Specters of Democracy: Blackness and the Aesthetics of Politics in the Antebellum U.S.

by Ivy G. Wilson

Overview

Specters of Democracy examines how figurations of blackness were used to illuminate the fraught relationship between citizenship, equality, and democracy in the antebellum U.S. Through close readings of Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and Walt Whitman (on aurality), and Herman Melville, William J. Wilson, and a host of genre painters (on visuality), the book reveals how the difficult tasks of representing African Americans-both enslaved and free-in imaginative expression was part of a larger dilemma concerning representative democracy itself.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780195340358
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	06/06/2011
Pages:	252
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.20(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Ivy G. Wilson is Associate Professor of English at Northwestern University. He is the editor of At the Dusk of Dawn: Selected Poetry and Prose of Albery Allson Whitman and the coeditor, with Robert S. Levine, of The Works of James M. Whitfield: America and Other Writings by a Nineteenth-Century African American Poet.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction. In the Shadows of Citizenship: African Americans and the Alterity of Democracy
Version and Subversion: The Aurality of Democratic Rhetoric
Chapter 1. Frederick Douglass's "Glib-tongue": African American Rhetoric and the Language of National Belonging
Chapter 2. Merely Rhetorical: Virtual Democracy in Clotel
Chapter 3. Rhythm Nation: African American Poetics and the Discourse of Freedom
Chapter 4. Black and Tan Fantasy: Walt Whitman, African Americans, and Sounding the Nation
Imagining the Nation and Democratic Visuality
Chapter 5. Framing the Margins: Geometries of Space and the Aesthetics of Nationalism
Chapter 6. The Spectacle of Disorder: Race, Decoration, and the Social Logic of Space
Chapter 7. The Colored Museum
Conclusion. Shadow and Act Redux
Works Cited

Editorial Reviews

"In Specters of Democracy, Wilson provides a brilliant reconceptualization of American democracy, positing it as an institution which, from its very origins, was constituted by the shadowy presence of its black subjects. Drawing upon representations from a variety of artistic forms, and with deft and detailed consideration of their sensory as well as intellectual and emotional impacts, Wilson's careful textual analyses are matched by his remarkable acuity with legal and political theory." —Imani Perry, Princeton University

"Navigating brilliantly between representations of blacks and traces of blackness in nineteenth-century U.S. formations of democracy and citizenship, Ivy Wilson balances a compelling, informed reading of literary and visual texts with a persuasive, creative linkage of aesthetics, rhetoric, politics, and cultural studies." —Thadious M. Davis, University of Pennsylvania

"Specters of Democracy gives close attention to visual media, providing a suggestive new theorization of how visual and aural aspects of print culture help produce U.S. democracy." —Dana D. Nelson, Vanderbilt University

"Brilliantly conceived, and written with uncommon verve, Specters of Democracy surprises at every turn. Wilson's core argument, supported by a rich body of evidence from literature and art especially, should inspire fresh readings of the subject of race in nineteenth-century America. His book casts a brave new light on our understanding of this vexed but vital topic." —Arnold Rampersad, Stanford University

"...Wilson aims to forge a new understanding of black citizenship, which began to move from shadow to substance in the era before the Civil War. Specialists will appreciate Wilson's ambitious argument..." —CHOICE

From the Publisher