Specters of Democracy

Download or read book Specters of Democracy written by Ivy G. Wilson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-05-27 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.