This work explicates the centrality of the transnational not only to the literary output of Frederick Douglass, but also to Douglass's self-fashioned identity and politics. The opening four chapters revolve around Douglass's remarkable five-month trip to Ireland, just as the Great Famine was taking hold in 1845. Often overlooked by Anglocentric historiography, the Irish editions of his Narrative contain a revised preface and other additions that extend the boundaries of the text well beyond the US nation-state. These revisions mark Douglass's emergence as an individual less beholden to New England abolitionists for validation and increasingly more in control of his own destiny.

In letters to supporters in America that Douglass wrote from the marginalized space of Victorian Ireland, he painted an idealized picture of a country free of racial prejudice. In Ireland, he wrote, “I live a new life.” Yet he characterized the native Irish in ways similar to the British; for example, he blamed drunkenness, rather than British colonial policy, for most Irish ills. While he intermittently expressed sympathy for the suffering all around him, Douglass, as Sweeney shows, posited the starving Irish peasant as a symbol of social difference – a difference that results in a self-portrayal of the enlightened expatriate American. Either because he was unwilling to offend his Anglo-Irish hosts, or because he did not wish to detract from his primary purpose of pressing the abolitionist cause – perhaps for both reasons – Douglass rarely mentioned the encroaching famine, the alarming signs of which he could not have failed to notice.

Chapter 5, entitled “‘Masks in Motion’: Dialect Spaces and Class Representation,” centers on notions of performativity, and here Sweeney veers somewhat off-track in her examination of Douglass's public oratory. Her ruminations upon “dialect spaces,” mimicry, masking, minstrelsy, and Bakhtin's notion of the carnivalesque, among other concepts, although often interesting, seem extraneous to the main thrust of her argument.

Thankfully, Sweeney returns to the less conjectural terrain of Douglass's transnational discursive practices in chapters 6 and 7. There his writings on, and travel to, Egypt and Haiti become her focus. She excels in linking these later writings with his screeds on Ireland. Douglass's lionization of empire, be it British or American, in his writings on the colonized spaces of Egypt, Haiti and Ireland demonstrate his “unshakeable belief in established cultural hierarchies and the logic of progress” (140). Throughout the book, moreover, Sweeney ties Douglass's constant avowal of masculine authority in with his ideas about US national citizenship and colonial power. Invoking the work of Amy Kaplan, among others, Sweeney also neatly shows how Douglass shifts the American frontier from the American West eastward to the Atlantic, “the primary site of US subjective emergence” (172). Her work validates the conceptual usefulness of the Atlantic as a way to examine “race” outside the restrictive parameters of the nation-state. At the same time, it admirably serves the growing scholarly interest in African American and Irish interaction through its investigation of Douglass's complex position in relation to the Atlantic that becomes for him both black and green.