This is a book about African American women who create versions of democracy different from the ones entrenched in state apparatuses, constitutions, and mainstream discourses. Focusing on narratives written by black women in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the book explores how select philosophers and authors offer alternative visions of the United States as a democratic society. In the narratives of these women, democracy is not a system of government or a nationalistic brand name; rather, it is a way of life shaped by cultural experiences that unfold within communities of African American women . From this standpoint, democracy involves the participation of individuals in an array of culture-building practices that bring together storytelling, art, labour, religion, and activism . Democracy equally constitutes a processual, open-ended, and fluid set of relations among people which breaks through social barriers, linking together not only individuals within marginalized communities but also communities themselves. I refer to this version of democracy as âcreative democracy ,â a term that should call to mind John Deweyâs pragmatist philosophy. 1 However, creative democracy existed as a set of ideals and narratives long before Dewey gave it a name, in much the same way that pragmatism existed within American letters before William James codified it in his 1907 manifesto, Pragmatism. James and Dewey belong to one pragmatic tradition that melds creative understandings of democracy with concepts like individualism , pluralism, and experience. This book focuses on a different genealogy of pragmatism which developed through the writings of African American women theorists and literary writers. It is this genealogy that offers some of the most robust and sophisticated interventions against the manifold failures (past and present) of institutional democracy in the United States. Rooted in both personal experience and long-standing cultural symbols, committed to the unification of theory and practice , African American womenâs pragmatism exposes the distortions, betrayals, and manipulations of state-sponsored U.S. democratic idealism while simultaneously creating spaces for new forms of democracy .
There are many potential starting points for thinking about African American womenâs literary pragmatism and creative democracy, but I focus on a trajectory that passes through the nineteenth-century philosophy of Maria Stewart, Anna Julia Cooper, and Mary Church Terrell, and the interwar literature of Jessie Fauset, Nella Larsen, and Zora Neale Hurston. One reason for choosing this approach and these authors is that doing so equips us to chart an evolution of black feminism that features continuity and yet a diversity of perspectives. As critics like Kristin Waters (366), Beverly Guy-Sheftall (2), and Patricia Hill Collins have pointed out, the balance between multiplicity and âthematic consistencyâ (as Collins calls it [âPoliticsâ 395]) has shaped much of black feminist history. Case in point, the theological works of the first African American woman philosopher, Maria Stewart, are profoundly different, on the levels of both form and content, from the passing novels of Harlem Renaissance authors like Jessie Fauset and Nella Larsen, but we can nonetheless identify recurring subjects and themes across them. For my purposes, these individuals belong to a black feminist tradition not by virtue of being black female authors, but by virtue of participating in a shared trajectory of literary pragmatism and creative democracy. For the pragmatist critic, building an arc in black womenâs writing from the early nineteenth century to the interwar period involves examining a multidimensional narrative that crosses disciplinary boundaries to find modes of expression at sites of resistance, struggle, and community formation. The narrative involves a diversity of voices, times, and places, but it also features a continuity founded on simultaneously pragmatic and creative reconstructions of democracy .
I say ânarrativeâ to acknowledge that the genealogy of black feminist pragmatism centres on stories which women have shared among themselves and passed down across the generations. Black feminism in the United States traces its roots to an array of collective enterprises and political causes, including abolitionism, anti-lynching campaigns , and club movements , but it also locates its origins in lineages grounded on storytelling, art, and cultural symbols. Moreover, the transmission of knowledge among black women has traditionally revolved around matrilineal narratives , specifically stories that mothers and grandmothers have told to their daughters. Naomi Ruth Lowinsky, Toni C. King, and S. Alease Ferguson use the term âthe motherlineâ to describe such narratological lines of descent, a concept that brings into focus the symbolic and practical role of maternity as an anchor in African American womenâs cultural traditions. In this book, I explore one version of a matrilineal narrative that extends across multiple generations and is united through crosscurrents between practical tenets and literary elements. As many critics have indicated, the tight unity between theory and practice (as well as between theory and personal experience) has shaped black feminism from its inception. So too, this unity defines the pragmatist approach to creative democracy. Yet the narrative of creative democracy is built around more than a common methodological approach to political struggle. It also includes a series of literary componentsâcharacters, symbols, settings, and thematic concernsâwhich bring aesthetic vitality to representations of creative democracy while also capturing how African American women see democracy working as a communal experience. Therefore, a literary pragmatic approach to creative democracy begins with the simple but necessary observation that black womenâs constructions of democracy are and always has been concurrently literary and pragmatic. In a related vein, the literary pragmatic approach demands a receptivity to the foundational ties that bind together creative democracy and black feminist culture, most pointedly the centrality of maternity and the overarching importance of community life .
