AUTOBIOGRAPHY, POLITICAL HOPE, RACIAL JUSTICE

2014 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 159-175 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Gooding-Williams
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Political Development ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
American Political Development ◽  
The United States ◽  
Racial Justice ◽  
Philosophical Work ◽  
Progressive Politics ◽  
Black President ◽  
American Political Science

AbstractAfter the overthrow of Jim Crow and the reelection of our first Black president, how should we conceptualize the tasks of a racially progressive politics in the United States? I address this question through (1) the lens of recent philosophical work on the relation between narrative and the justification of political hope and (2) a comparison of two autobiographies, Barack Obama’s Dreams of My Father and W. E. B. Du Bois’s Dusk of Dawn. In light of this comparison, the paper also evaluates some recent contributions to the American Political Science subfield of American Political Development.

Comparing America: Reflections on Democracy across Subfields

2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 788-800 ◽  
Author(s):  
Didi Kuo
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Comparative Politics ◽  
Political Development ◽  
Ethnic Politics ◽  
American Political Development ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Public ◽  
Contemporary Politics ◽  
The Public Sphere

Is America in a period of democratic decline? I argue that there is an urgent need to consider the United States in comparative perspective, and that doing so is necessary to contextualize and understand the quality of American democracy. I describe two approaches to comparing the United States: the first shows how the United States stacks up to other countries, while the second uses the theories and tools of comparative politics to examine relationships between institutions, actors, and democratic outcomes. I then draw on research in three literatures—clientelism and corruption, capitalism and redistribution, and race and ethnic politics and American Political Development—to lay out a research agenda for closing the gap between the subfields of American and comparative politics. In doing so, I also argue for richer engagement between academics and the public sphere, as opportunities for scholars to provide commentary and analysis about contemporary politics continue to expand.

Back to the Future: Historical Political Science and the Promise of Canadian Political Development

2017 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 219-241 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jack Lucas ◽  
Robert Vipond
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Political Development ◽  
American Political Development ◽  
The United States ◽  
Historical Research ◽  
Methodological Foundation ◽  
Canadian Politics ◽  
The Future

AbstractHow “historical” is Canadian political science? This paper sets out to answer this question through an analysis of historically oriented articles that have appeared in this journal from its first volume, in 1968, to 2015. We suggest that historical research in this journal is at once enduring and uneven, a pattern that we then explore in more detail in a case study, spanning forty years, of historical articles that focus on the interconnected themes of the constitution, courts, and federalism. The unevenness of this pattern suggests that the intellectual and methodological foundation of “historical” Canadian political science may not be as firm as it appears. We therefore conclude with a description of some methodological and conceptual tools, originally fashioned within the historically oriented subfield of American political development in the United States, that Canadian political scientists might deploy to probe important and enduring questions of Canadian politics.

The Carceral State and American Political Development

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amy E. Lerman ◽  
Vesla M. Weaver
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Political Development ◽  
American Political Development ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Order ◽  
American Democracy ◽  
Carceral State ◽  
Democratic Development ◽  
Institutional Landscape

Since mid-century, the capacity of the United States to punish and surveil its citizenry has undergone tremendous expansion. Yet this phenomenal transformation and its repercussions for citizens has engendered surprisingly little discussion among scholars of American political development (APD). Nor have criminal justice scholars been sufficiently attentive to the intersection between democratic development and the carceral state. In this essay, we highlight how several well-worn tools and concepts in APD have begun to pave new understandings in criminal justice. Many of the studies we describe here have profound consequences for how we see American democracy and citizenship today. They require us to attend to the fact that criminal justice is not just one more slice of the American institutional landscape, but is in fact central to the development of the modern American state, its political order, and how the state interacts with its citizens.

American Political Development in the Mirror of Europe

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amel Ahmed
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Political Development ◽  
American Political Development ◽  
The United States ◽  
Historical Research ◽  
European Politics ◽  
Specific Knowledge ◽  
Context Sensitive ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
The 19Th Century

Area-specific knowledge is indispensable for studying political development, but this can also lead to “blindspots” when conducting historical research if one’s horizons are limited to conventionally defined “areas.” Focusing on the 19th century, the author argues that the compartmentalization of the study of European and American political development has restricted our understanding of both. Particularly in struggles over democratization, pre-democratic elites in both regions saw their fates as linked and adopted similar strategies. In fact, one such strategy—the manipulation of electoral systems to limit working-class influence—was a mainstay of European politics, but first emerged in the American context. This finding illustrates the benefits of a comparative area studies (CAS) framework. A context-sensitive comparison of European and American political development offers a new perspective on the question of institutional endogeneity in Europe, while offering a new take on the question of “why no workers’ parties in the United States?”

