Lawrie Balfour

Reparations After Identity Politics

The end of the twentieth century witnessed a resurgence of demands for reparations for slavery and segregation in the United States. At the same time, a chorus of prominent political theorists warned against the threat “identity politics” poses for democratic politics. This essay considers whether it is possible to construct an argument for reparations that responds to these concerns, particularly as they are articulated by Wendy Brown. To do so, I explore how Brown’s analysis of the dangers of political organizing around“wounded identities” and of appealing to the state for redress might inform and be informed by arguments for black reparations.

Ida B. Wells and “Color Line Justice”: Rethinking Reparations in Feminist Terms

In contrast to sterile forms of apology or the evasions of color-blind political discourse, calls for reparations explicitly link the realization of democratic ideals to a history of antiblack violence and exploitation. I explore three dimensions of Ida B. Wellss antilynching writings that anticipate and enrich contemporary demands for reparations for slavery and Jim Crow. First, Wellss commitment to truth-telling, a centerpiece of reparations efforts around the world, models how to criticize received understandings of both past and present and revise them in the service of more democratic ways of life. Second, her gender- and sexuality-conscious analysis of the political and economic causes and effects of antiblack violence adds a dimension that is missing from many reparations arguments. Third, Wells both advocates an active citizenry and demands collective responsibility for the protection of black citizenship; in so doing, she reveals the racial and gendered underpinnings of contemporary disavowals of responsibility for racial justice, dressed up as “personal responsibility,” and offers a powerful rebuttal.

Reading Publius with Morrison and Melville

For scholars interested in what Jason Frank calls “the outsize authority of the Founders in our jurisprudence and our politics,” I propose reviewing the legacies of The Federalist Papers from the vantages offered by Toni Morrison and Herman Melville. Frank insists that understanding the politics of the Federalist requires grasping how the argument is felt and staged, as well as how its rhetoric constitutes the subjectivities of its readers. To that end, I linger on three words—empire, women, and slaves—that appear in Frank’s Publius and Political Imagination yet do more work than he explicitly allows. Passing references, omissions, elisions, and unowned contradictions reveal how the Founders evoked figures of the conquered and the enslaved to support the consolidation of the nation; they also suggest dimensions of the Founders’ imagination whose analysis could enlarge and sharpen Frank’s argument about the Federalist’s formative and depoliticizing work.

Integration, Desegregation and the Work of the Past

A masterful study of the entrenchment and disastrous consequences of post-civil rights era racial segregation, Elizabeth Andersons The Imperative of Integration more than lives up to its title. This article highlights two contributions of Andersons book: the way it models the work of non-ideal theorizing by offering an empirical account of the contemporary US that is grounded in close study of the most pressing social problems and the consequences of different remedies; and the way it re-conceives the argument for affirmative action. The article also raises two concerns about Andersons approach. First, it contends that Andersons argument depends too heavily on the cultivation of national identity and is insufficiently attentive to the dangers of such identification. Second, it demonstrates what is lost when segregation is approached as a problem to be solved. In conclusion, this article advocates a politics of de-segregation as an alternative that shares many of Andersons ends without losing sight of the limitations of integration as an ideal.

“The Most Damage I Can Do”: Joel Olson in Political Theory, Political Critique, and Political Activism

The following essays were initially written for a roundtable in celebration of Joel’s work that was convened at the Annual Meeting of the Western Political Science Association in 2012.We set out to speak about the wide range of commitments and concerns that shaped Joel’s career as an activist-teacher-scholar: anarchism, the abolition of whiteness, the virtues of fanaticism, the dangers of corporate capitalism, and the necessity and joys of grass-roots action. Joel set so many forces in motion that what we hoped to accomplish by our engagement was not merely to look back in remembrance but to keep moving forward. Yet very few, if any, of us feel equal to the example that Joel set. From the beginning of his academic career at the University of Minnesota in 1991, Joel integrated political activism with intellectual inquiry. This is not to say that he bent ideas to serve political ends but that he posed questions to the history of political thought that would bring insights to his politics. Early on, that politics was anarchism and his political theory interlocutor was Hannah Arendt. A seminar that he took with me inspired him to a critical engagement with Arendt’s “council democracies” and the revolutionary committees of the Spanish anarchists. It first took shape as a seminar paper but Joel lost no time in asking me what it would take to develop it for publication. He was characteristically New Political Science, 2014 Vol. 36, No. 2, 238–265, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07393148.2014.894702

Darkwater’s Democratic Vision

This essay considers W. E. B. Du Bois’s Darkwater (1920) as a window onto Du Bois’s political theory at an underexamined stage of his career and onto a challenge at the heart of black political thought: how to formulate a conception of collective life that regards the humanity of black women and men as a central concern. Exploring Du Bois’s attempt to articulate what can be seen through the lens of an avowedly “black” perspective and his creative juxtaposition of different modes of writing, the author suggests why Darkwater remains a valuable resource for democratic theory in an age misleadingly described as “post-racial.”

Party/Politics: Horizons in Black Political Thought

Party/Politics: Horizons in Black Political Thought. By Michael Hanchard. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. 352p.

In search of the Black fantastic: Politics and popular culture in the post-civil rights era

35.00. “What does contemporary political and social theory look like when viewed from a vantage point of a black life-world?” (p. 8). Crucial though this question is—particularly at a moment when U.S. citizens are deeply divided across racial lines on a wide array of political issues—it remains largely neglected by political scientists. Michael Hanchard responds to this inattention by presenting a dazzling, learned tour of the contours of contemporary black political thought. Moving fluently from the local to the national to the hemispheric to the global and traversing disciplinary lines at the same time, Party/Politics has much to offer scholars in multiple fields, both within political science and beyond. At the risk of understating this larger contribution, this review will focus on the example it sets for the practice of political theory.