Abolition-Democracy and Political Majoritarianism in Black Reconstruction

• In Event: American Democracy in Black Political Thought

Abstract

W. E. B. Du Bois’ Black Reconstruction is widely recognized as one of the inaugural works in the Black Radical tradition, and abolition-democracy has garnered interest among scholars of carcerality, justice and Black political thought explicating the normative horizons of multi-racial democracy in the United States. This paper turns to the democratic theory of Black Reconstruction to recover Du Bois’ account of abolition-democracy as a hopeful historical moment between 1868 and 1872. I schematize Du Bois’ discussion of the federal legislative and state politics of democratic dictatorship to reconstruct a theory of political majoritarianism against ‘paradoxical democracy’ in Black Reconstruction that ends in ‘splendid failure’ as race relations are converted from slavery to collective domination in the denouement of Reconstruction.

Author

• Vatsal Naresh, Harvard University