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Ambivalence and Imagination in African American Democratic Thought Daniel Henry

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Ambivalence and Imagination in African American Democratic Thought Daniel Henry Authoring Otherwise: Ambivalence and Imagination in African American Democratic Thought Daniel Henry A Dissertation presented to the Graduate Faculty of the University of Virginia in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Politics University of Virginia Month December 2, 2020 Committee: Lawrie Balfour, Jennifer Rubenstein, Stephen K. White, Sandhya Shukla (English and American Studies), Maurice Wallace (English, Rutgers University) 1 Table of Contents Abstract 3 Acknowledgments 5 Introduction: Authoring Otherwise 6 1. Assembling Reception: Anna Julia Cooper’s ​ Politics of Democratic Openness 32 2. James Weldon Johnson’s Democracy Rag 58 ​ 3. Writing Human and Revolution in W.E.B. Du Bois’s Dark Princess 87 ​ Conclusion 113 Bibliography 120 2 Abstract This dissertation concerns the work of democrats in undemocratic times, tracing an understudied strand of African American democratic thought through the impasse of the Jim Crow era. As political theorists in recent years have sought to move beyond a “liberal consensus” picture of American political development, they have often approached African American political thought through the framework of a politics of recognition, emphasizing the ways thinkers in this broad tradition have imagined, and strove toward, some future democratic community with presently-racist white citizens. I argue that African American democratic thought during times of impasse cannot be reduced to this pursuit, which ignores the often deeply, and generatively, ambivalent theorizing in this tradition about the prospects of ​ ​ democratic community with Jim Crow whites, as well as deep uncertainties as to what terms of association might characterize it. In the absence of recognition, I argue, Black thinkers pursued a multifaceted strategy of “opacity,” characterized by efforts to render uncertain white visions of Blackness and the terms of racial hierarchy in part constructed through that imaginary. By rendering perceptions across the color line opaque, they opened room for imagining new terms of relation in the (ambivalent) present, which could not be reduced to aspirations of some future democratic community. In tracing this history, I focus on the works of Anna Julia Cooper (1858-1964), Ida B. Wells (1862-1931), James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938), and W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963). My readings span the years 1892 to 1928, and engage the segregated New Woman movement of the late 19th century, the dominative listening practices of whites during the ragtime era, and the capitalist and colonial threats to (aesthetic and political) self-determination during the Harlem Renaissance. I center on three key themes, each of them rendered in various ways opaque: the meanings of “assembly” in Cooper’s A Voice from the South and Wells’ ​ ​ pamphlet Southern Horrors, both published in 1892; Johnson’s politics of “fugitivity” in his ​ ​ 1912 The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man and later writings on music; and W.E.B. Du ​ ​ Bois’ anticolonial, epistolary refiguring of the “human” in his 1928 Dark Princess: A Romance. ​ ​ 3 Their thought offers broader lessons for the fate of democratic thought amid exclusion and domination, as well as conceptual resources for a contemporary impasse in American politics defined in many respects by Jim Crow’s echoes. 4 Acknowledgments I was very fortunate to receive feedback on parts of this project from Lawrie Balfour, Lisa Beard, Chris Berk, Colin Bird, Alex Bleiberg, Matthias Brinkmann, Meredith Clark, Kevin Duong, Mylène Freeman, Matt Frierdich, Harrison Frye, Molly Foltyn, Jess Hasper, Andrew Gates, Adom Getachew, Murad Idris, Colin Kielty, George Klosko, F. Delali Kumavie, Janet Lawler, Brittany Leach, Timothy McCarty, Hana Nasser, Davide Panagia, Rachel Potter, Jennifer Rubenstein, Ryan Russell, Sandhya Shukla, Halimat Somotan, Ahmed Teleb, Tracey Stewart, Amanuel Tsighe Gebremichael, Maurice Wallace, Stephen K. White, and Francis Ying, as well as participants in panels at annual conferences of the American Political Science Association, Association for Political Theory, Caribbean Philosophical Organization, Power, Violence, and Inequality Collective, UVa Political Theory Colloquium, and the Western Political Science Association. In particular, I want to thank the members of my dissertation committee, Lawrie Balfour, Jennifer Rubenstein, Sandhya Shukla, Maurice Wallace, and Stephen K. White, for reading the project in its entirety, and for their indispensable guidance and support these past years. I cannot imagine better mentors, and feel truly fortunate. Lawrie Balfour, my committee chair, read multiple drafts of the project, has always steered the work in more ambitious and interesting directions, and is for me an exemplar of how to think, write, and teach. I am grateful for my students in the courses African American Political Thought and Racial Politics, who contributed innumerable insights which inform this project. Finally, this interdisciplinary work benefited at every step from conversations with Molly Foltyn, who is herself a writer I admire; and from her generous support and her tolerance, within reason. 