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.

Acknowledgments
Introduction. In the Shadows of Citizenship: African Americans and the Alterity of Democracy
Version and Subversion: The Aurality of Democratic Rhetoric
Chapter 1. Frederick Douglass's "Glib-tongue": African American Rhetoric and the Language of National Belonging
Chapter 2. Merely Rhetorical: Virtual Democracy in Clotel
Chapter 3. Rhythm Nation: African American Poetics and the Discourse of Freedom
Chapter 4. Black and Tan Fantasy: Walt Whitman, African Americans, and Sounding the Nation
Imagining the Nation and Democratic Visuality
Chapter 5. Framing the Margins: Geometries of Space and the Aesthetics of Nationalism
Chapter 6. The Spectacle of Disorder: Race, Decoration, and the Social Logic of Space
Chapter 7. The Colored Museum
Conclusion. Shadow and Act Redux
Works Cited

Ivy G. Wilson is Associate Professor of English at Northwestern University. He is the editor of At the Dusk of Dawn: Selected Poetry and Prose of Albery Allson Whitman and the coeditor, with Robert S. Levine, of The Works of James M. Whitfield: America and Other Writings by a Nineteenth-Century African American Poet.