Angela Y. Davis analyzed Douglass's Narrative in two lectures delivered at UCLA in 1969, titled "Recurring Philosophical Themes in Black Literature." Those lectures were subsequently published during Davis's imprisonment in 1970–1971 as the 24-page pamphlet Lectures on Liberation.[10] The lectures, along with a 2009 introduction by Davis, were republished in Davis's 2010 new critical edition of the Narrative.[11]
The first chapter of this text has also been mobilized in several major texts that have become foundational texts in contemporary Black studies: Hortense Spillers in her article "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book” (1987); Saidiya Hartman in her book Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (1997), and Fred Moten in his book In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (2003). Each author uniquely contends with and navigates through Douglass’s writing. Specifically, each author has a divergent approach to revisiting or reproducing narratives of the suffering enslaved body. These divergences on Douglass are further reflected in their differing explorations of the conditions where subject and object positions of the enslaved body are produced and/or troubled. Spillers mobilizes Douglass’s description of his and his siblings’ early separation from their mother and subsequent estrangement from each other to articulate how the syntax of subjectivity, in particular “kinship”, has a historically specific relationship to the objectifying formations of chattel slavery which denied genetic links and familial bonds between the enslaved. This denial was part of the processes that worked to reinforce the enslaved position as property and object. Spillers frames Douglass’s narrative as writing that, although frequently returned to, still has the ability to “astonish” contemporary readers with each return to this scene of enslaved grief and loss (Spillers, “Mama’s Baby”, 76). By tracing the historical conditions of captivity through which slave humanity is defined as “absence from a subject position” narratives like Douglass’s, chronicles of the Middle Passage, and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, are framed as impression points that have not lost their affective potential or become problematically familiar through repetitions or revisions (Spillers, “Mama’s Baby”, 66). Spillers own (re)visitation of Douglass’s narrative suggests that these efforts are a critical component to her assertion that “[i]n order for me to speak a truer word concerning myself, I must strip down through layers of attenuated meanings, made an excess in time, over time, assigned by a particular historical order, and there await whatever marvels of my own inventiveness” (Spillers, "Mama's Baby", 65).
In contrast to Spiller’s articulation that repetition does not rob Douglass’s narrative of its power, Saidiya Hartman explores how an over familiarity with narratives of the suffering enslaved body is problematic. In Hartman's work, repeated “exposure of the violated body” is positioned as a process that can lead to a benumbing “indifference to suffering” (Hartman, Scenes of Objection, 4). This turn away from Douglass’ description of the violence carried out against his Aunt Hester is contextualized by Hartman's critical examination of 19th century abolitionist writings in the Antebellum South. These abolitionist narratives included extreme representations of violence carried out against the enslaved body which were included to establish the slave's humanity and evoke empathy while exposing the terrors of the institution. However, Hartman posits that these abolitionist efforts, which may have intended to convey enslaved subjectivities, actually aligned more closely to replications of objectivity since they “reinforce[d] the ‘thingly’ quality of the captive by reducing the body to evidence” (Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 19). Instead of concentrating on these narratives that dramatized violence and the suffering black body, Hartman is more focused on revealing the quotidian ways that enslaved personhood and objectivity were selectively constructed or brought into tension in scenes like the coffle, coerced performances of slave leisure on the plantation, and the popular theater of the Antebellum South.
Fred Moten's engagement with Narrative of The Life of Frederick Douglass echoes Spillers assertion that “every writing as a revision makes the ‘discovery’ all over again” (Spillers, 69). In his book chapter “Resistance of the Object: Aunt Hester’s Scream” he speaks to Hartman's move away from Aunt Hester's experience of violence. Moten questions whether Hartman's opposition to reproducing this narrative is not actually a direct move through a relationship between violence and the captive body positioned as object, that she had intended to avoid. Moten suggests that as Hartman outlines the reasons for her opposition, her written reference to the narrative and the violence of its content may indeed be an inevitable reproduction. This is reflected in his question “of whether performance in general is ever outside the economy of reproduction” (Moten, In the Break, 4). A key parameter in Moten's analytical method and the way he engages with Hartman's work is an exploration of blackness as a positional framework through which objectivity and humanity are performed. This suggests that an attempt to move beyond the violence and object position of Aunt Hester would always be first a move through these things. Through this framework of the performativity of blackness Moten's revisitation of Douglass’s narrative explores how the sounds of black performance might trouble conventional understandings of subjectivity and subjective speech.