Managing the Periphery in the Gilded Age: Writing Constitutions for the Western States

2008 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-58 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amy Bridges
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Political Development ◽  
Gilded Age ◽  
Labor Law ◽  
American Political Development ◽  
The United States ◽  
State Building ◽  
State Governments ◽  
State Constitutions ◽  
Constitutional Conventions

In this essay I argue that in the Gilded Age (the last quarter of the nineteenth century), delegates to constitutional conventions in the western territories designed state governments to manage, as best they could, the development of their economies. They were, and understood themselves to be, citizens of the periphery of the United States. Delegates to the conventions hoped to shield their states from the worst possible outcomes of that peripheral relationship, and foster the best ones. My arguments contribute to our understanding of state constitutions and, more broadly, to central concerns of American political development—regionalism, labor law, and state building.

Cherokee Political Thought and the Development of Tribal Citizenship

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-15
Author(s):  
Aaron Kushner
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Political Development ◽  
American Political Development ◽  
Political Engagement ◽  
The United States ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Development Studies ◽  
Analytical Strategies ◽  
Political Idea

Abstract Citizenship, a fundamental political idea, exists in many forms in the United States. In this study, I apply the analytical strategies of American political development to examine the evolution of Cherokee constitutional citizenship law since 1827. The lack of political development studies on Cherokee governance presents a unique opportunity to identify foundational and second-story ideas underpinning Cherokee political thought. I contribute to the ongoing discussion of indigenous political development by creating a new theoretical framework for interpreting and analyzing durable shifts in Cherokee citizenship law. As America expands and diversifies, alternate, nonliberal views of citizenship increase in political relevance. Understanding why certain laws exist and where they came from is crucial for cultivating political engagement, engaging in productive discourse, and creating humanizing policies.

Dismantling White Privilege: The Black Lives Matter Movement and Environmental Justice in Canada

2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Cheryl Teelucksingh
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Critical Race Theory ◽  
Environmental Justice ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
The United States ◽  
Conceptual Tool ◽  
Public Monuments ◽  
Black Lives Matter ◽  
Jim Crow Era

On August 12, 2017, in Charlottesville, Virginia, alt-right/White supremacy groups and Black Lives Matter (BLM) supporters came face-to-face regarding what to do about public monuments that celebrate key figures from slavery and the Jim Crow era. White supremacists and White nationalists did not hide their racist ideologies as they demanded that their privileged place in history not be erased. The BLM movement, which challenges state-sanctioned anti-Black racism, was ready to confront themes of White discontent and reverse racism, critiques of political correctness, and the assumption that racialized people should know their place and be content to be the subordinate other.It is easy to frame the events in Charlottesville as indicative of US-specific race problems. However, a sense that White spaces should prevail and an ongoing history of anti-Black racism are not unique to the United States. The rise of Canadian activism under the BLM banner also signals a movement to change Canadian forms of institutional racism in policing, education, and the labor market. This article responds to perceptions that the BLM movement has given insufficient attention to environmental concerns (Pellow 2016; Halpern 2017). Drawing on critical race theory as a conceptual tool, this article focuses on the Canadian context as part of the author’s argument in favor of greater collaboration between BLM and the environmental justice (EJ) movement in Canada. This article also engages with the common stereotype that Blacks in Canada have it better than Blacks in the United States.

Utopias of One

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua Kotin
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
World War I ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Personal Autonomy ◽  
The United States ◽  
Soviet Period ◽  
Original Research ◽  
The Soviet Union

This book is a new account of utopian writing. It examines how eight writers—Henry David Thoreau, W. E. B. Du Bois, Osip and Nadezhda Mandel'shtam, Anna Akhmatova, Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, and J. H. Prynne—construct utopias of one within and against modernity's two large-scale attempts to harmonize individual and collective interests: liberalism and communism. The book begins in the United States between the buildup to the Civil War and the end of Jim Crow; continues in the Soviet Union between Stalinism and the late Soviet period; and concludes in England and the United States between World War I and the end of the Cold War. In this way it captures how writers from disparate geopolitical contexts resist state and normative power to construct perfect worlds—for themselves alone. The book contributes to debates about literature and politics, presenting innovative arguments about aesthetic difficulty, personal autonomy, and complicity and dissent. It models a new approach to transnational and comparative scholarship, combining original research in English and Russian to illuminate more than a century and a half of literary and political history.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Valls
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Public Policy ◽  
Social Construction ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Racial Inequality ◽  
The United States ◽  
Racial Justice ◽  
Color Blind ◽  
American Society ◽  
Liberal Political Theory

The persistence of racial inequality in the United States raises deep and complex questions of racial justice. Some observers argue that public policy must be “color-blind,” while others argue that policies that take race into account should be defended on grounds of diversity or integration. This chapter begins to sketch an alternative to both of these, one that supports strong efforts to address racial inequality but that focuses on the conditions necessary for the liberty and equality of all. It argues that while race is a social construction, it remains deeply embedded in American society. A conception of racial justice is needed, one that is grounded on the premises provided by liberal political theory.

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