Democracy and Faith: Gender, Race, and the Politics of Redemption in American Political Thought
Book Length Project (In Development)
Democracy and Faith investigates the sustained commitment by African-Americans and women to the American polity amid exclusion in the 19th and 20th century through a number of key figures. It uses the philosophical and political category of “the people” understood as a not yet realized ideal, and argues that this category served as the space in which women and blacks sought to transform their fellows. In occupying this space they relied on rhetoric (i.e., as a tool for transformation) and appealed to the sentiments (i.e., the affective sensory capacity of humans to which rhetoric was directed). The moral is that since women and blacks did not know if or when their grievances would be answered, their actions were inescapably tied to uncertainty and so demanded faith. Faith thus encouraged self-assertion and so affirmed agency, but agency was circumscribed by humility about political outcomes and so disrupted the sense of America as a “chosen” nation. The book thus deepens our understanding of the dynamics of democratic transformation from the perspective of political theory, while simultaneously holding at bay an “exceptionalist” view of America’s moral development that continues to occupy studies in intellectual history and American studies. The project tentatively include chapters on Thomas Jefferson, David Walker, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, W. E. B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King, and James Baldwin.
"The People, Rhetoric, and Affect: On the Political Force of Du Bois' The Souls of Black Folk"
(American Political Science Review, Forthcoming: February 2012, vol. 106, no. 1)
In recent years, the concept of "the people" has received sustained theoretical attention. Unfortunately, political theorists have said very little about its explicit or implied deployment in thinking about the expansion of the American polity along racial lines. In taking up this issue, the purpose of this paper is twofold. First, to provide a substantive account of the meaning of "the people," what I call its descriptive and aspirational dimensions. And second, to use that description as the framework for understanding the rhetorical character of W. E. B. Du Bois' classic work, The Souls of Black Folk, and its relationship to what we might call the cognitive-affective dimension of judgment. In doing so, I argue that as a work of political theory, Souls draws a specific connection between rhetoric on the one hand, and emotional states such as sympathy and shame on the other to enlarge America's political and ethical imagination regarding the status of African-Americans.
"The Fact of Sacrifice and Necessity of Faith: Dewey and the Ethics of Democracy"
(Transactions of Charles S. Peirce Society: A Quaterly Journal in American Philosophy, 2011, vol. 47, no. 3, 274-300)
John Dewey’s underappreciated 1888 essay, “The Ethics of Democracy,” attempts to answer the following question: How do I consider myself a member of “the people” that rule in a democracy, and yet belong to the political minority? In challenging the prevailing view of this essay, I argue that Dewey defends a fundamental indeterminacy in the idea of “the people” that implies a necessary, but productive tension between relative stability and emerging disruptions. The latter, he argues, holds out hope that the power of “the people” can be redirected, thus redeeming the sacrifices of the minority and retaining their identification with “the people.” For Dewey, the idea of “the people” means that though democracy entails sacrifice, the legitimacy of the political system demands faith that it will be redeemed. Although this view is first captured in 1888, it receives amplification in his later writings.
"Race and the Democratic Aesthetic: Whitman Meets Billie Holiday"
(In Development)
In his classic literary exhortation, Democratic Vistas, Walt Whitman ties the vitality of democracy to its transformative effects on the character of the citizenry: “For not only is it not enough that … the new frame of democracy shall be vivified and held together merely by political means, superficial suffrage, legislation, but it is clear to me that, unless it goes deeper, gets at least as firm and as warm a hold in men's hearts, emotions and belief … welling from the centre forever, its strength will be defective, its growth doubtful, and its main charm wanting.” In juxtaposing the institutional and juridical features of democracy to emotional states, Whitman connects democratic life to our feelings about and vision of the practices in which that life is involved. Taking Whitman as the starting point, this essay argues that this view of democratic development as bound to affect, provides a framework for engaging Billie Holiday’s gripping anti-lynching song, “Strange Fruit." Holiday’s vivid depiction of lynching, the aesthetic consumption of this most gruesome spectacle, can be read as working within Whitman’s model—she seeks to cool one’s affection for the maiming of black bodies, opening up the possibility for repairing the character of whites and securing the physical and ethical protection of blacks. Her song thus enacts the relationship between emotional states, social practices, and democratic transformation that Whitman envisions.
