Nick Bromell on The Powers of Dignity: The Black Political Philosophy of Frederick Douglass

Conversations in Atlantic Theory

This conversation is with Nick Bromell, Professor Emeritus in the English Department at University of Massachusetts in Amherst, Mass. Bromell is the author of numerous articles on 19th and 20th century literature and politics, and has edited the Norton Critical Edition of Frederick Douglass’ My Bondage and My Freedom, as well as a collection of essays under the title The Political Companion to W.E.B. Du Bois (University of Kentucky Press, 2018). He is the author of four books: By the Sweat of the Brow: Literature and Labor in Antebellum America (University of Chicago, 1993), Tomorrow Never Knows: Rock and Psychedelics in the 1960s (University of Chicago Press, 2000), The Time is Always Now: Black Thought and the Transformation of U.S. Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2013), and a new book, the occasion for our conversation today, The Powers of Dignity: The Black Political Philosophy of Frederick Douglass, out with Duke University Press in 2021.

In The Powers of Dignity, Bromell centers on the notion of dignity and its cognates in Douglass’ work and, by way of that focus, develops a broad, comprehensive picture of a political philosophy rooted in what Douglass calls “the slave experience.” In our discussion here , we explore themes of race, racism, Republicanism, liberalism, and the complexities of imagining Black liberation in the 19th century up through the 21st century.