Title: Specters of democracy
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.
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, American literature, african american authors, history and criticism, Discourse analysis, literary, Political aspects
Places: United States