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Persona Ficta: Frederick Douglass
- ELH
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 85, Number 3, Fall 2018
- pp. 775-800
- 10.1353/elh.2018.0028
- Article
- Additional Information
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Abstract:
This essay resituates Frederick Douglass's turn to political abolitionism post-1851 within an Anglo-American discussion in legal hermeneutics about the concept of persona ficta: a legal fiction used to confer personhood on nonhuman entities, such as corporations. Douglass drew on this discussion, with roots in early modernity and a principal exponent in Thomas Hobbes, to adjudicate the unconstitutionality of slavery and the meaning of legal personhood. Rather than vouchsafe legal protections for the enslaved in a transcendent notion of humanity, Douglass sought justice in the idea that personhood is immanent to the artificial yet politically significant domain constituted by legal texts.