68 research outputs found
Narrating the Present-Past in Frederick Douglass’s Life and Times
No full textThis chapter finds in Frederick Douglass’s final autobiography a case study for what it means to narrate the present-past. The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass points backward to bondage, bringing the author face to face with his former master. For nineteenth- and twenty-first-century readers alike, the tableau of the ex-slave sharing a sentimental moment with the man who once abused him suggests that the radical abolitionist had become a reactionary. But this chapter advances a different interpretation of the signal episode. By underscoring the elisions, revisions, and omissions that distinguish this moment in Life and Times from contemporaneous news coverage of the event, and by deploying narrative theory to illuminate both accounts, the chapter argues that Douglass’s work enacts the challenge of fighting for black equality amid a political landscape that posed the forgetting of bondage as the condition for national reunion.</p
Introduction
No full textThis introductory chapter outlines the conceptual, historical, and literary stakes of the book’s examination of the place of progress in definitions of democracy. The chapter opens with a reading of Walt Whitman’s Democratic Vistas (1871) as articulating one of the constitutive tensions of standard narratives of American democracy: the tendency to locate this political form’s promise in a future that is divorced from the past of racial slavery. Offering context for Whitman’s vision, the chapter surveys key political, cultural, and legal developments that functioned to consolidate the idea of time as linear and progressive in the period that historians have termed the nadir of racial history in the United States. The chapter then outlines the contributions of the authors and activists at the center of this study who identify an untimely democratic hope in contesting the common-sense notion that the forward movement of chronological time entails change.</p
Failed Futures
No full textThis chapter examines the uses of the unfulfilled in the writings of Charles W. Chesnutt and Sutton E. Griggs. While both authors sought politically progressive ends, Chesnutt and Griggs deployed different strategies to navigate the discourses of “pessimism” and “optimism” that marked turn-of-the-twentieth-century debates about the future of the race. Whereas Griggs believed that bringing about a better future for black Americans required representing this future in the present, Chesnutt staged its failure in order to realize a future that might not fail. Specifically, in The Colonel’s Dream, Chesnutt addresses the nation’s failures to approximate the democratic ideal. He thus anticipates the twenty-first-century debate between Afro-pessimism and black optimism. By intensifying the pessimism in Afro-pessimism, Chesnutt insists that forecasting the failed future is necessary for realizing any better tomorrow. Accordingly, he clarifies the links between Afro-pessimism and black optimism, revealing these not as opposites but as critical coproducers.</p
Making Reparation; or, How to Count the Wrongs of Slavery
No full textThis chapter focuses on the conflicting temporal frames deployed by postbellum authors and activists seeking redress. While there was brief national attention given to reparations in the years following the Civil War, the project lost much of its official sanction after the collapse of Reconstruction. By 1896, the majority opinion in Plessy v. Ferguson would argue that servitude did not count in defining race-based discrimination. The Plessy decision thus made it more crucial to clarify what was wrong with slavery and how to account for its effects. Narratives appearing in this moment took up this task: from Samuel Hall’s 47 Years a Slave, to Callie House’s articulations of the aims of the ex-slave pension movement, to Stephen Crane’s The Monster. The chapter argues that Crane’s novella conceives the wrong of slavery in a way that can help resolve the problem of causality confronting philosophical debates about making amends even today.</p
Epilogue
No full textThe Epilogue places Spike Lee’s Bamboozled into dialogue with the thought of Ralph Ellison, whose Invisible Man constitutes the silent source for Lee’s film. At the center of both works is the image of a falling body, which highlights the relationship between the present-past of slavery and the possibility of achieving a democratic future. Whereas Lee leaves viewers locked in the past of racial subjugation that his film’s treatment of blackface minstrelsy represents, Ellison revises Walt Whitman’s vision to underscore the ways nonprogressive temporal models can facilitate political progress. Limning the energies of progress and regress through the nonteleological trajectory he imbues in his novel’s key terms, “plunge” and “fall,” Ellison posits the definitive democratic movement. This idea remains recessed in the rhetoric of Barack Obama, who in his “speech on race” disavowed the politically transformative potential of the stasis associated with the racial worldview of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright.</p
Pauline E. Hopkins’s Untimely Democracy
No full textThis chapter reveals how Pauline E. Hopkins transforms the boundary between slavery and freedom into the source of a paradoxical political hope—indeed, as the best chance for realizing democracy. Announcing in Contending Forces that problems such as rape and lynching constitute “duplications” of the past of bondage, Hopkins calls for a neo-abolitionist crusade. For Thomas Jefferson or W. E. B. Du Bois, such a declaration would signal democracy’s arrested development. In the recursive narrative structures and scenes of temporal arrest that characterize her fictional and journalistic oeuvre, however, Hopkins constructs a critical resource for the campaign to redress democracy’s failings. Interrogating the limits of liberal agency, she redefines scenes of slavery’s recurrence as a starting point for a politics that might realize progress because it engenders an uncertainty about what has changed. From her democratic vista, progress results not by breaking with the past but by embracing its persistence.</p
On the Possibility of Democracy in the Present-Past
No full textThis chapter constructs a conceptual grammar for untimely democracy by pairing Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia and W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk. Jefferson’s vision of an ever-progressing polity rests on his principle of generational autonomy: the notion that each cohort of citizens is free from the burdens of its ancestors. Slavery stands as the limit for such a model. For Jefferson, blackness signifies a future haunted by bondage; thus Africans can have no place in American democracy. Jefferson’s future is what Du Bois terms the “present-past.” With this phrase, Du Bois reorders linear time—positioning the past after, not before, the present—and posits intergenerational responsibility as a democratic value alongside equality and liberty. And yet, even as he advocates a temporal double consciousness that blurs past and present, Du Bois worries that emphasizing slavery’s seemingly eternal return might paralyze political action.</p
Citizens, Soldiers, and Future Selves
No full textThis essay approaches the citizen-forming duties of literature by meditating on the military-civilian divide. Supplementing regnant accounts of the value of literary study, it argues that the democratic power of literature resides not simply in the work of imagining the other but also in imagining other versions of one's self.</jats:p
Untimely Democracy
No full textUntimely Democracy tells the surprising story of how American authors and activists defined the path of racial progress after the abolition of slavery. Conventional narratives of democracy stretching from Thomas Jefferson’s America to the present day posit a purposeful break between past and present as the key to the viability of this political form—the only way to ensure its continual development. But for Pauline E. Hopkins, Frederick Douglass, Stephen Crane, W. E. B. Du Bois, Charles W. Chesnutt, Sutton E. Griggs, Callie House, and the other figures examined in this book, the campaign to secure liberty and equality for all citizens proceeds most potently when it refuses the precepts of progressive time. Placing these authors’ post–Civil War writings into dialogue with debates about racial optimism and pessimism, tracts on progress, and accounts of ex-slave pension activism, and extending their insights into our contemporary moment, the book recovers late nineteenth-century literature as a vibrant site for doing political theory. Untimely Democracy ultimately shows how one of the bleakest periods in American racial history provided fertile terrain for a radical reconstruction of some of the foundational elements of the nation’s political system. Offering resources for moments when the march of progress seems to slow, stutter, and even cease, the book invites readers to reconsider just what democracy can make possible.</p
John O. Waller Lectureship on the Arts Featuring Gregory Laski
No full texthttps://www.andrews.edu/agenda/52468https://digitalcommons.andrews.edu/campus-news-images/1505/thumbnail.jp
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