Untimely Democracy: The Politics of Progress after Slavery. Gregory Laski

Extract

Gregory Laski’s Untimely Democracy: The Politics of Progress after Slavery offers a powerful examination of late nineteenth-century American authors, particularly Frederick Douglass, Stephen Crane, Callie House, W. E. B. Du Bois, Charles Chesnutt, Sutton E. Griggs, and Pauline E. Hopkins. Laski focuses on the post-Reconstruction era—the period between 1877 and 1901 that historian Rayford Logan once labeled the “nadir” of race relations in the United States. The book begins with the observation that little political progress occurred in the decades following the end of Reconstruction, as black Americans were systematically disenfranchised. It might even be considered a time of political regress. But what does democracy look like without progress? What is a democracy that faces backward rather than forward? Laski takes seriously the notion that this is a specifically postbellum period, in which the afterlives of slavery and the after-effects of the Civil War continued to leave profound impressions on Americans. The common rhetoric of progress can imply that the past is dead and gone, but the authors under consideration here understood, à la William Faulkner, that the past was not even past.