Political Theory current issue

Awakening to Race: Ralph Ellison and Democratic Individuality

Turner, J. — 2008-09-08

Ralph Ellison offers crucial insight into the meaning of conscientious citizenship in American democracy. In doing so, he follows his nineteenth-century Transcendentalist forebears—Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman—who have become key figures in contemporary efforts to theorize liberal democratic character. At the center of Emersonian ethics is the idea of "awakening." "Awakening" is the Emersonians' name for honest and courageous confrontation with reality. Ellison broadens the Emersonians' vision by insisting that one cannot be "well awake" in America without confronting the ways historical white supremacy shapes one's identity and chances in life. Political theorists who draw inspiration from the Emersonians in theorizing democratic individuality need to pay attention to Ellison—for he demonstrates that one cannot achieve democratic individuality without awakening to race.

The Color of Memory: Reading Race with Ralph Ellison

Booth, W. J. — 2008-09-08

In this article, I am concerned with the relationship between the visibility of race as color, the memory of injustice, and American identity. The visibility of color would seem to make it a daily reminder of race and its history, and in this way to be intimately a part of American memory and identity. Yet the tie between memory and color is anything but certain or transparent. Rather, as I shall argue, it is a latticework composed of things remembered, forgotten, glossed, or idealized, and the traces they leave in our world, traces that keep that past from falling into the oblivion of forgetfulness. Finally, color, memory, and identity together belong to the struggle over racial justice in this country, a battle in part to recognize the past, of which color is the visible reminder, and to fashion an American identity that does not seek to render it invisible. Ralph Ellison's writings on memory and race, and particularly his defining work, the Invisible Man, map these issues and some of the ways of approaching them. The present essay is an exploration of those issues, conducted through an engagement with his work.

Thinking Authority Democratically: Prophetic Practices, White Supremacy, and Democratic Politics

Shulman, G. — 2008-09-08

This essay explores Hebrew prophecy and its modern reworkings to develop an account of authority in democratic politics that contrasts with prevailing genres of political theory. At first, we use William Blake to reveal the poetic and democratic dimensions in the biblical prophecy typically associated with absolute truth and law as command. By using the examples of Frederick Douglass and James Baldwin, we then argue that critics of white supremacy draw on the genre of biblical prophecy to address dimensions of political life obscured by liberal language. Partly, they use prophecy to name the willful blindness of whites, to provoke acknowledgment of what whites know but disavow—their domination of others. Partly, prophetic speech-acts show how commitment, judgment, and aggression are needful in democratic politics. In these ways, critics of white supremacy demonstrate genuine authority as a democratic practice.

Discourses of Danger: Locating Emma Goldman

Ferguson, K. E. — 2008-09-08

Government, media, and medical accounts of Emma Goldman converged to create her public presence in the U.S. as a "dangerous individual." The prevailing discourses constituted Goldman as violent, utilizing her alleged menace to distract attention from far more egregious violence against labor by state and corporate forces. Goldman responded by denying, confronting, and redirecting the alarmed gaze toward greater risks left underarticulated in hegemonic accounts. Goldman's bold confrontations with authorities constituted a kind of anarchist parrhesia, fearless speech, a relentless truth-telling practice that risked her own security in pursuit of her "beautiful ideal." The labor of remembering America's history of class violence hones our attention to the complex discursive processes by which some historical facts come to count in prevailing narratives, while others fade into obscurity.

Review Essay: National Love in Violent Times: Postcolonial Melancholia, by Paul Gilroy. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. 192 pp. $70.00 (cloth); $19.95 (paper) The Truth about Patriotism, by Steven Johnston. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007. 296 pp. $79.95 (cloth); $22.95 (paper)

Anker, E. — 2008-09-08