Gregory Laski
Biographic Data
| ID | 1050864 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Gregory Laski |
| GIVEN NAMES | Gregory |
| FAMILY NAME | Laski |
| SIGNATURE | LASKI G |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8678-1586 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 9 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 0 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 9 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2010 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 0 |
The New Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies
The New Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies takes stock of critical developments over the past twenty years, offering a fresh examination of key interpretative issues in this field. In eclectic fashion, it presents a wide range of new approaches in such areas as print and material culture, Black studies, Latinx studies, disability studies, gender and sexuality studies, postsecular studies, and Indigenous studies. This volume also maps ou…
Reimagining the Republic
Albion W. Tourgée (1838–1905) was a major force for social, legal, and literary transformation in the second half of the nineteenth century. Best known for his Reconstruction novels A Fool’s Errand (1879) and Bricks without Straw (1880), and for his key role in the civil rights case Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), challenging Louisiana’s law segregating railroad cars, Tourgée published more than a dozen novels and a volume of short stories, as well as…
Reconstructing Revenge
This essay reconsiders the politics of African American literature after the Civil War by focusing on revenge as a response to the wrong of slavery. Though forgiveness dominates literary and historical scholarship, I assemble an archive of real and imagined instances of vengeance in black-authored texts from the period following formal emancipation to the dawn of the twentieth century: the petitions of the freedmen of Edisto Island, South Carolin…
Untimely Democracy
Untimely Democracy tells the surprising story of how American authors and activists defined the path of racial progress after the abolition of slavery. Conventional narratives of democracy stretching from Thomas Jefferson’s America to the present day 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, …
On the Possibility of Democracy in the Present-Past
This chapter constructs a conceptual grammar for untimely democracy by pairing Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia and W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk . Jefferson’s vision of an ever-progressing polity rests on his principle of generational autonomy: the notion that each cohort of citizens is free from the burdens of its ancestors. Slavery stands as the limit for such a model. For Jefferson, blackness signifies a future h…
Narrating the Present-Past in Frederick Douglass’s Life and Times
This chapter finds in Frederick Douglass’s final autobiography a case study for what it means to narrate the present-past. The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass points backward to bondage, bringing the author face to face with his former master. For nineteenth- and twenty-first-century readers alike, the tableau of the ex-slave sharing a sentimental moment with the man who once abused him suggests that the radical abolitionist had become a rea…
Failed Futures
This chapter examines the uses of the unfulfilled in the writings of Charles W. Chesnutt and Sutton E. Griggs. While both authors sought politically progressive ends, Chesnutt and Griggs deployed different strategies to navigate the discourses of “pessimism” and “optimism” that marked turn-of-the-twentieth-century debates about the future of the race. Whereas Griggs believed that bringing about a better future for black Americans required represe…
Pauline E. Hopkins’s Untimely Democracy
This chapter reveals how Pauline E. Hopkins transforms the boundary between slavery and freedom into the source of a paradoxical political hope—indeed, as the best chance for realizing democracy. Announcing in Contending Forces that problems such as rape and lynching constitute “duplications” of the past of bondage, Hopkins calls for a neo-abolitionist crusade. For Thomas Jefferson or W. E. B. Du Bois, such a declaration would signal democracy’s …
Falling Back into History
Falling Back into HistoryThe Uncanny Trauma of Blackface Minstrelsy in Spike Lee's Bamboozled Gregory Laski (bio) ...nobody, black or white, wants to revisit this stuff. I know there'll be a resistance to this film, like, "Why is Spike bringing this stuff back? That was the last century; we're in a new century, a new frontier." I think it's important that we look at this stuff. It has to be confronted. Blackface is part of American history. —Spik…
No prominent works on this page.
Falling Back into History
Falling Back into HistoryThe Uncanny Trauma of Blackface Minstrelsy in Spike Lee's Bamboozled Gregory Laski (bio) ...nobody, black or white, wants to revisit this stuff. I know there'll be a resistance to this film, like, "Why is Spike bringing this stuff back? That was the last century; we're in a new century, a new frontier." I think it's important that we look at this stuff. It has to be confronted. Blackface is part of American history. —Spik…
Untimely Democracy
Untimely Democracy tells the surprising story of how American authors and activists defined the path of racial progress after the abolition of slavery. Conventional narratives of democracy stretching from Thomas Jefferson’s America to the present day 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, …
On the Possibility of Democracy in the Present-Past
This chapter constructs a conceptual grammar for untimely democracy by pairing Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia and W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk . Jefferson’s vision of an ever-progressing polity rests on his principle of generational autonomy: the notion that each cohort of citizens is free from the burdens of its ancestors. Slavery stands as the limit for such a model. For Jefferson, blackness signifies a future h…
Narrating the Present-Past in Frederick Douglass’s Life and Times
This chapter finds in Frederick Douglass’s final autobiography a case study for what it means to narrate the present-past. The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass points backward to bondage, bringing the author face to face with his former master. For nineteenth- and twenty-first-century readers alike, the tableau of the ex-slave sharing a sentimental moment with the man who once abused him suggests that the radical abolitionist had become a rea…
Failed Futures
This chapter examines the uses of the unfulfilled in the writings of Charles W. Chesnutt and Sutton E. Griggs. While both authors sought politically progressive ends, Chesnutt and Griggs deployed different strategies to navigate the discourses of “pessimism” and “optimism” that marked turn-of-the-twentieth-century debates about the future of the race. Whereas Griggs believed that bringing about a better future for black Americans required represe…
Pauline E. Hopkins’s Untimely Democracy
This chapter reveals how Pauline E. Hopkins transforms the boundary between slavery and freedom into the source of a paradoxical political hope—indeed, as the best chance for realizing democracy. Announcing in Contending Forces that problems such as rape and lynching constitute “duplications” of the past of bondage, Hopkins calls for a neo-abolitionist crusade. For Thomas Jefferson or W. E. B. Du Bois, such a declaration would signal democracy’s …
Reconstructing Revenge
This essay reconsiders the politics of African American literature after the Civil War by focusing on revenge as a response to the wrong of slavery. Though forgiveness dominates literary and historical scholarship, I assemble an archive of real and imagined instances of vengeance in black-authored texts from the period following formal emancipation to the dawn of the twentieth century: the petitions of the freedmen of Edisto Island, South Carolin…
Reimagining the Republic
Albion W. Tourgée (1838–1905) was a major force for social, legal, and literary transformation in the second half of the nineteenth century. Best known for his Reconstruction novels A Fool’s Errand (1879) and Bricks without Straw (1880), and for his key role in the civil rights case Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), challenging Louisiana’s law segregating railroad cars, Tourgée published more than a dozen novels and a volume of short stories, as well as…
The New Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies
The New Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies takes stock of critical developments over the past twenty years, offering a fresh examination of key interpretative issues in this field. In eclectic fashion, it presents a wide range of new approaches in such areas as print and material culture, Black studies, Latinx studies, disability studies, gender and sexuality studies, postsecular studies, and Indigenous studies. This volume also maps ou…
History (8 works) · Race, History, and American Society (6 works) · Art (5 works) · Law (5 works) · Literature (5 works) · Political science (5 works) · Politics (5 works) · Democracy (4 works) · Sociology (4 works) · Art history (3 works)