Lawrie Balfour
Biographic Data
| ID | 169461 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Lawrie Balfour |
| GIVEN NAMES | Lawrie |
| FAMILY NAME | Balfour |
| SIGNATURE | BALFOUR L |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Virginia |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2437-4096 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 27 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 106 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 27 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1998 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Making Hope and History ‘Rhyme’: Michele Moody-Adams’s Making Space for Justice
More Beautiful than Democracy: Toni Morrison and the Idea of a Shareable World
More Beautiful than Democracy:Toni Morrison and the Idea of a Shareable World Lawrie Balfour (bio) The destiny of the twenty-first century will be shaped by the possibility or the collapse of a shareable world. —Toni Morrison, "Home" (2009)1 I. Democracy in Danger Democracy is in danger, and the signs are everywhere. The popularity of authoritarian leadership around the world has enabled strongmen to strip citizens of their rights and the earth o…
Seeing Again: On Erin Pineda's Seeing Like an Activist
Seeing Like an Activist is a profound—and profoundly political—book. Skillfully distilling complex historical evidence into a vivid narrative and advancing a compelling theoretical argument, Pineda unsettles conventional accounts of the civil rights movement to ask what we can learn about the nature and limits of civil disobedience “by reconsidering the example we already think we know so well” (3). One of the book's key contributions is its anal…
Storytelling amid the 'dirty plates' of the past: Book Review of Political Memory and the Aesthetics of Care: The Art of Complicity and Resistance , by Mihaela Mihai, Reviewed by Lawrie Balfour
The Politics of Reparations for Black Americans
Although struggles for reparations for slavery and its legacies date back to the earliest period of US politics, they have received relatively little attention from political scientists. Focusing on reparations claims, I argue, can enhance the study of Black social movements and political thought. The recent resurgence of demands for redress for racial injustice, both in the United States and internationally, and contemporary divisions over the p…
Rethinking revolutionary times
Massimiliano Tomba's Insurgent Universality is a stunning book. Conceptually, historically, and rhetorically innovative, it shows how popular challenges to conservative and liberal forms of state-centered politics outlive attempts to contain and repress them. Tomba's reading of revolutionary declarations and manifestos in France, Saint-Domingue, Russia, Mexico, and elsewhere recalls experimental democratic practices that can animate contemporary …
To Manipulate American English: Toni Morrison's Word-Work as a Practice of Freedom
This essay considers the idea of freedom through the prism of Toni Morrison's twinned aspirations to remake American English and to "transfigure the complexity and wealth of Afro-American culture into a language worthy of the culture." Although she is celebrated as a novelist and literary critic, Morrison's political thought has yet to receive its due. Focusing on her nonfiction writing from 1971 to 2019, I investigate how Morrison interprets the…
A Discussion of Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum’s A Lot of People Are Saying: The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Bodies in Politics
Ida B. Wells and “Color Line Justice”: Rethinking Reparations in Feminist Terms
In contrast to sterile forms of apology or the evasions of color-blind political discourse, calls for reparations explicitly link the realization of democratic ideals to a history of antiblack violence and exploitation. I explore three dimensions of Ida B. Wells's antilynching writings that anticipate and enrich contemporary demands for reparations for slavery and Jim Crow. First, Wells's commitment to truth-telling, a centerpiece of reparations …
Reading Publius with Morrison and Melville
For scholars interested in what Jason Frank calls “the outsize authority of the Founders in our jurisprudence and our politics,” I propose reviewing the legacies of The Federalist Papers from the vantages offered by Toni Morrison and Herman Melville. Frank insists that understanding the politics of the Federalist requires grasping how the argument is felt and staged, as well as how its rhetoric constitutes the subjectivities of its readers. To th…
Integration, Desegregation and the Work of the Past
A masterful study of the entrenchment and disastrous consequences of post-civil rights era racial segregation, Elizabeth Anderson's The Imperative of Integration more than lives up to its title. This article highlights two contributions of Anderson's book: the way it models the work of non-ideal theorizing by offering an empirical account of the contemporary US that is grounded in close study of the most pressing social problems and the consequen…
The Most Damage I Can Do: Joel Olson in Political Theory, Political Critique, and Political Activism
Unthinking Racial Realism: A Future for Reparations?1
Considered costly, divisive, and backward-looking, reparations for slavery and Jim Crow appear to have no place in the politics of the "postracial epoch." This essay proposes that the dismissal of reparations concedes too much. First, I contend that the conjunction of postracial discourse, on the one hand, and deepening racial inequalities, on the other, demands a counter-language, one that ties the analysis of the present to the historical condi…