5 Introduction: Authoring Otherwise The narrator of Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel, Invisible Man, authors his recollections in ​ ​ the aftermath of the betrayal of his democratic hopes. He dwells in the realization that he was all along made invisible to his white would-be comrades by a “peculiar disposition of the eyes,” refusing to see him as, among other things, an equal member of their political community (3).1 ​ He writes, literally, from the underground: in “a building strictly rented to whites, in a section of the basement that was shut off and forgotten during the nineteenth century” (6), and he finds there a place of refuge—from the white-led democratic movement of which he was a part (the “Brotherhood”) which sought to sacrifice Black interests for collective gain; and from Black political nationalists who think him a traitor and reject his multiracial democratic commitments. Between these two poles, he describes his time underground as a “hibernation,” “a covert preparation for a more overt action” toward, perhaps, a democratic future (13). The novel is in part a meditation on this interval, an indeterminate period between Reconstruction’s democratic promise (the birthdate, perhaps, of the room he now lives in) and before the arrival of a democracy in which all “become one, and yet many” (577). But what politics is left for the “invisible” democrat without political community? Far from a mere prelude to a more spectacular, transformative moment—the “overt action” he predicts upon his departure—the narrator points in this passage to an often-overlooked, but generative tradition of democratic ambivalence: working in the space between a democratic community which is not yet, and the demands of freedom in its absence. Ellison’s thoughts can be read as a commentary on broader intellectual currents among African American authors and activists of the Jim Crow period, between Reconstruction’s democratic moment and the mass mobilizations of the Civil Rights movement (Ellison’s Invisible Man was published the same year Brown v. Board began arguments at the Supreme ​ ​ ​ 1 All in-text citations in this chapter refer to Invisible Man unless otherwise indicated. ​ ​ 6 Court). This was an era of impasse, in many ways, of the “waiting” Anna Julia Cooper sardonically described in 1892 and which Martin Luther King, Jr. rejected from a Birmingham jail in 1963. Drawing on Ellison, Danielle Allen (2005) describes a Jim Crow regime of “invisible citizenship,” relations of racial domination which negate the interests of African Americans while also denying the role of their sacrifice in structuring a shared social and political world. And in order to maintain a fictive consistency between this denial and their supposedly democratic moral and political commitments, Ellison elsewhere argues, white citizens employ a racist imaginary which precludes civic equality in the first place (Ellison 2011a, 28). African American democratic thought throughout the period engaged this impasse, contributing to what Cornel West calls Black “traditions of response” to white “challenges to self-definition and self-determination” (West 1982, 71). These traditions have involved, respectively, efforts to “define who and what one is” against harmful white images of Blackness (West 1982, 22) and, often in light of that self-definition, to reconstruct American democratic community—namely, by dismantling existing, white supremacist visions of “the people” and 2 imagining forms of association that could characterize a more equal public life. ​ Often implicit in ​ this formulation of “response” are two distinct moments: an effort of self-definition and self-determination within an undemocratic present, and what Melvin Rogers (2012), in his reading of W.E.B. Du Bois’ aesthetic politics calls an “aspirational” politics of peoplehood which might characterize some future democratic community. The latter has received far more attention from democratic theorists, but in what follows, I argue in conversation with Ellison for the importance of recognizing the former as a site of democratic theorizing. 2 Here and in what follows, I use the terms democratic “community” and “peoplehood” more or less interchangeably to indicate a self-authorizing, world-making, collective agent. I have opted to include this language of community in order to indicate a broader meaning than is often assigned to ideas
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