Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Truscello, Michael

Titel

Direct Democracy: Collective Power, the Swarm, and the Literatures of the Americas by Scott Henkel (review)

Ist Teil von

• Ariel, 2021, Vol.52 (1), p.181-183

Ort / Verlag

Calgary: Johns Hopkins University Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2021

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Project MUSE

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• By examining C. L. R. James' The Black Jacobins (1938), Walt Whitman's Democratic Vistas (1871), Lucy Parsons' anarchist propaganda, B. Traven's Mahogany Novels, and Marie Vieux Chauvet's novella Love (1968), Henkel illustrates how direct democratic power emerges not from the institutional spaces of elected governments but from "the plantations where people in Haiti fought for their liberty and independence, in streets full of union picketers like Lucy Parsons, and in the textile factories that B. Traven shows as the incubators of dissent during the Mexican Revolution" (4). In his analysis of Nat Turner's Confessions (1831), a text written and published by Thomas R. Gray, Henkel sees a "literary misdirection" that "obscures an understanding of the Southampton Rebellion as a collective act against the constituted power of slavery and instead focuses attention on the part played by one of its participants" (86). A potential flaw of the book could only be solved by writing a longer book, and that might diffuse the essential concept of direct democracy: I would have appreciated more extensive coverage of anarchist intellectual history.