Specters of Democracy: Blackness and the Aesthetics of Nationalism in the Antebellum U.S.

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.