In search of the Black fantastic: Politics and popular culture in the post-civil rights era
Multiracial Democracy between Past and Future
Democracy's Reconstruction: W.E.B. Du Bois and the problems of the 21st century
This book challenges a longstanding tendency in political theory: the disciplinary division that separates political theory proper from the study of black politics. Political theory rarely engages with black political thinkers, despite the fact that the problem of racial inequality is central to the entire enterprise of American political theory. To address this lacuna, it focuses on the political thought of W. E. B. Du Bois, particularly his lon…
Inheriting Du Bois
What would it mean to treat W. E. B. Du Bois as a "living political thinker," Tommie Shelby asks. The formulation of the question indicates one answer: acknowledging Du Bois's twofold legacy for political theory and philosophy. On the one hand, his body of work as a political theorist is rich and provocative enough that it ought to be, as Robert Gooding-Williams (2009) urges, the subject of serious inquiry in its own right. On the other hand, eng…
Darkwater’s Democratic Vision
This essay considers W. E. B. Du Bois’s Darkwater (1920) as a window onto Du Bois’s political theory at an underexamined stage of his career and onto a challenge at the heart of black political thought: how to formulate a conception of collective life that regards the humanity of black women and men as a central concern. Exploring Du Bois’s attempt to articulate what can be seen through the lens of an avowedly “black” perspective and his creative…
Party/Politics: Horizons in Black Political Thought
Party/Politics: Horizons in Black Political Thought. By Michael Hanchard. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. 352p. $35.00. “What does contemporary political and social theory look like when viewed from a vantage point of a black life-world?” (p. 8). Crucial though this question is—particularly at a moment when U.S. citizens are deeply divided across racial lines on a wide array of political issues—it remains largely neglected by political s…
Representative Women: Slavery, Citizenship, and Feminist Theory in Du Bois's ?Damnation of Women
Representative Women: Slavery, Citizenship, and Feminist Theory in Du Bois's “Damnation of Women”
In this essay, I contend that feminist theories of citizenship in the U.S. context must go beyond simply acknowledging the importance of race and grapple explicitly with the legacies of slavery. To sketch this case, I draw upon W.E.B. Du Bois's “The Damnation of Women,” which explores the significance for all Americans of African American women's sexual, economic, and political lives under slavery and in its aftermath
Reparations After Identity Politics
The end of the twentieth century witnessed a resurgence of demands for reparations for slavery and segregation in the United States. At the same time, a chorus of prominent political theorists warned against the threat “identity politics” poses for democratic politics. This essay considers whether it is possible to construct an argument for reparations that responds to these concerns, particularly as they are articulated by Wendy Brown. To do so,…
Unreconstructed Democracy: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Case for Reparations
W. E. B. Du Bois's observations about the links between Americans' unwillingness to acknowledge the legacies of slavery and the shortcomings of formal equality in the post-Reconstruction era anticipate the obstacles to racial justice in the "post-civil rights" era. His study of the "splendid failure" of Reconstruction indicates how a kind of willful national amnesia prevented black citizens from enjoying in fact the freedom and equality they were…
The Evidence of Things Not Said: James Baldwin and the Promise of American Democracy
The Evidence of Things Not Said employs the rich essays of James Baldwin to interrogate the politics of race in American democracy. Lawrie Balfour advances the political discussion of Baldwin's work, and regards him as a powerful political thinker whose work deserves full consideration.Baldwin's essays challenge appeals to race-blindness and formal but empty guarantees of equality and freedom. They undermine white presumptions of racial innocence…
Reparations After Identity Politics
The end of the twentieth century witnessed a resurgence of demands for reparations for slavery and segregation in the United States. At the same time, a chorus of prominent political theorists warned against the threat “identity politics” poses for democratic politics. This essay considers whether it is possible to construct an argument for reparations that responds to these concerns, particularly as they are articulated by Wendy Brown. To do so,…
Unreconstructed Democracy: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Case for Reparations
W. E. B. Du Bois's observations about the links between Americans' unwillingness to acknowledge the legacies of slavery and the shortcomings of formal equality in the post-Reconstruction era anticipate the obstacles to racial justice in the "post-civil rights" era. His study of the "splendid failure" of Reconstruction indicates how a kind of willful national amnesia prevented black citizens from enjoying in fact the freedom and equality they were…
A Most Disagreeable Mirror: Race Consciousness as Double Consciousness
