ABSTRACT
Developing in the early nineteenth century, the school of "scientific racism" emerged as a racist response to scientific discoveries that were challenging long-held assumptions about essential human difference from animals. "Exploiting these discoveries of similarity" between human and nonhuman animals, scientific racism attempted "a reinscription of race along the line of species". The chapter focuses on how animals and animality mediate in Frederick Douglass' Narrative, both to make and unmake slavery. More important, it hopes to demonstrate how Douglass negotiates an embodied authorship that both resists and is complicit in inequalities, as it tentatively articulates an abolitionist manifesto not based on an animal alterity that is assumed to be deficient. Douglass' writerly tears assert that the "authority" of both slavery and narrative reside in the body. This assertion points to the need to read such authority through its corporeality, but it also underscores writing itself as an embodied act.
