On Racial Frontiers
The New Culture of Frederick Douglass, Ralph Ellison, and Bob Marley

Heroes of black history and consciousness reconsidered for a contemporary understanding of multiracial culture.

Gregory Stephens (Author)

9780521643931, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 28 June 1999

342 pages, 8 b/w illus.
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.8 cm, 0.46 kg

"Consistently, the book rewards with fresh insight. Stephens has done an admirable thing, rarer than it should be in scholarly works, which is to hit the center and explore the circumference of his subject." Michael Kuelker, The Beat

Frederick Douglass, Ralph Ellison and Bob Marley each inhabited the shared but contested space at the frontiers of race. Gregory Stephens shows how their interactions with mixed audiences made them key figures in a previously hidden interracial consciousness and culture, and integrative ancestors who can be claimed by more than one 'racial' or national group. Douglass ('something of an Irishman as well as a Negro') was an abolitionist but also a critic of black racialism. Ellison's Invisible Man is a landmark of modernity and black literature which illustrates 'the true interrelatedness of blackness and whiteness'. Marley's allegiance was to 'God's side, who cause me to come from black and white'. His Bible-based Songs of Freedom envisage a world in which black liberation and multiracial redemption co-exist. The lives of these three men illustrate how our notions of 'race' have been constructed out of a repression of the interracial.

Introduction
1. Interraciality in historical context
2. Frederick Douglass as integrative ancestor: the consequences of interracial co-creation
3. Invisible community: Ralph Ellison's vision of a multiracial ideal democracy
4. Bob Marley's Zion: a trans-racial 'blackman redemption'.

Subject Areas: Sociology & anthropology [JH], Black & Asian studies [JFSL3]