Definition de la notion descriptive et normative de conscience raciale a partir de l'oeuvre de J. Baldwin consacree a l'analyse du pouvoir de l'identite raciale a travers l'experience de la division noir/blanc dans la societe americaine. Rapprochant les principes et la pratique democratiques en un sens qui renouvelle le debat sur l'identite et la difference, Baldwin developpe l'idee de conscience raciale en termes de conscience double, d'une part…
Ida B. Wells and “Color Line Justice”: Rethinking Reparations in Feminist Terms
In contrast to sterile forms of apology or the evasions of color-blind political discourse, calls for reparations explicitly link the realization of democratic ideals to a history of antiblack violence and exploitation. I explore three dimensions of Ida B. Wells's antilynching writings that anticipate and enrich contemporary demands for reparations for slavery and Jim Crow. First, Wells's commitment to truth-telling, a centerpiece of reparations …
Unthinking Racial Realism: A Future for Reparations?1
Considered costly, divisive, and backward-looking, reparations for slavery and Jim Crow appear to have no place in the politics of the "postracial epoch." This essay proposes that the dismissal of reparations concedes too much. First, I contend that the conjunction of postracial discourse, on the one hand, and deepening racial inequalities, on the other, demands a counter-language, one that ties the analysis of the present to the historical condi…
The Appeal of Innocence: Baldwin, Walzer, and the Bounds of Social Criticism
Racial innocence persists not only in American public life but in its democratic theory as well. An unwillingness to confront the implications of American racial history diminishes theorists' capacity to respond to the exclusion and dehumanization of African Americans in the post-civil rights era. Reading James Baldwin's social critical essays against Michael Walzer's writings on the practice of social criticism, this essay shows how a theorist w…
Darkwater’s Democratic Vision
This essay considers W. E. B. Du Bois’s Darkwater (1920) as a window onto Du Bois’s political theory at an underexamined stage of his career and onto a challenge at the heart of black political thought: how to formulate a conception of collective life that regards the humanity of black women and men as a central concern. Exploring Du Bois’s attempt to articulate what can be seen through the lens of an avowedly “black” perspective and his creative…
The Politics of Reparations for Black Americans
Although struggles for reparations for slavery and its legacies date back to the earliest period of US politics, they have received relatively little attention from political scientists. Focusing on reparations claims, I argue, can enhance the study of Black social movements and political thought. The recent resurgence of demands for redress for racial injustice, both in the United States and internationally, and contemporary divisions over the p…
Party/Politics: Horizons in Black Political Thought
Party/Politics: Horizons in Black Political Thought. By Michael Hanchard. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. 352p. $35.00. “What does contemporary political and social theory look like when viewed from a vantage point of a black life-world?” (p. 8). Crucial though this question is—particularly at a moment when U.S. citizens are deeply divided across racial lines on a wide array of political issues—it remains largely neglected by political s…
Reading Publius with Morrison and Melville
For scholars interested in what Jason Frank calls “the outsize authority of the Founders in our jurisprudence and our politics,” I propose reviewing the legacies of The Federalist Papers from the vantages offered by Toni Morrison and Herman Melville. Frank insists that understanding the politics of the Federalist requires grasping how the argument is felt and staged, as well as how its rhetoric constitutes the subjectivities of its readers. To th…
To Manipulate American English: Toni Morrison's Word-Work as a Practice of Freedom
This essay considers the idea of freedom through the prism of Toni Morrison's twinned aspirations to remake American English and to "transfigure the complexity and wealth of Afro-American culture into a language worthy of the culture." Although she is celebrated as a novelist and literary critic, Morrison's political thought has yet to receive its due. Focusing on her nonfiction writing from 1971 to 2019, I investigate how Morrison interprets the…
Bodies in Politics
Integration, Desegregation and the Work of the Past
A masterful study of the entrenchment and disastrous consequences of post-civil rights era racial segregation, Elizabeth Anderson's The Imperative of Integration more than lives up to its title. This article highlights two contributions of Anderson's book: the way it models the work of non-ideal theorizing by offering an empirical account of the contemporary US that is grounded in close study of the most pressing social problems and the consequen…
The Most Damage I Can Do: Joel Olson in Political Theory, Political Critique, and Political Activism
Inheriting Du Bois
What would it mean to treat W. E. B. Du Bois as a "living political thinker," Tommie Shelby asks. The formulation of the question indicates one answer: acknowledging Du Bois's twofold legacy for political theory and philosophy. On the one hand, his body of work as a political theorist is rich and provocative enough that it ought to be, as Robert Gooding-Williams (2009) urges, the subject of serious inquiry in its own right. On the other hand, eng…
