Democracy's Spectacle

"What is the hangman but a servant of law? And what is that law but an expression of public opinion? And if public opinion be brutal and thou a component part thereof, art thou not the hangman's accomplice?" Writing in 1842, Lydia Maria Child articulates a crisis in the relationship of democracy to sovereign power that continues to occupy political theory today. Is sovereignty, with its reliance on singular and exceptional power, fundamentally inimical to democracy? Or might a more fully realized democracy distribute, share, and popularize sovereignty, thus blunting its exceptional character and its basic violence? In Democracy's Spectacle, Jennifer Greiman looks to an earlier moment in the history of American democracy's vexed interpretation of sovereignty to argue that such questions about the popularization of sovereign power shaped debates about political belonging and public life in the antebellum United States. In an emergent democracy that was also an expansionist slave society, Greiman argues, the problems that sovereignty posed were less concerned with a singular and exceptional power lodged in the state than with a power over life and death that involved all Americans intimately.Drawing on Alexis de Tocqueville's analysis of the sovereignty of the people in Democracy in America, along with work by Gustave de Beaumont, Lydia Maria Child, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville, Greiman tracks the crises of sovereign power as it migrates out of the state to become a constitutive feature of the public sphere. Greiman brings together literature and political theory, as well as materials on antebellum performance culture, antislavery activism, and penitentiary reform, to argue that the antebellum public sphere, transformed by its empowerment, emerges as a spectacle with investments in both punishment and entertainment

Democracy · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Popular sovereignty · Power (physics) · Public sphere · Sociology · Sovereignty · Spectacle · State (computer science) · Latin American and Latino Studies · Law · Political and Economic history of UK and US · Political Economy and Marxism · Political theory and Gramsci · Race, History, and American Society · Theater, Performance, and Music History

• New Studies of Spectacle and Spectatorship in the United States

  Open Access•Andrew M Fearnley•European Journal of American…•2019

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• The Biggest Little Marriage on Record”

  Open Access•Jean Franzino•American Quarterly•2015

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• When the People Rule

  Open Access•Elizabeth Markovits, Elizabeth K Markovits et al.•When the People Rule•2023

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• The feminization of American culture

  Ann Douglas•The feminization of American…•1978

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• The black Atlantic

  Paul Gilroy•The black Atlantic•1993

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• Declaring Independence

  Jay Fliegelman•Declaring Independence•1993

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• The Enchantment of Modern Life

  Jane Bennett•Enchantment of Modern Life•2001

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• Cities of the Dead

  Joseph R Roach•Cities of the Dead•2021

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• Sensational designs

  Jane P Tompkins•Sensational designs•1985

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• The Black Jacobins

  Nick Broten•The Black Jacobins•2017

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• Culture and the State

  David Lloyd, Paul Thomas•Culture and the State•2014

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• Must We Mean What We Say?

  Open Access•Stanley Cavell•Must We Mean What We Say?•2002

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• The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

  Open Access•Karl Marx, Terrell Carver•Marx: Later Political Writings•1996

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• The Antitheatrical Prejudice

  Open Access•Jonas A Barish•Critical Quarterly•1966

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• The Showman and the Slave

  Benjamin Reiss•Showman and the Slave•2001

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• The Human Condition

  Hannah Arendt, Margaret Canovan et al.•Human Condition•2018

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• The Portable Theater

  Renée M Sentilles, Alan Ackerman et al.•Journal of the Early Republic•2002

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• The Spectator and the City in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

  Gunther Barth, Dana Brand•Journal of the Early Republic•1992

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• Letters of the Republic

  Maria Farland, Michael Warner•Modern Language Notes•1991

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• The Public Heart”

  Heather Roberts•American Literature•2004

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• Voicing America

  Lawrence Buell, Christopher Looby•American Literature•1997

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• Slavery and Social Death

  Orlando Patterson•Slavery and Social Death•2018

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• The Garies and their Friends

  Frank Webb, Frank J Webb•The Garies and their friends•1997

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• Necro Citizenship

  Donald E Pease, Russ Castronovo•Necro Citizenship: Death,…•2001

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• Absorption and Theatricality. Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot

  Georges May, Michael Fried•History and Theory•1982

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• American Anatomies

  Michael Bérubé, Robyn Wiegman•African American Review•1997

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• Abolition's Public Sphere

  Aaron Ogletree, Robert Fanuzzi•African American Review•2004

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• Hawthorne's Romance and the Right to Privacy

  Open Access•Milette Shamir•American Quarterly•1997

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• Melodrama Unveiled

  Open Access•Francis J Thompson, David Grimsted•American Quarterly•1969

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• The Fall of Public Man

  Joann Chirico, Richard Sennett•Sociological Analysis•1980

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• The American Jeremiad

  Gustaaf Van Cromphout, Sacvan Bercovitch•American Literature•1979

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