Ivy G. Wilson – författare

Specters of Democracy interrogates the representational strategies that nineteenth-century Americans used in art and literature to delineate blackness as an index to the forms of U.S. citizenship. The book reveals how the difficult task of representing African Americans-both enslaved and free-in imaginative expression was part of a larger dilemma concerning representative democracy. More specifically, the book analyzes how African Americans manipulated aurality and visuality in art that depicted images of national belonging not only as a mode of critique but as an iteration or articulation of democratic representation itself.Such a turn to culture as a particular arena where African Americans had varying levels of agency is all the more necessary in the years before they were ostensibly granted access to formal political structures with the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment. Recovering important aspects of the African American presence in the debates about democracy and citizenship, this book focuses on the mutual engagement with the national idioms by both black and white Americans and illustrates how African Americans in particular deployed artistic practices to enact a more egalitarian society.

Specters of Democracy is undergirded by three principal lines of critical inquiry. Firstly, it correlates representation in art with representation in politics as a specific cultural juncture and as a particular concern of African American writers at this historical moment-something that I am calling the "aesthetics of nationalism." Secondly, it argues that politics can become strategically discursive, almost as a replacement of physicality itself; a phenomenon that is especially noticeable when one considers the enslaved black body. In the case of African America, especially post-Fugitive Slave Law when physical movement becomes even more restricted and tenuous, democratic discourse, ironically, becomes increasingly mobile and transcendent, seemingly separated from black bodies themselves, thereby creating a de-territorialized field of political engagement less bound to physical location. Thirdly, the book theorizes the disjunction between the aesthetic and the political as an important liminal space: the realm of the spectral.

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.

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.

In this comprehensive volume of the collected writings of James Monroe Whitfield (1822-71), Robert S. Levine and Ivy G. Wilson restore this African American poet, abolitionist, and intellectual to his rightful place in the arts and politics of the nineteenth-century United States. Whitfield's works, including poems from his celebrated America and Other Poems (1853), were printed in influential journals and newspapers, such as Frederick Douglass's The North Star . A champion of the black emigration movement during the 1850s, Whitfield was embraced by African Americans as a black nationalist bard when he moved from his longtime home in Buffalo, New York, to California in the early 1860s. However, by the beginning of the twentieth century, his reputation had faded. For this volume, Levine and Wilson gathered and annotated all of Whitfield's extant writings, both poetry and prose, and many pieces are reprinted here for the first time since their original publication. In their thorough introduction, the editors situate Whitfield in relation to key debates on black nationalism in African American culture, underscoring the importance of poetry and periodical culture to black writing during the period. |Levine and Wilson restore James Monroe Whitfield (1822-71), the African American poet, abolitionist, and intellectual, to his rightful place in the arts and politics of the nineteenth-century United States. This volume contains all of Whitfield's extant writings, both poetry and prose, and many pieces are reprinted here for the first time since their original publication.

In this comprehensive volume of the collected writings of James Monroe Whitfield (1822-71), Robert S. Levine and Ivy G. Wilson restore this African American poet, abolitionist, and intellectual to his rightful place in the arts and politics of the nineteenth-century United States.Whitfield''s works, including poems from his celebrated America and Other Poems (1853), were printed in influential journals and newspapers, such as Frederick Douglass''s The North Star. A champion of the black emigration movement during the 1850s, Whitfield was embraced by African Americans as a black nationalist bard when he moved from his longtime home in Buffalo, New York, to California in the early 1860s. However, by the beginning of the twentieth century, his reputation had faded.For this volume, Levine and Wilson gathered and annotated all of Whitfield''s extant writings, both poetry and prose, and many pieces are reprinted here for the first time since their original publication. In their thorough introduction, the editors situate Whitfield in relation to key debates on black nationalism in African American culture, underscoring the importance of poetry and periodical culture to black writing during the period.