Representative Women: Slavery, Citizenship, and Feminist Theory in Du Bois's ?Damnation of Women
Representative Women: Slavery, Citizenship, and Feminist Theory in Du Bois's “Damnation of Women”
In this essay, I contend that feminist theories of citizenship in the U.S. context must go beyond simply acknowledging the importance of race and grapple explicitly with the legacies of slavery. To sketch this case, I draw upon W.E.B. Du Bois's “The Damnation of Women,” which explores the significance for all Americans of African American women's sexual, economic, and political lives under slavery and in its aftermath
A Most Disagreeable Mirror: Race Consciousness as Double Consciousness
Definition de la notion descriptive et normative de conscience raciale a partir de l'oeuvre de J. Baldwin consacree a l'analyse du pouvoir de l'identite raciale a travers l'experience de la division noir/blanc dans la societe americaine. Rapprochant les principes et la pratique democratiques en un sens qui renouvelle le debat sur l'identite et la difference, Baldwin developpe l'idee de conscience raciale en termes de conscience double, d'une part…
The Appeal of Innocence: Baldwin, Walzer, and the Bounds of Social Criticism
Racial innocence persists not only in American public life but in its democratic theory as well. An unwillingness to confront the implications of American racial history diminishes theorists' capacity to respond to the exclusion and dehumanization of African Americans in the post-civil rights era. Reading James Baldwin's social critical essays against Michael Walzer's writings on the practice of social criticism, this essay shows how a theorist w…
The Evidence of Things Not Said: James Baldwin and the Promise of American Democracy
The Evidence of Things Not Said employs the rich essays of James Baldwin to interrogate the politics of race in American democracy. Lawrie Balfour advances the political discussion of Baldwin's work, and regards him as a powerful political thinker whose work deserves full consideration.Baldwin's essays challenge appeals to race-blindness and formal but empty guarantees of equality and freedom. They undermine white presumptions of racial innocence…
Unreconstructed Democracy: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Case for Reparations
W. E. B. Du Bois's observations about the links between Americans' unwillingness to acknowledge the legacies of slavery and the shortcomings of formal equality in the post-Reconstruction era anticipate the obstacles to racial justice in the "post-civil rights" era. His study of the "splendid failure" of Reconstruction indicates how a kind of willful national amnesia prevented black citizens from enjoying in fact the freedom and equality they were…
Representative Women: Slavery, Citizenship, and Feminist Theory in Du Bois's ?Damnation of Women
Representative Women: Slavery, Citizenship, and Feminist Theory in Du Bois's “Damnation of Women”
In this essay, I contend that feminist theories of citizenship in the U.S. context must go beyond simply acknowledging the importance of race and grapple explicitly with the legacies of slavery. To sketch this case, I draw upon W.E.B. Du Bois's “The Damnation of Women,” which explores the significance for all Americans of African American women's sexual, economic, and political lives under slavery and in its aftermath
Reparations After Identity Politics
The end of the twentieth century witnessed a resurgence of demands for reparations for slavery and segregation in the United States. At the same time, a chorus of prominent political theorists warned against the threat “identity politics” poses for democratic politics. This essay considers whether it is possible to construct an argument for reparations that responds to these concerns, particularly as they are articulated by Wendy Brown. To do so,…
Party/Politics: Horizons in Black Political Thought
Party/Politics: Horizons in Black Political Thought. By Michael Hanchard. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. 352p. $35.00. “What does contemporary political and social theory look like when viewed from a vantage point of a black life-world?” (p. 8). Crucial though this question is—particularly at a moment when U.S. citizens are deeply divided across racial lines on a wide array of political issues—it remains largely neglected by political s…
Darkwater’s Democratic Vision
This essay considers W. E. B. Du Bois’s Darkwater (1920) as a window onto Du Bois’s political theory at an underexamined stage of his career and onto a challenge at the heart of black political thought: how to formulate a conception of collective life that regards the humanity of black women and men as a central concern. Exploring Du Bois’s attempt to articulate what can be seen through the lens of an avowedly “black” perspective and his creative…
Democracy's Reconstruction: W.E.B. Du Bois and the problems of the 21st century
This book challenges a longstanding tendency in political theory: the disciplinary division that separates political theory proper from the study of black politics. Political theory rarely engages with black political thinkers, despite the fact that the problem of racial inequality is central to the entire enterprise of American political theory. To address this lacuna, it focuses on the political thought of W. E. B. Du Bois, particularly his lon…
Inheriting Du Bois
