ENGLISH

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

By Ivy G. Wilson

Book information

Publisher
Oxford University Press
Year
2011
ISBN
0195337379, 9780195337372
Language
english
Format
PDF
Filesize
3 MB (2647376 bytes)
Edition
1
Pages
252\250
Scanned
yes
Time added
2015-11-19 13:25:02
African American United States Regional Cultural H

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 imaginative expression was part of a larger dilemma concerning representative democracy itself.

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