American Stasis: Conflict, Order, and Leadership in Black Political Thought

Lupino, Ferris

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Overview

Year:: 2020
Contributor:: Lupino, Ferris (creator); Honig, Bonnie (Advisor); Krause, Sharon (Reader); Morone, James (Reader); Oliver, Graham (Reader); Brown University. Department of Political Science (sponsor)
Genre:: theses
Subject:: Democracy; Black radical thought; Canon (Literature); reception
Extent:: 9, 144 p.

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Description

Abstract:: The persistence of racial inequality in the face of formal legal rights leads many theorists of race and democracy to view the United States as at an impasse or standstill. Against the view that exclusion can be remediated through the rule of law, some hold that the country is in an ongoing civil war, where politics is simply war by other means. This view has the benefit of accounting for inequality’s persistence, but leaves little hope for transforming the situation. This project identifies another response, which similarly identifies a racial impasse, but finds resources for political action within these conditions. This response draws on the ancient Greek idea of internal conflict, stasis, which connotes both rest and unrest. Casting the conflict in classical terms suggests classical (or classicized) solutions to conflict. This project takes up the post-civil rights view of the United States as gripped by stasis and assesses the work of canonical black political thinkers from the long civil rights movement in light of this conceptual lens. Each of these thinkers can be read as offering a classicized strategy for responding to slavery’s enduring legacy. W.E.B. Du Bois takes up the idea of charismatic and prophetic leadership, Ralph Ellison invokes the archetype of the trickster, and James Baldwin engages with classical accounts of love and community. Reading these authors as stasis theorists demonstrates their sensitivity to the limits of impasse and the means by which action is possible in such conditions, but the strategy of classicization is not without risks. Heroic and epic emplotments understate the extent to which the racial standstill is a product of human plurality and risk reinscribing ideas about sovereign leadership that the reappropriation of the Western tradition might otherwise undo.
Notes:: Thesis (Ph. D.)--Brown University, 2020

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Rights: In Copyright

Citation

Lupino, Ferris, "American Stasis: Conflict, Order, and Leadership in Black Political Thought" (2020). Political Science Theses and Dissertations. Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library. https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:1129446/

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Political Science Theses and Dissertations

Theses and Dissertations for the Political Science department.
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