"Razed to the Knees": the Anti-Heroic Body in James McCune Smith's "Head of Colored People"

This article examines James McCune Smith’s series of sketches “The Heads of Colored People” (1852-1854), printed in Frederick Douglass’ Paper, and its dialogic relationship with Frederick Douglass’s novel The Heroic Slave (1853). I argue that, through representations of disabled working-class black bodies and the recurring trope of the shipwreck, Smith rejects Douglass’s privileging of the transatlantic heroic body in favor of an anti-heroism that emphasizes the importance of black print production and circulation as both testimony and prosthesis.