics of mutual translation and re-translation� 17 Within this dynamic of creative (re-)configuration, Haiti appears as a paradigmatic case in point of the conflicted nature of postcolonial creolization. But she is also, as Douglass proudly notes, “a credit to the colored race” (523), and she has always been “a sharp thorn in our [the US Americans’] side and source of alarm and terror� She came into the sisterhood of nations through blood” (520). Douglass creolizes the aesthetic by juxtaposing Haiti’s sublime progress narrative with the regressive nature of supremacist racism in the United States� So, while I concur with Paul Gilmore that aesthetics “allows Douglass to delay, momentarily at least, the need for specific political solutions or reductive identifications as he explores the problematic intersection of race, culture, and politics” (112), I want to add that aesthetics also allows him to renegotiate the explanatory power of the aesthetic in light of these politically non-specific explorations. V. “in defiance of all opposing forces” - Douglass’s Aesthetics of Resistance Relying on the transformative impact of his rhetoric, Douglass, in contrast to a politician, missionary, or a returnee from an expedition, refrains both from offering reform-oriented proclamations concerning the United States and from bizarre depictions of savage exoticism in Haiti. Instead, he seeks to convince the members of his audience—his second lecture at Quinn Chapel 17 Stuart Hall adds that “[t]ranslation is an important way of thinking about creolization, because it always retains the trace of those elements which resist translation, which remain left over, so to speak, in lack or excess, and which constantly then return to trouble any effort to achieve total cultural closure” (16)� And drawing on the aesthetic is Douglass’s mode of translating the Caribbean experience (or, in the words of Henry Louis Gates, “signifying,” “renaming,” and “revising” the Black aesthetic [xxii]) into a site of trans-American recognition of subjugation and repressive hegemony� 232 d ustin B reitenWischer was attended by a predominantly Black audience—that the transnational, diasporic relation between the United States and Haiti literally concerns them, and he does so by drawing on and catering to that relation’s aesthetic particularities� 18 Recourse to the aesthetic suits him perfectly, as he seeks to introduce publicly the idea of a consonant, productive, and creative Black experience—the idea, that is, of what I refer to as ‘creolization’. This becomes even more apparent when we, yet again, compare Douglass’s celebration of Haitian sublime beauty and its relation to a greater Black trans-American experience with his analysis of the unsettledness of the late-nineteenth-century Black American citizen� In the Introduction to The Reason Why, he writes, the Negro is not standing still� He is not dead, but alive and active� He is not drifting with the current, but manfully resisting it and fighting his way to better conditions than those of the past, and better than those which popular opinion prescribes for him� He is not contented with his surroundings, but nobly dares to break away from them and hew out a way of safety and happiness for himself in defiance of all opposing forces� A ship rotting at anchor meets with no resistance, but when she sets sail on the sea, she has to buffet opposing billows� The enemies of the Negro see that he is making progress and they naturally wish to stop him and keep him in just what they consider his proper place� (14; emphasis mine) Douglass’s depictions of mobility and engagement, of resistance and reform, of regress and progress are equally striking� And while it has been adequately established that Douglass locates all matters of progress and reform in the vicinity of art and the relational nature of the aesthetic, it is noteworthy that Douglass draws on a particularly instable aesthetic to underscore the necessity, as Achille Mbembe so poignantly puts it in his discussion of the postcolony, “to take seriously the visual, the aural—all that has to do with the sensorial life of power” (8)� So, for the Black American to defy the “proper place” in US society is as much an act of sociopolitical resistance against a subjugating power as it is a mode of cultural, i.e. aesthetic, self-expression. In fact, Douglass seems to suggest that acts of actively resisting the forces of violent placement mark the Black American’s entrance into processes of creolization, the constitution and acceleration of what Glissant refers to as an “aesthetics of turbulence” (Poetics of Relation 155) and what Douglass himself evokes in the image of “whirlwinds of lawless turbulence” (FDP 5, 531)� To reiterate, in Douglass’s aesthetics, progress is art and, as such, an essentially aesthetic mode of relating oneself to sociocultural dynamics of creative intervention� Against this backdrop, Haiti, in his two lectures, becomes the epitome of the fragile aesthetic disposition of Black diasporic progress, and Douglass’s creolization of the aesthetic appears within this argumentative bridging� But as we move deeper into Douglass’s aesthetics of progress and Black emancipation, we must, at first, acknowledge that Douglass, quite ironically, “lost faith in his former beliefs in racial equality” (Stauffer, “Frederick Douglass and the Aesthetics of Freedom” 136) after the Civil