Rituals of Race: American Public Culture and the Search for Racial Democracy (review)

Rituals of Race: American Public Culture and the Search for Racial Democracy. By Alessandra Lorini (Charlottesville, University Press of Virginia, 1999) 305 pp. $60.00 cloth $19.50 paper.

Lorini brings the transnational perspective of a Florentine historian to the subject of race relations (and, to a much lesser extent, gender relations) in the United States during the period between the Civil War and World War I. She sees in that subject a way to empower the discipline of history as a strong voice in the ongoing discourse about the meaning of participatory democracy in general, worldwide. Her methodological approach to the subject of race relations employs a concept that she labels "public culture." She offers it as a more inclusive alternative to Habermas' "public sphere," which she regards as too closely tied to representative democracy to capture the universalities that she wants to express with respect to participatory democracy.¹ She characterizes public culture as the "space where conflictual definitions of democracy can converse" and sees those conversations taking place in the form of "rituals," by which she means "collective symbolic behavior" (xiii).

The substance of the book consists of discussions of various parades, pageants, plays, musical traditions, intellectual debates, and interracial institutions. The rituals are chosen from both the North and the South on the basis of what she considers to be the "national impact of each event on definitions of race and democracy" (xvi). But that criterion, "national impact," opens Lorini to the obvious question of how to measure national impact. Though this book offers intriguing new ways to think about old subjects and demonstrates that race relations in the United States between the Civil War and World War I were far more complicated than they are often depicted, the book ultimately founders upon that question of impact, in large part because the logic of such an approach becomes almost necessarily tautological.

Much of the book covers reasonably familiar ground, since Lorini selects a number of events that other historians have already explored in different ways: for example, Chicago's Columbian Exposition of 1893; Atlanta's Cotton States and International Exposition of 1895; conflicts between Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois; the ironies embedded in blackface theater and African-American music; and racial and gendered tensions within the early naacp. Other events that she chooses are less well known or less skillfully explored elsewhere. This book contains an excellent treatment of African-American military parades and the racial cross-currents running through the municipal pageant movement of the Progressive era. It has a particularly moving discussion of the "Silent Parade" mounted in New York City as a protest against the massacre of African-Americans in the East St. Louis labor riots of 1917. Lorini refers throughout the book to other race riots as well, using them almost like a drumbeat in the background. But it is not clear whether that drumbeat functions as a counterpoint to the rituals of public culture discussed in the book, as the hard sound of racially charged rituals that co-existed with the ones that Lorini examines, or as an implicit reminder that life-and-death realities for most African-Americans probably remained largely untouched by the rituals of public culture, however interesting and revealing they might now appear to be after the fact.

This is a brave and idealistic book. It would be wonderful if Rituals of Race succeeded in using the concept of public culture to make the history of America's ongoing struggle for racial democracy even more germane to similar struggles elsewhere than it already is. But some serious methodological questions will need to be answered along the way.

James C. Mohr
University of Oregon

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