Dana D. Nelson

Materializing Democracy: Toward a Revitalized Cultural Politics

For the most part, democracy is simply presumed to exist in the United States. It is viewed as a completed project rather than as a goal to be achieved. Fifteen leading scholars challenge that stasis in Materializing Democracy . They aim to reinvigorate the idea of democracy by placing it in the midst of a contentious political and cultural fray, which, the volume’s editors argue, is exactly where it belongs. Drawing on literary criticism, cultural studies, history, legal studies, and political theory, the essays collected here highlight competing definitions and practices of democracy—in politics, society, and, indeed, academia. Covering topics ranging from rights discourse to Native American performance, from identity politics to gay marriage, and from rituals of public mourning to the Clinton-Lewinsky affair, the contributors seek to understand the practices, ideas, and material conditions that enable or foreclose democracy’s possibilities. Through readings of subjects as diverse as Will Rogers, Alexis de Tocqueville, slave narratives, interactions along the Texas-Mexico border, and liberal arts education, the contributors also explore ways of making democracy available for analysis. Materializing Democracy suggests that attention to disparate narratives is integral to the development of more complex, vibrant versions of democracy. Contributors . Lauren Berlant, Wendy Brown, Chris Castiglia, Russ Castronovo, Joan Dayan, Wai Chee Dimock, Lisa Duggan, Richard R. Flores, Kevin Gaines, Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, Michael Moon, Dana D. Nelson, Christopher Newfield, Donald E. Pease

Preface: Violence, the Body and “The South”

An animated telephone call between the North and the South was the origin of the present special issue. We had just agreed to serve as visiting coeditors of American Literature and visiting faculty members in the Duke University English department for the 1998–1999 academic year. This telephone conversation commenced as a planning session for the joint work we hoped to undertake for the journal. But the talk veered almost from the outset to ‘‘The South,’’ as we discovered the intersection of our personal histories in Kentucky and of our professional interests in matters Southern. The intersecting geographies of our telephone conversation were emblematic, we felt, of the nuanced inseparability of North and South in any fruitful model of American cultural studies we could imagine for a new millennium. As one of us quipped during the call, ‘‘Every time a shocking act of racist violence occurs in New York, Illinois, or Pennsylvania, you can bet another movie on Mississippi will appear within six months.’’ From this observation came our idea for a course entitled ‘‘Mississippi,’’ whose subject would be the national formation of the United States and the dynamics of race, region, and citizenship entailed by, as it were, a putatively split and decidedly Manichean geography. We recalled Malcolm X’s pithy summation of U.S. regionalism as a possible epigraph for the course syllabus: Mississippi, Malcolm declared, is anywhere in the United States south of the Canadian border. Slowly the idea took hold that we needed to collaborate on a project that would contribute to a new Southern studies, an emerging collective already producing a robust body of work in current Ameri-

Commons Democracy: Reading the Politics of Participation in the Early United States

In Commons Democracy, literary scholar Dana Nelson offers an alternative history of democracy in Revolutionary America. Nelson challenges the comforting narrative Americans like to tell themselves about the ‘Founders’ high-minded ideals and their careful crafting of the sage framework for democracy – a representative republican government’ (p. 3). This ‘consensus’ story of the founding ‘omits the challenges offered and the contributions made by non-elite citizens’ (p. 10). Nelson wants scholars – and Americans – to take more seriously what she calls ‘commons democracy’ or ‘vernacular democracy’. Based on this book, we certainly should.

Sentimental Democracy: The Evolution of America's Romantic Self-Image (review)

making a case for international and cross cultural connections in literary and cultural studies. In these authors’ works, she sees the Jewish gangster as a focus for such subjects as modernism and Marxism, nationalism and communism, identity and ethnicity, gender and masculinity. Cultivating an effective interdisciplinary methodology, Rubin argues so well that it becomes easy to feel overwhelmed by the charismatic figure of a Jewish hero of the streets who blends ethnicity, revolution, criminality, alienation, and potent manhood. Rubin should pursue this theme just as assiduously in writers such as E. L. Doctorow and Norman Mailer, among many others, for the evolution of this gangster figure in the light of our cultural and political history since the era of the New York Jewish left.