Democracy and Practice: What the C19 Can Teach Us Now (A Roundtable)

Title: Democracy and Practice: What the C19 Can Teach Us Now (A Roundtable) Co-chairs: D. Berton Emerson (Whitworth University) and Gregory Laski (United States Air Force Academy) Participants: Nancy Armstrong (Duke... [ view full abstract ]

Title: Democracy and Practice: What the C19 Can Teach Us Now (A Roundtable)

Co-chairs: D. Berton Emerson (Whitworth University) and Gregory Laski (United States Air Force Academy)

Participants: Nancy Armstrong (Duke University); Mandy L. Cooper (Duke University); Maggie McKinley (University of Pennsylvania); Margot Minardi (Reed College); Michelle Sizemore (University of Kentucky); Kyle G. Volk (University of Montana)

In the summer of 2015, an unlikely figure announced his bid for the nation’s highest office. The Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig was running for president in order “to make democracy possible.” As Lessig explained, the political equality that constitutes a critical component of this system had all but disappeared. In running as a “referendum president”—seeking election but promising to resign as soon as this equality had been restored—Lessig sought to underscore just how separated “America” and “democracy” had become. This short-lived candidacy seems like a footnote in the wake of the 2016 election returns. But the pedagogical function that Lessig’s campaign performed—the vision of “democracy” it sought to put into practice—has a prehistory. From Frederick Douglass’s July 5th oration to the petitions of dispossessed indigenous Colombians, authors and activists across the hemisphere regularly yoked “democracy” and “America,” both to mark the proximity of these terms and to underscore the cognitive dissonance conjured by their conjugation. Drawing upon and continuing that tradition, this roundtable assembles scholars from literary, historical, and legal studies to ask what the study of “democracy” in the long nineteenth century can teach us now, for our various roles as academics, teachers, and public voices.

Democracy has long been a key concern for Americanists. With his landmark American Renaissance (1941), F. O. Matthiessen famously institutionalized a canon of five writers based on their shared “devotion” to the “possibilities” of this political form. Scholars in the intervening years have taken issue with Matthiessen’s narrow focus. From literary studies like Ivy G. Wilson’s Specters of Democracy (2011), to historical work such as James Sanders’s The Vanguard of the Atlantic World (2014), to philosophical accounts like Danielle Allen’s Our Declaration (2014), recent scholarship on “democracy” has sought to realize the “possibilities” of this political system by enlarging its constituent voices, spaces, and structures. Emerging from this important work is the question of practice: the scholarly methods, the activist strategies, and the pedagogies that the study of “democracy” in the long nineteenth century points us to and provides. This is an objective prompted by Russ Castronovo and Dana Nelson’s 2002 collection Materializing Democracy, but one that takes on new contours and even greater urgency in our contemporary moment.

Accordingly, our roundtable engages the implications of the long nineteenth century for the practice of democracy in the various spaces and climates we presently inhabit. Among other questions, the speakers will consider: What happens to our definition of “democracy” when we understand this keyword in local, national, and transnational contexts? What does it mean to realize this political form in light of new insights about empire and colonization, peace and war? How might we democratically define the spheres of political deliberation and decision making, and through what spatial metaphors—top-down, bottom-up, polycentric? What resources do aesthetic forms such as the novel and legal documents like the petition provide? How might we gauge the temperature and mood of the polity? Finally, how does our work as scholars and teachers interact? What are the continuities and discontinuities between the various publics— local and global—that we address?

The scholars we have assembled will take up these questions. At various stages in their careers and from a range of institutions, the speakers also showcase a diversity of disciplines: history, legal studies, and literary criticism. Our objective in selecting this group is to continue C19’s effort to make conversations about the nineteenth century as multidisciplinary and inclusive as possible. During the roundtable, speakers will have seven to eight minutes to deliver their statements, leaving at least thirty minutes for discussion.

After Berton Emerson and Gregory Laski introduce the panelists and outline key concerns, the session will begin with two statements tackling mid-century reform movements: in an effort to rethink the compatibilities between democracy and empire, the historian Margot Minardi will examine the ambiguous relationship between imperialism and pacifism among nineteenth-century reformers; in the following comment, literary scholar Michelle Sizemore will address the language of “comfort” in the discourse of New York city housing activists, with an eye toward theorizing the atmospheric properties of democracy. The next two speakers will consider spheres of action for democracy: the literary critic Nancy Armstrong will show how nineteenth-century novels anticipate the pragmatic model of “self-organization” formulated by the economist Elinor Ostrom, and historian Mandy Cooper will shed light on our current political climate by examining the pattern of prominent political men pushing legislation that would ultimately benefit their families’ economic endeavors. Our roundtable will conclude with two papers that bring the question of practice to contrasting political sites, Congress and the classroom. In her statement, legal scholar Maggie McKinley will mine the archives of the first Congress to address the integral but unnamed role of petitioning and its subsequent evolution, while historian Kyle Volk will offer his course “Dissent, Disobedience, and American Democracy” as a case study for a meditation on the practices of teaching the history of dissent.

This roundtable thus brings a fresh perspective to an abiding concern for Americanists. Given this aim, we anticipate that the panel will interest attendees regardless of their disciplinary background or methodological commitments. Moreover, by the time of the meeting, an interdisciplinary J19 forum on “democracy” co-edited by the panel chairs (but with a different roster of contributors) will have appeared, so attendees can respond not only to statements within the roundtable but also to the conversation inaugurated in the forum. Ultimately, we envision the roundtable itself as a democratic practice: a space to deliberate about the implications of our work as authors, teachers, and activists.