From the abolition era to the Civil Rights movement to the age of Obama, the promise of perfectibility and improvement resonates in the story of American democracy. But what exactly does racial "progress" mean, and how do we recognize and achieve it? Untimely Democracy: The Politics of Progress After Slavery uncovers a surprising answer to this question in the writings of American authors and activists, both black and white. Conventional narratives of democracy stretching from Thomas Jefferson's America to our own posit a purposeful break between past and present as the key to the viability of this political form--the only way to ensure its continual development. But for Pauline E. Hopkins, Frederick Douglass, Stephen Crane, W. E. B. Du Bois, Charles W. Chesnutt, Sutton E. Griggs, Callie House, and the other figures examined in this book, the campaign to secure liberty and equality for all citizens proceeds most potently when it refuses the precepts of progressive time. Placing these authors' post-Civil War writings into dialogue with debates about racial optimism and pessimism, tracts on progress, and accounts of ex-slave pension activism, and extending their insights into our contemporary period, Laski recovers late-nineteenth-century literature as a vibrant site for doing political theory. Untimely Democracy ultimately shows how one of the bleakest periods in American racial history provided fertile terrain for a radical reconstruction of our most fundamental assumptions about this political system. Offering resources for moments when the march of progress seems to stutter and even stop, this book invites us to reconsider just what democracy can make possible.

About the Author
Gregory Laski is an Assistant Professor of English at the United States Air Force Academy. He is co-founder of the Democratic Dialogue Project, a Mellon grant-funded exchange between Air Force Academy and Colorado College students that seeks to bridge the military-civilian divide.

Reviews
"...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. * John Hay, MELUS *
challenge[s] the field's reductive drive to periodize by century, uncovering a long and rich history of writing about democracy * Katherine Biers, American Literature *
...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. * Nick Bromell, Political Theory *
what Laski gives us is an intellectually thrilling, exhaustively researched book that should alter how we study the long nineteenth century. * John Funchion, American Literary History *
Gregory Laski's Untimely Democracy is an intriguing and thought-provoking assessment of how writers and activists of the post-Reconstruction era grappled with the period's troubling realities. * Anne Elizabeth Carroll, Journal of American History *
While the promise of freedom is often coupled to the train of historical progress, Untimely Democracy argues that it is time to derail this conventional assumption. Looking at writers as diverse as Pauline Hopkins and Stephen Crane, Gregory Laski overturns not just settled ideas about chronologies but also the political desire to sever the past from the present. This is a clear and compelling read. * Russ Castronovo, University of Wisconsin-Madison *
Laski's meticulously researched volume offers critical insight into how slavery shapes American democracy in the past and the present. It also offers essential analysis of postbellum literature. * Soyica Diggs Colbert, Georgetown University *
Laski's complex and sophisticated text will have great appeal to political theorists and political philosophers as well as scholars of American political development and American letters and literature. * Lilly Goren, New Books Network *
Despite its scholarly tone, Untimely Democracy: The Politics of Progress after Slavery resonates with wide audiences interested in the question of progress. * Rebecca Brenner, Black Perspectives blog of the African American Intellectual History Society *


Awards
Winner of Winner of the American Literature Association's Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins Scholarship Award (for Chapter Five: ^IPauline E. Hopkins's Untimely Democracy (Stasis, Agitation, Agency^R).



Book Information
ISBN 9780190642792
Author Gregory Laski
Format Hardback
Page Count 288
Imprint Oxford University Press Inc
Publisher Oxford University Press Inc
Weight(grams) 562g
Dimensions(mm) 157mm * 236mm * 25mm