Douglas Jones
Rutgers University
Douglas Jones is associate professor of English at Rutgers University, where he studies and teaches courses in (African) American literatures of the eighteenth- and nineteenth centuries, drama and performance studies, and cultural histories of slavery in British North America and the US. He is the author of several essays in these areas, as well as The Captive Stage: Performance and the Proslavery Imagination of the Antebellum North (Michigan, 2014). His most recent article "Slave Evangelicalism, Shouting, and the Beginning of African American Writing" appears in Early American Literature 53.1 (2018).
This paper offers some preliminary thoughts on the place of violence in democratic theory. Democratic theorists most often concern themselves with procedural (e.g., administrative, legislative, or juridical), discursive... [ view full abstract ]
This paper offers some preliminary thoughts on the place of violence in democratic theory. Democratic theorists most often concern themselves with procedural (e.g., administrative, legislative, or juridical), discursive (e.g., agonism; deliberative spheres), and rights (e.g., assembly; petition; politicized locomotion) formations. These theorists almost always frame such concerns in terms of civility: that is, as forms of political agency and potentiality that require a set of considered and considerate arrangements. I’m interested in the curious lack of grappling with violence in this literature, a lack that, however unwittingly, proceeds from an Arendtian notion that violence cannot exist within the political realm proper. This paper asks if systems like slavery or colonialism suggest violence is somehow constitutive of modern democratic politics and its formations? Or, do histories of slavery and colonialism show that violence is anterior to the achievement of democratic formations, that collective and individual acts of violence are conduits that make freedom and democratic subjectivity possible? (Arendt might agree with some version of this last question; more recently, the political theorist Neil Roberts has taken it up in work on slave marronage.)
These questions inform a chunk of a chapter of my current book project, which is on the foundations and forms of democratic individuality in 19th-century (African) American thought. Frederick Douglass is the primary figure of the book, and his battle with Covey is an obvious case study I could use for the seminar. But for the seminar (and the book) I will consider violence beyond Douglass', perhaps in Wilson’s Our Nig (1859) or in agricultural magazines and journals such as DeBow’s Review in which violence serves disciplinary and thus economic functions for slaveholders, among others. This paper aims to offer a kernel of a more robust theorization of violence’s relation to democratic individuality. Specifically, it will ask how New World slavery troubles (or, perhaps, affirms) ideas about the political realm (the polis; the staat) that depend on forms of civility and thereby position violence outside, even anathema to, politics. Indeed, such notions of politics—from those that inform Arendt’s political philosophy, which are in many aspects thoroughly Aristotelian, to those that structure post-Habermasian theories of discursive agonism—seem to bracket violence too quickly and thus refuse to deal with the ways in which violence, as threat and as practice, serves as kind of foundation upon which political civilities rest. I am trying to understand if and how democratic individuality, as a political philosophy that achieves some of its most important and lasting elaborations from slave and ex-slave thinkers and actors, conceptualizes violence vis-à-vis its immanent civilities. Simply put: Is violence a political act? If so, what is its relation to the moral dimensions that shape democratic individuality, dimensions that proceed from the unwavering belief in the inviolability of human dignity.