What would it mean to treat W. E. B. Du Bois as a "living political thinker," Tommie Shelby asks. The formulation of the question indicates one answer: acknowledging Du Bois's twofold legacy for political theory and philosophy. On the one hand, his body of work as a political theorist is rich and provocative enough that it ought to be, as Robert Gooding-Williams (2009) urges, the subject of serious inquiry in its own right. On the other hand, eng…
Multiracial Democracy between Past and Future
In search of the Black fantastic: Politics and popular culture in the post-civil rights era
Integration, Desegregation and the Work of the Past
A masterful study of the entrenchment and disastrous consequences of post-civil rights era racial segregation, Elizabeth Anderson's The Imperative of Integration more than lives up to its title. This article highlights two contributions of Anderson's book: the way it models the work of non-ideal theorizing by offering an empirical account of the contemporary US that is grounded in close study of the most pressing social problems and the consequen…
The Most Damage I Can Do: Joel Olson in Political Theory, Political Critique, and Political Activism
Unthinking Racial Realism: A Future for Reparations?1
Considered costly, divisive, and backward-looking, reparations for slavery and Jim Crow appear to have no place in the politics of the "postracial epoch." This essay proposes that the dismissal of reparations concedes too much. First, I contend that the conjunction of postracial discourse, on the one hand, and deepening racial inequalities, on the other, demands a counter-language, one that ties the analysis of the present to the historical condi…
Ida B. Wells and “Color Line Justice”: Rethinking Reparations in Feminist Terms
In contrast to sterile forms of apology or the evasions of color-blind political discourse, calls for reparations explicitly link the realization of democratic ideals to a history of antiblack violence and exploitation. I explore three dimensions of Ida B. Wells's antilynching writings that anticipate and enrich contemporary demands for reparations for slavery and Jim Crow. First, Wells's commitment to truth-telling, a centerpiece of reparations …
Reading Publius with Morrison and Melville
For scholars interested in what Jason Frank calls “the outsize authority of the Founders in our jurisprudence and our politics,” I propose reviewing the legacies of The Federalist Papers from the vantages offered by Toni Morrison and Herman Melville. Frank insists that understanding the politics of the Federalist requires grasping how the argument is felt and staged, as well as how its rhetoric constitutes the subjectivities of its readers. To th…
Bodies in Politics
A Discussion of Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum’s A Lot of People Are Saying: The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
To Manipulate American English: Toni Morrison's Word-Work as a Practice of Freedom
This essay considers the idea of freedom through the prism of Toni Morrison's twinned aspirations to remake American English and to "transfigure the complexity and wealth of Afro-American culture into a language worthy of the culture." Although she is celebrated as a novelist and literary critic, Morrison's political thought has yet to receive its due. Focusing on her nonfiction writing from 1971 to 2019, I investigate how Morrison interprets the…
Rethinking revolutionary times
Massimiliano Tomba's Insurgent Universality is a stunning book. Conceptually, historically, and rhetorically innovative, it shows how popular challenges to conservative and liberal forms of state-centered politics outlive attempts to contain and repress them. Tomba's reading of revolutionary declarations and manifestos in France, Saint-Domingue, Russia, Mexico, and elsewhere recalls experimental democratic practices that can animate contemporary …
The Politics of Reparations for Black Americans
Although struggles for reparations for slavery and its legacies date back to the earliest period of US politics, they have received relatively little attention from political scientists. Focusing on reparations claims, I argue, can enhance the study of Black social movements and political thought. The recent resurgence of demands for redress for racial injustice, both in the United States and internationally, and contemporary divisions over the p…
More Beautiful than Democracy: Toni Morrison and the Idea of a Shareable World
More Beautiful than Democracy:Toni Morrison and the Idea of a Shareable World Lawrie Balfour (bio) The destiny of the twenty-first century will be shaped by the possibility or the collapse of a shareable world. —Toni Morrison, "Home" (2009)1 I. Democracy in Danger Democracy is in danger, and the signs are everywhere. The popularity of authoritarian leadership around the world has enabled strongmen to strip citizens of their rights and the earth o…
Seeing Again: On Erin Pineda's Seeing Like an Activist
Seeing Like an Activist is a profound—and profoundly political—book. Skillfully distilling complex historical evidence into a vivid narrative and advancing a compelling theoretical argument, Pineda unsettles conventional accounts of the civil rights movement to ask what we can learn about the nature and limits of civil disobedience “by reconsidering the example we already think we know so well” (3). One of the book's key contributions is its anal…
Political science (25 works) · Law (23 works) · Sociology (23 works) · Law (22 works) · Politics (22 works) · Race, History, and American Society (15 works) · Democracy (12 works) · Philosophy (12 works) · Philosophy (11 works) · Political philosophy (6 works)