The Strangers Book explores how various nineteenth-century African
American writers radically reframed the terms of humanism by redefining
what it meant to be a stranger. Rejecting the idea that humans have easy
access to a common reserve of experiences and emotions, they countered
the notion that a person can use a supposed knowledge of human nature to
claim full understanding of any other person's life. Instead they
posited that being a stranger, unknown and unknowable, was an essential
part of the human condition. Affirming the unknown and unknowable
differences between people, as individuals and in groups, laid the
groundwork for an ethical and democratic society in which all persons
could find a place. If everyone is a stranger, then no individual or
class can lay claim to the characteristics that define who gets to be a
human in political and public arenas.
Lloyd Pratt focuses on nineteenth-century African American writing and
publishing venues and practices such as the Colored National Convention
movement and literary societies in Nantucket and New Orleans. Examining
the writing of Frederick Douglass in tandem with that of the francophone
free men of color who published the first anthology of African American
poetry in 1845, he contends these authors were never interested in
petitioning whites for sympathy or for recognition of their humanity.
Instead, they presented a moral imperative to develop practices of
stranger humanism in order to forge personal and political connections
based on mutually acknowledged and always evolving differences.
