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  • Untimely Democracy: The Politics of Progress after Slavery by Gregory Laski
  • John Hay (bio)
Untimely Democracy: The Politics of Progress after Slavery. Gregory Laski. Oxford UP, 2018. xv 1 269 pages. $78.00 cloth; $77.99 ebook.

Gregory Laski's Untimely Democracy: The Politics of Progress after Slavery offers a powerful examination of late nineteenth-century American authors, particularly Frederick Douglass, Stephen Crane, Callie House, W. E. B. Du Bois, Charles Chesnutt, Sutton E. Griggs, and Pauline E. Hopkins. Laski focuses on the post-Reconstruction era—the period between 1877 and 1901 that historian Rayford Logan once labeled the "nadir" of race relations in the United States. The book begins with the observation that little political progress occurred in the decades following the end of Reconstruction, as black Americans were systematically disenfranchised. It might even be considered a time of political regress. But what does democracy look like without progress? What is a democracy that faces backward rather than forward? Laski takes seriously the notion that this is a specifically postbellum period, in which the afterlives of slavery and the after-effects of the Civil War continued to leave profound impressions on Americans. The common rhetoric of progress can imply that the past is dead and gone, but the authors under consideration here understood, à la William Faulkner, that the past was not even past.

Building on Du Bois's notion of the "present-past," Laski's title, Untimely Democracy, gestures to a political rhetoric that rejects the simplicity of linear progress—that resists, in other words, reduction to a static/progressive binary. Rather than working with a historical horizon, a "time for democracy," Laski focuses on the "time of democracy" (26). This conceptual work on temporality in nineteenth-century American literature pairs well with Michelle Sizemore's American Enchantment: Rituals of the People in the Post-Revolutionary World (2018), especially with her final chapter on future-passing, Sizemore's term for the deeper sense of the present granted to the reader of historical romances (a present, that is, reconceived as the future of past events). Laski's chosen authors are not just storytellers but social theorists who "untether the politics of racial progress from the precepts of progressive time" (27). Instead of championing the destiny of democratic vistas, they carefully examine their own moment in history in order to reveal a contingent and strenuous process of and for the work of [End Page 220] democracy. The perverse complexity of postbellum politics—celebrating the end of slavery while dismantling civil rights—is mirrored in the formal properties of the era's literary texts, many of which have been criticized for featuring problematic narrative elements such as convoluted plots, awkward sentences, and unsatisfactory endings. Laski reads these literary elements not as formal flaws but as stylistic strategies in concert with the political problems of the day.

The book's second chapter, on Frederick Douglass, is particularly appealing. Much literary scholarship on Douglass looks at his powerful anti-slavery rhetoric in antebellum writings such as Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845), "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?" (1852), and My Bondage and My Freedom (1855). Laski focuses instead on his speeches delivered and writings published after the abolition of slavery, especially the Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881/1892). By attending to the narrative properties of Douglass's final autobiography, written during the worsening conditions of the post-Reconstruction era, Laski reveals a complexity that challenges the notion of a simple trajectory leading from bondage to freedom. The call for emancipation has been replaced by a cry for agitation, a different activism for a different era.

Untimely Democracy's other chapters similarly offer nuanced readings of literary texts that display a far more complicated political outlook than has normally been attributed to them. The fourth chapter, for example, examines Charles Chesnutt's novels The Marrow of Tradition (1901) and The Colonel's Dream (1905) and finds a dialectic between different attitudes toward progress that can serve as a pre-history of today's debate between Afro-pessimism and black optimism. This chapter pairs especially well with John Levi Barnard's recent reflections on Chesnutt's...

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