Pragmatics of Democracy: A Political Theory of African American Literature Before Emancipation

This study argues early African American literature constitutes an abiding repository of modern democratic thought that is lacking in the political philosophy we normally analyze.

Douglas A. Jones’s Pragmatics of Democracy reads African American literature, from its beginnings through the mid-nineteenth century, to theorize how we have come to regard democracy as the most excellent form of political life. Jones notes that the aims of democracy, especially consent of the governed and equality under the law, can seem like tenets of governance that humans desire instinctively. But human nature does not correlate absolutely to politics. Jones argues that political selfhood is formed by ＂bodily events.＂ He proposes a typology of such experiences that dispose persons toward democratic subjectivity: ecstasy, impersonality, violence, respectability, and care.

African American literature before Emancipation reveals the democratic features of these categories that conventional political philosophy ignores or obscures. Given their lives as enslaved persons or the descendants of enslaved persons, early black writers crafted narratives about achieving democratic subjectivity that were missing in other Anglo-American canons. Pragmatics of Democracy discusses the works of well-known figures such as Phillis Wheatley, Harriet E. Wilson, and Frederick Douglass as well as those of more neglected writers such as Richard Allen, Peter Paul Simmons, James McCune Smith, and Frank J. Webb.

Douglas A. Jones is professor of English, theater studies, and African and African American studies at Duke University.