Abstract
Untimely Democracy advances an important and controversial argument about temporality, democracy, and race in the United States between roughly 1880 and 1920. Although located in the field of US literary studies, it has much to offer political theorists, in particular those who have found African American works of literature to be rich sources of political thought. There is much to learn from both its archive of often overlooked texts and its method of nuanced close-reading, which focuses as much on narrative form as on the manifest content of the texts it examines. Readers in any discipline will find it a pleasure to read. In every chapter, Laski’s clear and energetic prose is studded with brilliantly concise formulations.
Laski shows that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a number of writers, including W. E. B. Du Bois, Frederick Douglass, Charles W. Chesnutt, and Pauline E. Hopkins, rejected the Progressive Era’s insistence that America was fulfilling the promise of its democracy and making steady progress toward racial equality. However, such dissent always risked playing into the hands of racists who maintained that blacks were congenitally incapable of making progress. Laski’s persuasive and insightful analysis explains how these writers negotiated this dilemma while nonetheless making plain that, in their view, the myth of racial progress was doing more harm than good. Indeed, they maintained (in differing degrees) that the nation was still stuck in its pre-Civil War racial structure and that both blacks and whites would be better off facing this bleak fact than denying it.
The temporal state these writers call our attention to is one that Laski, taking an apt phrase from Du Bois, names “the present-past”—a present that is bound to the past, not a break from it. In so doing, they challenge a progressive temporality embedded, Laski claims, in mainstream thinking about US democracy: In what I term their vision of untimely democracy, these figures transform the pervasive imperative for “progress” . . . from an ambiguous and often-misleading end into a difficult, deliberative process. Interrupting the steady forward movement that propels the desire for progress and has produced so many false starts, their narratives replace the future with the present-past as the temporal horizon that guides political action. This untimely political principle accordingly constitutes a mode that is neither exclusively progressive nor exclusively static. Instead, it stands as a critical—and always dynamic—third way, a path to democratic promises that have been perpetually denied. For these writers, in short, the best (if not the last) chance to realize democracy is to embrace the past that refuses to pass away. (3–4)
Because Laski’s readings of all these writers depend on close analysis of texts and careful attention to narrative form, they are too complex to summarize in a brief review. In what follows, therefore, I will focus on his discussion of Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk, both because that is a text most readers of this journal will be familiar with and because Laski’s treatment of it amply demonstrates the strengths and the shortcomings of his project.
In his original and provocative reading of Souls, Laski invites us to rethink what Du Bois might have meant when he famously invoked the Declaration of Independence, urging black Americans to “‘clin[g] unwaveringly to those great words which the sons of the Fathers would fain forget’” (29). Laski suggests that Du Bois was doing more here than simply reaffirming the originating democratic promise of that founding document. He was challenging the temporality that Jefferson’s celebrated words assume.
As is well known, Jefferson believed that democratic time was radically hostile to the past, or, more precisely, to national fealty to the past. He believed that each generation must be left free to define itself, its values, and its goals; no “‘generation of men has a right to bind another,’” as Jefferson wrote in a letter to James Madison (37). Laski argues that Du Bois, by contrast, invented a temporal category he dubbed “the present-past” precisely in order to reject this view of progressive democratic temporality. White Americans, Du Bois believed, must understand that the nation’s present had not yet left behind its slavery past, and that “the freedman has not yet found in freedom his promised land” (50). Thus, as Laski puts it, whereas Jefferson offered “a vision of time in which democratic possibility rests on the capacity of the sons to break with the fathers,” Du Bois advanced “a vision of time in which the possibility of democracy depends on the sons’ ability to recognize the resemblance they bear to the fathers” (39). Laski’s reading of Souls as “a meditation on the shape of political time” culminates in a remarkably fresh take on the famous passage in which Du Bois explains the meaning of “double-consciousness.” Here are Du Bois’s words: From the double life every American Negro must live, as a Negro and an American, as swept on by the current of the nineteenth while yet struggling in the eddies of the fifteenth century,—from this must arise a painful self-consciousness . . . The worlds within and without the Veil of Color are changing, and changing rapidly, but not at the same rate, and not in the same way; and this must produce a peculiar wrenching of the soul, a peculiar sense of doubt and bewilderment.
1
As the phrases I have italicized indicate, Laski has noticed an important yet overlooked aspect of Du Bois’s notion of double-consciousness: it involves a conflict between two kinds of temporal consciousness or between two identities that have been shaped by different and disjunctive temporalities. Laski’s argument deftly and persuasively makes this clear.