War, and that his Haiti lectures (and the Introduction to Wells’s pamphlet) strikingly 18 One of the audience members was 24-year-old W� E� B� Du Bois� Cf� Blight, “Up from ‘Twoness’” 301� The Creolization of the Aesthetic 233 exemplify this loss of faith. Even though Douglass still ties the aesthetic to the promises of civilizational progress, in his recurrent reference to Haiti as “the Black Republic” and in his creolizing distortion of Euro-American (i�e� white) ideals of beauty, progress can no longer be narrativized as the natural evolution of racial equality on North American soil, as he envisioned it in the 1850s and 1860s� Such a narrative, Douglass seems to suggest toward the end of his life, must turn out to be an illusion in a society that is essentially permeated by the logic of white supremacy� In his two lectures, Douglass shows that he radically needs to change the trajectory, the rhetoric, and the aesthetics of his progress narrative� As David W� Blight puts it, “[p]rogress needed some transformative history in order to seem real” (Frederick Douglass 729)� And, for Douglass, such a transformative history needed a transformative aesthetic� In this spirit, Douglass, at the end of his second lecture on Haiti, ecstatically summarizes his idea of a transformative Black aesthetic in and through the creolization of established norms and representations during and after the Haitian revolution� He writes, in the face of the fact that Haiti still lives, after being boycotted by all the Christian world; in the face of the fact of her known progress within the last twenty years, in the face of the fact that she has attached herself to the car of the world’s civilization, I will not, I cannot believe that her star is to go out in darkness, but I will rather believe that whatever may happen of peace or war Haiti will remain in the firmament of nations, and, like the star of the north, will shine on and shine on forever� (FDP 5, 534) Hardly is there another passage in his two lectures in which Douglass so extraordinarily conflates the history of US slavery and emancipation (“the star of the north”) and the sovereignty of the Black Republic (which “still lives”) with the prophetic justice of progress (“shine on forever”)� Having spent numerous passages on the rebuttal of Haiti’s prophesized “downgrade to barbarism” (524) due to her demonized blackness (her “darkness”? ), Douglass does not shy away from including the poetic relation of the diasporic experiences in the Black Americas in the indisputable and eternal truth of astronomic calculation. The creolization of the aesthetic salvages the Black experience from the disfiguring grasp of the white supremacist, and, in its cosmic dimension, it almost salvages that experience from human encroachment altogether (“like the star”)� VI. Conclusion Considering their extraordinarily versatile and prophetic modes of philosophical reflection and public oratory, Frederick Douglass’s two 1893 lectures on Haiti must be read as passionate attempts to explore an emphatically new and essentially transcultural mode of capturing the Black diasporic experience� Douglass, I argued in this essay, engages in a curious act of creolization to initiate and reflect upon creative processes of Black self-making and 234 d ustin B reitenWischer trans-American aesthetic relatability� In fact, in these two of his last public addresses, Douglass has inadvertently opened the door for those diverse and conflicting cultural theories that understand processes of creolization as “a potential new basis from which a popular creativity which is distinctive, original to the area itself, and better adapted to capture the realities of daily life in the postcolony, can be, and is being, produced” (Hall 19)� And as if he anticipated contemporary ideas of the “postcolony,” Douglass, in his two lectures on Haiti (and his Introduction to The Reason Why), manages to conflate and unfold aesthetically the different realities of emancipated Black lives in the United States and Haiti at the turn of the century. Both at the exposition grounds and in Quinn Chapel, Douglass engages his audiences in complicated and, at times, provocatively disconcerting comparisons of the Black diasporic experiences in the Americas, in which he strategically switches between his roles as Haiti’s American representative, as former slave, and as Black American social reformer� Douglass’s lectures on Haiti can thus be read as his final attempt to integrate and, ultimately, disintegrate the relation between his own experiences and the systemic forces of racism and white supremacy in the postbellum United States on the one hand, and his understanding of the aesthetic as a primarily relating and mobilizing force of progress and reform on the other� In what I described as a unique process of ‘creolization’, Douglass experiments with a particular mode of rhetorical performativity which, as he desires, should enable him to establish a cross-cultural communication between the diverse subjects of the African diaspora� Above all, Douglass’s depictions of the sublime beauty of Haiti—her essential Black aesthetics—help him transform the unsettling power of the aesthetic from a performative indictment of white supremacy and US imperial ambitions into a cross-cultural and transnational expression of Black sovereignty. 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