Direct Democracy: Collective Power, the Swarm, and the Literatures of the Americas(Caribbean Studies)

Beginning with the Haitian Revolution, Scott Henkel lays out a literary history of direct democracy in the Americas. Much research considers direct democracy as a form of organization fit for worker cooperatives or political movements. Henkel reinterprets it as a type of collective power, based on the massive slave revolt in Haiti. In the representations of slaves, women, and workers, Henkel traces a history of power through the literatures of the Americas during the long nineteenth century. Thinking about democracy as a type of power presents a challenge to common, often bureaucratic and limited interpretations of the term and opens an alternative archive, which Henkel argues includes C. L. R. James's The Black Jacobins, Walt Whitman's Democratic Vistas, Lucy Parsons's speeches advocating for the eight-hour workday, B. Traven's novels of the Mexican Revolution, and Marie Vieux Chauvet's novella about Haitian dictatorship. Henkel asserts that each writer recognized this power and represented its physical manifestation as a swarm. This metaphor bears a complicated history, often describing a group, a movement, or a community. Indeed it conveys multiplicity and complexity, a collective power. This metaphor's many uses illustrate Henkel's main concerns, the problems of democracy, slavery, and labor, the dynamics of racial repression and resistance, and the issues of power which run throughout the Americas.

About the Author :
Scott Henkel, Laramie, Wyoming, is assistant professor of English and of African American and diaspora studies at the University of Wyoming. His research has appeared in the journals Walt Whitman Quarterly Review and Workplace: A Journal of Academic Labor as well as the edited volumes Problems of Democracy: Language and Speaking and The Grapes of Wrath: A Reconsideration.

Review :
"Direct Democracy is an exhilarating investigation of collective political action in the Americas. Marshalling a broad range of theoretical resources, Henkel focuses on the concept of the swarm to construct a protean literary history and theory of collective insurgency since the Haitian Revolution. With elegance and erudition, Direct Democracy argues incisively for a novel conceptualization of collective action, resistance, and direct democracy equal to the challenges of the present age." --Nick Nesbitt, professor of French at Princeton University; author of numerous books and articles, including Caribbean Critique: Antillean Critical Theory from Toussaint to Glissant and Universal Emancipation: The Haitian Revolution and the Radical Enlightenment; and editor of The Concept in Crisis: Reading Capital Today "Inspired by the incomparable C. L. R. James, Scott Henkel explores the 'swarm' of humanity in the literatures of the Americas, illuminating its deep but often hidden democratizing power to shape the course of history. Here is a timely book for a new age of resistance." --Marcus Rediker, coauthor of The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic