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Chapter 4 - Frederick Douglass’s Literary Landscape and the Racial Construction of Nature

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2025

Scott Hess
Affiliation:
Earlham College
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Summary

This chapter explores the significance of race for the landscape of genius in relation to the overall racial construction of nature in American society. It focuses on Frederick Douglass’s attempt to establish his own landscape of genius at his estate at Cedar Hill in Ancostia, overlooking Washington DC. Douglass was famous for his genius as an orator and as an abolitionist and civil rights activist. This chapter also demonstrates his deep immersion in nineteenth-century discourses of literary landscape and nature. By seeking to naturalize his genius in the Cedar Hill landscape, Douglass affirmed not only his full cultural citizenship in the nation but also, as a representative figure, the cultural rights and status of all African Americans. Cedar Hill was memorialized after Douglass’s death and eventually became a National Historic Site, but its racial associations disqualified it as “nature” in the dominant White environmental imagination, obscuring this important aspect of Douglass’s identity.

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Chapter
Information
Landscapes of Genius and the Transatlantic Origins of Environmentalism
Nineteenth-Century British and American Literary Cultures of Nature
, pp. 131 - 159
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2025

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