From Emerson to King: Democracy, Race, and the Politics of Protest (review)

354 Rhetoric & Public Affairs From Emerson to King: Democracy, Race, and the Politics of Protest. By Anita Haya Patterson. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997; pp. ix + 257. $49.95. Recent polemics for or against affirmative action illustrate the reductive thinking that too often stands for public deliberation. One is either for individual rights or for a set of group-based commitments associated with the term "race." As the media and policy makers continue to exploit social divisiveness along purely racial lines, questions about what holds America together as a diverse but unified political community are replaced by ad hominem attacks and specious generalizations from every side. One wonders if our public discourse is capable of assuaging this seemingly intractable debate. Readers of Rhetoric & Public Affairs should find the critical-historical perspective that guides Anita Haya Patterson's analysis of Ralph Waldo Emerson's rhetorical discourse particularly useful, and hopeful, in thinking through public questions about race. As she observes, "A great deal is thus at stake in the attempt to arrive at a clear understanding of the historical relationship between democratic values and racial attitudes in the development of American nationalist rhetorics, literature, and culture" (4). Patterson explores the influence of Emerson's ideas about democracy, race, and rights on African American intellectuals Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. DuBois, Martin Luther King Jr., and Cornel West. Her analysis opens by examining Emerson's defense of individual rights, and accounting for his shift from the Utopian possibilities of friendship as the basis for political obligation to one grounded on the scientific concept of race. "The fervent, critical recuperation of American democracy undertaken by Emerson," Patterson writes in the study's introduction, "was shaped and indeed made conceptually coherent only through his recourse to racialist ideology" (5). To prove this claim, she first attempts to demonstrate that Emerson's writings consistently exhibit a pattern of contradiction which is fundamental to his reinterpretation of democratic values; he simultaneously promotes and opposes mainstream ideals such as the right to private ownership and individual autonomy. Second, Patterson explores the "balancing act" between these poles of contradiction, a rhetorical balancing act that she argues is reconceived in Emerson's later essay "Fate" as "double-consciousness." This double-consciousness justifies the violent, racist policy of westward expansion even as it functions, particularly when re-interpreted by later intellectuals like DuBois, to reconcile racial and national identity in America (5-6). The author traces the uses of race in Emerson's writings to learn how racism contributes to the "compelling beauty and seductiveness" of his nationalist vision, and to ascertain why it mobilizes such "luminous powers of description" (7). The following chapter descriptions illustrate briefly how Patterson fulfills these objectives. "Defining the Public: Representative Men" explores the meaning of "the public" in Emerson's 1850 text. Patterson interrogates Emerson's contradictory picture of Book Reviews 355 "the representative," a picture that she asserts simultaneously affirms and repudiates nineteenth-century democratic and racialist ideals, thus functioning to "bar and facilitate access, to install and remove exclusions to the public realm of representation " (12). The political logic of Emerson's ideas about ownership is addressed in "Property and the Body in Nature" Emerson's nationalistic vision, claims Patterson, was grounded in racialist appeals derived from his contradictory vision of the American self as represented in Nature (25). The religious and political emblems that informed "The American Scholar" are analyzed in "The Poetics of Contradiction." Patterson's concern in this chapter is to detail Emerson's "strategic mediation" between these two distinct and related iconographie resources (51). In "'Self-Reliance': The Ethical Demand for Reform," Patterson argues that, when contextualized with Emerson's early statements on social reform, "the systematic merging of political and religious discourses in 'Self-Reliance' has the effect of equating 'political' obligation with a personal, moral, and legally unenforceable obligation to resist conformity as a means of bettering society as a whole" (81). This personalizing of the political "ultimately results in a reactionary vision of reform as 'inaction' or 'sublime prudence,' a view that ultimately dismantles any real possibilities for visible public protest" (81). Chapters five and six explore the limits of consent...