What defines a literary pragmatic approach to African American womenâs texts? This approach requires an understanding of the principles that have tied together the many strains of pragmatist thought as well as an openness to the way black women have developed pragmatist narratives that speak to their particular experiences. As I have discussed in previous work, to my mind, literary pragmatist reading begins with the claim that pragmatism at large reflects in myriad ways an American national ethos. 2 The first self-identified pragmatist, William James , developed his conception of the distinctly American ethos of pragmatism in writings such as Pragmatism and The Meaning of Truth. 3 At the same time, from the literary standpoint, the American orientation of pragmatism cannot be located in a common set of ideas that James and others insert into specific arguments. Rather, the American characteristics of pragmatism consist of subtle literary components embedded within a wide array of novels, stories, poems, and non-fiction texts that cover a range of subjects, from history to metaphysics to biology, from religion to aesthetics to politics. Among the writings of pragmatist philosophers, we find a variety of commentaries on that most flexible of topics, the relationship between the individual and society (and, more abstractly, between subjectivity and objectivity); but we also find literary inflections that frame this relationship in the context of varied locales, time periods, and cultural formations in the United States, from the eighteenth century to the present day. In the philosophical tradition, pragmatist ideas about individuality and society work in concert with figurative representations of pragmatic individuals inhabiting American social settings. Such representations are built around archetypes, national mythology, and portrayals of and reflections on U.S. geographical spaces, national institutions, and sociopolitical transformations.
What emerges through comparative literary analyses of these writings is not a theory of American identity per se, but a cast of characters and settings that are products of American society just as much as they are actors and stages which enliven the fundamental principles of pragmatist philosophy. These literary components afford multiple portraits of how theorists incorporate constructions of American culture into their writing. In the process, these components also provide snapshots of the ways interactions between the individual and society are delimited by one of the key tenets of pragmatist thought: the relationship between experience and truth . Literary pragmatism identifies a reciprocal relationship between theory (in the widest sense) and literature, exploring how fiction and poetry both enact and revise the themes, characterizations, motifs, and settings found within pragmatist writing. Literary pragmatism is less a lens for reading either theory or literature than a series of reading practices that track long threads that run across diverse forms of writingâa method of exploration that does not actively blur disciplinary boundaries so much as it seeks instances of blurring, opposition, influence, and synthesis in the narratives that wind throughout the works of authors, philosophers, essayists, and activists .
Previous critics have examined the writings of black men and white women in relation to pragmatism, and literary pragmatism has emerged as a field unto itself in recent years. 4 Monographs such as Joan Richardsonâs A Natural History of Pragmatism (2006), Walton Muyumbaâs The Shadow and the Act (2009), Lisi Schoenbachâs Pragmatic Modernism (2011), and Paul Grimstadâs Experience and Experimental Writing (2013) have joined earlier texts like Richard Poirierâs Poetry and Pragmatism (1992), Ross Posnockâs The Trial of Curiosity (1991), and Patricia Raeâs The Practical Muse (1997). 5 One reason for the recent increase in literary pragmatist studies is that pragmatism itself has grown into one of the most influential schools of thought in contemporary theory. There are a number of explanations for the resurgence of pragmatism in the twenty-first century, with anxieties about the current state of American democracy perhaps being the most poignant of them. Commentaries on the cultural, philosophical, and political meaning of democracy are deeply entrenched in the classical pragmatist tradition, not only in the works of foundational authors like William James and John Dewey, but also in the writings of thinkers regarded as the forerunners to pragmatism, such as Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Deweyâs works, in particular, are rightly known for celebrating the intrinsic connection between democracy and classical pragmatism. 6 My book does not revisit the thematic role that democracy has played (and still plays) in the works of canonical pragmatists , not least because many critics have already explored these connections. Rather, the current study seeks to develop a literary pragmatist approach to a largely ignored narrative of creative democracy. What is sorely missing in scholarship, I argue, is a comprehensive literary pragmatist study of how African American womenâs writing brings forth this narrative .
Aiming to fill this substantial gap, my book works on the premise that genealogies of African American womenâs letters stretching from the early nineteenth century to the Harlem Renaissance offer some of the fullest and most provocative representations of how pragmatism understands democracy creatively. Today this project is more necessary than ever, for reasons that are both scholarly and sociopolitical (which in black feminism and pragmatism are not separate domains). In recent decades, the mechanistic workings of U.S. democracy have steadily degenerated into a grotesque menagerie of corporate and institutional status quos, preservations of racist and misogynistic stratifications, entertainment bonanzas masquerading as public discourses, and rigged elections. The question of how and when early twenty-first-century American democracy will finally bottom out is an open one, but one positive that has emerged from the downward spiral is an increasingly fervent grassroots resistance to these manifestations of democratic idealism. Following Donald Trumpâs bizarre yet not wholly unexpected victory in the 2016 election, the battle cry among vast numbers of American citizens was ânot my president.â But perhaps a wider and more historical phrase is required: not my democracy .
To be sure, this is an underlying (and at times explicit) statement that has found countless modes of expression in the history of African American womenâs letters. The works of nineteenth-century theorists like Maria Stewart, Anna Julia Cooper, and Mary Church Terrell emphasize in a variety of ways the massive disjunctions between the promises of establishment democracy and the experiences of black women in the United States. They also give voice to different possibilities of democratic life, not only showcasing how African American women create organic, cultural, and flexible experiences of democracy within marginalized communities, but also outlining how their approaches to communal experience harbour the potential to transform the workings of democracy within U.S. institutions. In the next generation, the literary works of Harlem Renaissance authors like Jessie Fauset, Nella Larsen, and Zora Neale Hurston depict young African American women enacting their own versions of creative democracy through mobility among communities, the traversal of societal barriers, and interpersonal relationships founded on shared enterpr...