American Literary History

Abstract:

“Pragmatics of Democracy: A Political Theory of African American Literature before Emancipation” reads scenes of embodied experience in early African American literary culture to theorize how persons come to regard democratic cultures as productive of the most excellent forms of life. The book proposes a typology of these iterative bodily events which dispose persons toward democratic subjectivity: ecstasy, violence, impersonality, respectability, and autonomy.