Somewhat less clear is what Laski means when he claims that the temporality of the “present-past” offers “a critical—and always dynamic—third way, a path to democratic promises that have been perpetually denied” (4). He sometimes seems to offer a commonsense version of this argument, as when he writes that the present-past constitutes a temporal “mode that is neither exclusively progressive nor exclusively static” (4). By this definition, when Martin Luther King Jr. remarked that “progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability,” he was expressing this “third way” because he believed in neither stasis nor progress “exclusively,” but in progress achieved through hard work. Likewise, when Frederick Douglass argued that progress requires unending struggle because “power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will,” he too was pointing out this third way. Indeed, it would seem that the vast majority of black thinkers and activists, and many white ones as well, walk this third way insofar as they do not have “unqualified belief in ‘progress’ itself,” but rather hold to a more qualified conception of progress that is achievable only through continuous struggle (50).
At other times, however, Laski seems to be advancing a more controversial argument, one in which this third way presents a radical challenge to conventional democratic temporality and effects a more thoroughgoing rejection of progressive hopes. But what exactly comprises that more? Laski’s answer, often implied rather than stated, is that recognition of stasis is sometimes more enabling politically than even a qualified belief in progress. Thus, in his assertion that Du Bois offers, “a vision of time in which the possibility of democracy depends on the sons’ ability to recognize the resemblance they bear to the fathers” (39), everything hinges on the meaning of the word “resemblance.” Resemblance is not the same thing as equivalence, much less as identity; yet Laski seems to want to push resemblance into identity—or have us mistake resemblance for identity—in order to make his more radical case for “stasis as a politically viable temporality” (33).
This tendency appears also, for example, in his claim that Douglass and Hopkins “refuse to accede to the promise of a corrected future that is impossibly disconnected from the past. Rather, for them, such a future will only ever be realized by agitating perhaps endlessly, in the present, which for these thinkers often was utterly indistinguishable from the past—and productively so” (17). Notice the slide here from the commonsense position that, for these writers, the future cannot possibly be disconnected from the past, to the more controversial claim that they “often” regarded “the present” as “indistinguishable from the past.” The first verb suggests a commonsensical view of time that many black writers and activists would hold: indeed, does anyone believe that the future can be disconnected from the past? The second verb conjures a very different version of temporality, one that neither King nor Douglass embraced. Douglass did indeed believe in an eternal now of struggle, but he did not regard it as “indistinguishable” from the past.
In a similar vein, Laski concludes his fine chapter on Charles Chesnutt with the claim that Chesnutt’s novel The Colonel’s Dream “suggests that the faith that a better future will come needs to be put aside in order to make room for a critical engagement with the ways the past persists in the present. In fact, for him, it is only through this sort of encounter that a better future is even possible” (155). One wonders, however, whether Chesnutt himself ever did believe “that a better future will come,” in the sense of arriving not by human effort but merely by democracy’s inexorable progressive temporality. I am doubtful. Thus, Laski’s more provocative and troubling argument here might be that a qualified “faith that a better future will come” through continuing struggle needs to be put aside because the past persists in the present. But he does not state this argument, he only implies it.
The unacknowledged interplay between Laski’s more conventional and more controversial arguments haunts this book on almost every page—virtually becoming a theme in its own right. Indeed, if we give these arguments equal weight, we see that for most of the figures he discusses, the possibility of progress did not become untrue when they saw it to be incomplete, or not yet fully achieved. Instead of “putting aside” or rejecting progress outright, they maintained a qualified belief in the possibility of some progress through struggle. That belief persisted alongside, and in dynamic tension with, their “engagement with the ways the past persists in the present.” The intense dialectical relation between these dispositions produced, repeatedly, an existential crisis of commitment: why continue the struggle if injustice is so obdurate? Yet, continue the struggle they did.
In sum, what Laski too often implies was a choice between progress and stasis, with his writers landing ultimately on stasis, was really more of a commitment to holding both in tension with each other. They believed that such commitment was intrinsic to what Douglass called struggle, as when he observed in the 1857 speech referred to above that: “The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of earnest struggle. . . . . If there is no struggle there is no progress. . . . Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will” (emphasis added).
One wishes that Laski had brought this dialectic more to the foreground. Yet, as I hope my account of his reading of Souls indicates—and as his excellent chapters on reparations discourse, Hopkins, and Chesnutt will show to readers who turn to them—his book makes an important contribution on its own terms. If its argument seems to waver between its commonsense and controversial versions, that may be because the present-past is such an elusive temporality, one that seems to flicker on and off, yet is undeniably there—in the texts he reads and in democratic theory as these texts formulate it. By making his case for the value of the present-past as “stasis,” he provokes a deep consideration of temporality in both democratic theory and black political thought.