A01=Ivy G. Wilson
Author_Ivy G. Wilson
Category=DSBF
Category=DSBH
Category=NHK
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eq_biography-true-stories
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Product details
- ISBN 9780195340358
- Weight: 363g
- Dimensions: 155 x 231mm
- Publication Date: 16 Jun 2011
- Publisher: Oxford University Press Inc
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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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.
Assistant Professor of English at Northwestern University.
