• Acknowledgments


• Introduction. In the Shadows of Citizenship: African Americans and the Alterity of Democracy


• Version and Subversion: The Aurality of Democratic Rhetoric


• 1.: Frederick Douglass's "Glib-tongue": African American Rhetoric and the Language of National Belonging


• 2.: Merely Rhetorical: Virtual Democracy in Clotel


• 3.: Rhythm Nation: African American Poetics and the Discourse of Freedom


• 4.: . Black and Tan Fantasy: Walt Whitman, African Americans, and Sounding the Nation


• Imagining the Nation and Democratic Visuality


• 5.: Framing the Margins: Geometries of Space and the Aesthetics of Nationalism


• 6.: The Spectacle of Disorder: Race, Decoration, and the Social Logic of Space


• 7.: The Colored Museum


• Conclusion. Shadow and Act Redux


• Works Cited

Assistant Professor of English at Northwestern University.

Specters of Democracy examines how figurations of blackness were used to illuminate the fraught relationship between citizenship, equality, and democracy in the antebellum U.S. Through close readings of Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and Walt Whitman (on aurality), and Herman Melville, William J. Wilson, and a host of genre painters (on visuality), the book reveals how the difficult tasks of representing African Americans-both enslaved and free-in imaginative expression was part of a larger dilemma concerning representative democracy itself.