Douglas A. Jones Jr. - Böcker

This study argues early African American literature constitutes an abiding repository of modern democratic thought that is lacking in the political philosophy we normally analyze.Douglas A. Jones’s Pragmatics of Democracy reads African American literature, from its beginnings through the mid-nineteenth century, to theorize how we have come to regard democracy as the most excellent form of political life. Jones notes that the aims of democracy, especially consent of the governed and equality under the law, can seem like tenets of governance that humans desire instinctively. But human nature does not correlate absolutely to politics. Jones argues that political selfhood is formed by “bodily events.” He proposes a typology of such experiences that dispose persons toward democratic subjectivity: ecstasy, impersonality, violence, respectability, and care.African American literature before Emancipation reveals the democratic features of these categories that conventional political philosophy ignores or obscures. Given their lives as enslaved persons or the descendants of enslaved persons, early black writers crafted narratives about achieving democratic subjectivity that were missing in other Anglo-American canons. Pragmatics of Democracy discusses the works of well-known figures such as Phillis Wheatley, Harriet E. Wilson, and Frederick Douglass as well as those of more neglected writers such as Richard Allen, Peter Paul Simmons, James McCune Smith, and Frank J. Webb.

This study argues early African American literature constitutes an abiding repository of modern democratic thought that is lacking in the political philosophy we normally analyze.Douglas A. Jones’s Pragmatics of Democracy reads African American literature, from its beginnings through the mid-nineteenth century, to theorize how we have come to regard democracy as the most excellent form of political life. Jones notes that the aims of democracy, especially consent of the governed and equality under the law, can seem like tenets of governance that humans desire instinctively. But human nature does not correlate absolutely to politics. Jones argues that political selfhood is formed by “bodily events.” He proposes a typology of such experiences that dispose persons toward democratic subjectivity: ecstasy, impersonality, violence, respectability, and care.African American literature before Emancipation reveals the democratic features of these categories that conventional political philosophy ignores or obscures. Given their lives as enslaved persons or the descendants of enslaved persons, early black writers crafted narratives about achieving democratic subjectivity that were missing in other Anglo-American canons. Pragmatics of Democracy discusses the works of well-known figures such as Phillis Wheatley, Harriet E. Wilson, and Frederick Douglass as well as those of more neglected writers such as Richard Allen, Peter Paul Simmons, James McCune Smith, and Frank J. Webb.

In The Captive Stage, Douglas A. Jones, Jr. argues that proslavery ideology remained the dominant mode of racial thought in the antebellum north, even though chattel slavery had virtually disappeared from the region by the turn of the nineteenth century—and that northerners cultivated their proslavery imagination most forcefully in their performance practices. Jones explores how multiple constituencies, ranging from early national artisans and Jacksonian wage laborers to patrician elites and bourgeois social reformers, used the stage to appropriate and refashion defenses of black bondage as means to affirm their varying and often conflicting economic, political, and social objectives. Joining performance studies with literary criticism and cultural theory, he uncovers the proslavery conceptions animating a wide array of performance texts and practices, such as the “Bobalition” series of broadsides, blackface minstrelsy, stagings of the American Revolution, reform melodrama, and abolitionist discourse. Taken together, he suggests, these works did not amount to a call for the re-enslavement of African Americans but, rather, justifications for everyday and state-sanctioned racial inequities in their post-slavery society. Throughout, The Captive Stage elucidates how the proslavery imagination of the free north emerged in direct opposition to the inclusionary claims black publics enacted in their own performance cultures. In doing so, the book offers fresh contexts and readings of several forms of black cultural production, including early black nationalist parades, slave dance, the historiography of the revolutionary era, the oratory of radical abolitionists and the black convention movement, and the autobiographical and dramatic work of ex-slave William Wells Brown.

'Post-black' refers to an emerging trend within black arts to find new and multiple expressions of blackness, unburdened by the social and cultural expectations of blackness of the past and moving beyond the conventional binary of black and white. Reflecting this multiplicity of perspectives, the plays in this collection explode the traditional ways of representing black families on the American stage, and create new means to consider the interplay of race, with questions of class, gender, and sexuality. They engage and critique current definitions of black and African-American identity, as well as previous limitations placed on what constitutes blackness and black theatre.Written by the emerging stars of American theatre such as Eisa Davis and Marcus Gardley, the plays explore themes as varied as family and individuality, alienation and gentrification, and reconciliation and belonging. They demonstrate a wide-range of formal and structural innovations for the American theatre, and reflect the important ways in which contemporary playwrights are expanding the American dramatic canon with new and diverse means of representation. Edited by two leading US scholars in black drama, Harry J. Elam Jr (Stanford) and Douglas A. Jones Jr (Princeton), this cutting edge anthology gathers together some of the most exciting new American plays, selected by a rigorous academic backbone and explored in depth by supporting critical material.

The contributors to Race and Performance after Repetition explore how theater and performance studies account for the complex relationship between race and time. Pointing out that repetition has been the primary point of reference for understanding both the complex temporality of theater and the historical persistence of race, they identify and pursue critical alternatives to the conceptualization, organization, measurement, and politics of race in performance. The contributors examine theater, performance art, music, sports, dance, photography, and other forms of performance in topics that range from the movement of boxer Joe Louis to George C. Wolfe's 2016 reimagining of the 1921 all-black musical comedy Shuffle Along to the relationship between dance, mourning, and black adolescence in Flying Lotus's music video “Never Catch Me.” Proposing a spectrum of coexisting racial temporalities that are not tethered to repetition, this collection reconsiders central theories in performance studies in order to find new understandings of race.Contributors. Joshua Chambers-Letson, Soyica Diggs Colbert, Nicholas Fesette, Patricia Herrera, Jasmine Elizabeth Johnson, Douglas A. Jones Jr., Mario LaMothe, Daphne P. Lei, Jisha Menon, Tavia Nyong’o, Tina Post, Elizabeth W. Son,  Shane Vogel, Catherine M. Young, Katherine Zien