Specters of democracy
Subtitle: blackness and the aesthetics of politics in the antebellum U.S.
By: Ivy Wilson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2011
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 237
ISBN-13: 9780195337372; 9780195340358
Subjects: African Americans in literature; Democracy in literature; Nationalism in literature; History and criticism; American literature; Rhetoric; Political and social views; Literary Discourse analysis; African American authors; History
Description: 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 imaingative expression was part of a larger dilemma concerning representative democracy itself.
Table of contents: title: Introduction. In the shadows of citizenship: African Americans and the alterity of democracy; title: Frederick Douglass's "glib-tongue": African American rhetoric and the language of national belonging; title: Merely rhetorical: virtual democracy in clotel; title: Rhythm nation: African American poetics and the discourse of freedom; title: Black and tan fantasy: Walt Whitman, African Americans, and sounding the nation; title: Framing the margins: geometries of space and the aesthetics of nationalism; title: The spectacle of disorder: race, decoration, and the social; title: The colored museum.