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

by Wilson, Ivy G.

• ISBN13: 9780195340358
• ISBN10: 0195340353
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2011-06-06
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

Specters of Democracyexamines 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.

Author Biography

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	p. ix
Introduction: In the Shadows of Citizenship: African Americans and Democracy's Alterity	p. 1
Version and Subversion: The Aurality of Democratic Rhetoric
Frederick Douglass's ôGlib-tongueö: African American Rhetoric and the Language of National Belonging	p. 17
Merely Rhetorical: Virtual Democracy in William Wells Brown's Clotel	p. 37
Rhythm Nation: African American Poetics and the Discourse of Freedom	p. 59
Black and Tan Fantasy: Walt Whitman, African Americans, and Sounding the Nation	p. 80
Visuality and the Optical Illusions of National Belonging
Framing the Margins: Geometries of Space and American Genre Painting	p. 103
The Spectacle of Disorder: Race, Decoration, and the Social Logic of Space	p. 126
The Colored Museum: William ôEthiopö Wilson and the Afric-American Picture Gallery	p. 145
Conclusion: Shadow and Act Redux	p. 169
Notes	p. 179
Works Cited	p. 205
Index	p. 225
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