Specters of democracy : blackness and the aesthetics of politics in the antebellum U.S. / Ivy Wilson.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Wilson, Ivy G.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

American literature--African American authors--History and criticism.

American literature.

American literature--African American authors.

African Americans in literature.

Democracy in literature.

Nationalism in literature.

African American authors--Political and social views.

African American authors.

Discourse analysis, Literary.

Rhetoric--Political aspects--United States--History.

Rhetoric.

Rhetoric--Political aspects.

History.

United States.

Physical Description:

x, 237 pages ; 22 cm

Place of Publication:

New York : Oxford University Press, 2011.

Summary:

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.

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. Book jacket.

Contents:

Introduction. In the shadows of citizenship: African Americans and the alterity of democracy

Frederick Douglass's "glib-tongue": African American rhetoric and the language of national belonging

Merely rhetorical: virtual democracy in clotel

Rhythm nation: African American poetics and the discourse of freedom

Black and tan fantasy: Walt Whitman, African Americans, and sounding the nation

Framing the margins: geometries of space and the aesthetics of nationalism

The spectacle of disorder: race, decoration, and the social

The colored museum.

ISBN:

9780195337372

0195337379

9780195340358

0195340353

OCLC:

624552255