Journal of American History · 2018 · 35 citations · 0 references
HumanitiesAfrican American StudiesHistoryBlack Intellectual HistoryPolitical HistorySlavery StudiesAbolitionismAbolitionist ThoughtAfrican American Literary CriticismAfrican American Literary StudiesAfrican American Political HistorySlave NarrativesAfrican American Literary TheoryBlack Political TheoryDemocratic NarrativesHistories Of EnslavementHistoriography Of Slave RebellionsNineteenth-century HistoriographyPostslavery Reconstruction NarrativesReconstruction Era Politics
Gregory Laski's Untimely Democracy is an intriguing and thought-provoking assessment of how writers and activists of the post-Reconstruction era grappled with the period's troubling realities. For many, the growth in violence against African Americans and the rescinding of their newly granted rights and freedoms were evidence that while the bodily enslavement of African Americans had ended with abolition, the degradation of African Americans was far from over. Laski focuses on these writers' understanding of the political implications of those conditions: If the injustices of the past were still extant in the present, was a better, more democratic future possible? Laski explores these issues through close readings of a range of late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century texts, such as speeches, petitions, expository essays and books, slave narratives, and novels, which he sees as “political theory in narrative form” (p. 3). He includes texts by a few white writers—most notably Thomas Jefferson and Stephen Crane—but his primary focus is on works by African American writers, including Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, Callie House, Charles Chesnutt, Sutton Griggs, and Pauline Hopkins.