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3 f R E D E R I C k D O U g L A S S taking an Ell to Claim Humanity The first step had been taken. Mistress, in teaching me the alphabet, had given me an inch, and no precaution could prevent me from taking the ell. Douglass, 1960 Persecution is precisely what happens without the warrant of any deed of my own. Butler, 2005 Some of the most frightening kinds of arguments outsiders have been forced to make in American history and culture are claims in which they seek status as humans. Many groups have had to argue for the recognition of their full personhood: American Indians calling for the recognition of their very existence in what were seen as unsettled lands; American slaves seeking the right to literally own their own bodies , share in the fruits of their labors, and maintain their family relationships ; American women seeking the right to vote, own property, and control their ability to reproduce the species; and American lesbian , gay, bisexual, transgendered, and transsexual people arguing for the right to marry, to adopt children, and to have control of their partners ’ medical treatment when necessary. At the heart of this oppression are various kinds of dehumanization, of defining some classes of people as less worthy of education, of legal access to basic institutions such as citizenship, marriage, and parenthood, and of fair treatment under the law. The opening epigraph—from Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave1 —illustrates one of the myriad ways that Douglass and other African Americans were dehumanized: the denial of basic literacy and the opportunities literacy creates. 1. For the sake of simplicity after the first full reference in the text, I refer to Douglass’s Narrative and My Bondage by these shortened titles. Frederick Douglass 73 In telling the story of how he became literate, escaped slavery, and came to have a powerful public voice, Douglass was keenly aware that he was “taking an ell,” that he was fulfilling the prophecy of his new master , Hugh Auld, who remonstrated his wife for teaching Douglass the alphabet: “If you give a nigger an inch, he will take an ell . . . if you teach that nigger (speaking of myself) how to read, there would be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be a slave” (1960, 58). Douglass’s story of “taking an ell” is interesting from the standpoint of alternative rhetoric because it dramatically demonstrates that for those who have been dehumanized by systemic oppression, basic humanity must often be claimed, and Douglass’s account of this process in his Narrative illustrates not only the many forms that dehumanizing oppression can take, but it also suggests the many things “taking an ell” may entail. In addition, Douglass’s story is important for my exploration of alternative rhetoric because it is arguably the most wildly successful literacy story in American history: an illiterate and unschooled slave becomes a leading figure in American policy debates over slavery and, to a lesser extent, women’s rights in the latter half of the nineteenth century. His three autobiographies can be read as important examples of embodied writing , of the sorts of literacy narratives for which Morris Young and other compositions have called. In one sense, then, it is important simply to read Douglass’s telling of his journey to voice as a case of someone who responded successfully to what Butler calls “persecution,” someone who was forced to respond to discriminatory restrictions placed upon him solely because of his race and class status as a slave. However, my purpose is to use Douglass’s case to press further into Butler’s more complicated understanding of individual agency and collective responsibility that I sketched in chapter 1. In this sense, Douglass’s case illustrates how, in Butler’s terms, “To be human seems to mean being in a predicament that one cannot solve” (2005, 103). By this, Butler means that as much as we might yearn to be “wholly perspicacious beings” capable of absolute independent agency, doing so would mean eliminating the very means of doing so: “to eradicate all the active and structuring traces of our psychological formations and to dwell in the pretense of fully knowing, selfpossessed adults” (2005, 102). As I have already discussed, what Butler adds to the usual discussions of the postmodern conundrum of agency is the explicit call for addressing one’s own inability to find anything...

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