Partisan politics and the public sphere: The civil war north

Public space is often understood as an important ‘node’ of the public sphere. Typically, theorists of public space argue that it is through the trust, civility and openness to others which citizens cultivate within a democracy’s public spaces, that they learn how to relate to one another as fellow members of a shared polity. However, such theorizing fails to articulate how these democratic comportments learned within public spaces relate to the public sphere’s purported role in holding state power to account. In this paper, we examine the ways in which what we call ‘partisan interventions’ into public space can correct for this gap. Using the example of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPIM), we argue that the ways in which CPIM partisans actively cultivate sites of historical regional importance – such as in the village of Kayyur – should be understood as an aspect of the party’s more general concern to present itself to citizens as an agent both capable and worthy of wielding state power. Drawing on histories of supreme partisan contribution and sacrifice, the party influences the ideational background – in competition with other parties – against which it stakes its claims to democratic legitimacy. In contrast to those theorizations of public space that celebrate its separateness from the institutions of formal democratic politics and the state more broadly, the CPIM’s partisan interventions demonstrate how parties’ locations at the intersections of the state and civil society can connect the public sphere to its task of holding state power to account, thereby bringing the explicitly political questions of democratic legitimacy into the everyday spaces of a political community.

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The Genteel Tradition and the Emergence of the African American Sonnet

The African American Sonnet ◽

10.14325/mississippi/9781496817839.003.0002 ◽

2018 ◽

pp. 15-38

Author(s):

Timo Müller

Keyword(s):

African American ◽

Civil War ◽

Public Sphere ◽

American Literature ◽

African American Literature ◽

Racial Stereotypes ◽

James Weldon Johnson ◽

Paul Laurence Dunbar ◽

The Public ◽

The Public Sphere

This chapter traces the emergence of the sonnet in African American literature to the pervasive influence of genteel conventions. These conventions have widely been regarded as conservative or even stultifying, but they provided black poets with various opportunities for self-assertion in the public sphere. The sonnet was a favourite genre among the genteel establishment, and poets pushed the boundaries of black expression by appropriating the form to subvert racial stereotypes, develop a black poetic subjectivity, and participate in the debate over the memory of the Civil War. In tracing these developments, the chapter repositions the outstanding poets of the period, Paul Laurence Dunbar and James Weldon Johnson, alongside their less-known contemporaries, Samuel Beadle, William Stanley Braithwaite, Joseph Seamon Cotter Jr., T. Thomas Fortune, and Henrietta Cordelia Ray.

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Printed Religion, the Public Sphere, and the Disordering of the Union

10.1093/oso/9780190248321.003.0004 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Lucas P. Volkman

Keyword(s):

African American ◽

Civil War ◽

Public Sphere ◽

The Public ◽

The Public Sphere

Chapter 4 reveals that the evangelical schisms in Missouri spurred a radical escalation of theological and political disputation between pro- and antislavery evangelicals in religious newspapers and other printed publications. This verbal sparring played a heretofore unexamined central role in spawning a vicious conflict between northern and southern evangelicals and partisans on the border with Kansas after 1854. To the extent that sectarian strife over the morality of African American bondage spurred armed strife in Missouri from the spring of 1854 through 1860, it played an important role in generating the larger sectional tensions that led to secession and the Civil War.

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Representations of Wales and the Welsh during the civil wars and Interregnum

Historical Research ◽

10.1111/j.1468-2281.2004.00214.x ◽

2004 ◽

Vol 77 (197) ◽

pp. 358-376 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Lloyd Bowen

Keyword(s):

Seventeenth Century ◽

Civil War ◽

Public Sphere ◽

Civil Wars ◽

Political Discourse ◽

The State ◽

The Public ◽

Charles I ◽

The Public Sphere ◽

High Politics

Abstract This article examines how Wales and the Welsh were represented in the pamphlet literature of the civil war and early Interregnum. It considers the historical construction of the Welsh image in English minds, and traces how this image came to be politicized by Welsh support for Charles I during the sixteen-forties. An examination of the public controversies surrounding the state-sponsored evangelization programme in Wales during the early sixteen-fifties shows how the contested image of Wales in the public sphere interacted with high politics at the centre. This study contributes to our understanding of the interplay between ethnicity, identity and politics during the sixteen-forties and fifties, and demonstrates how imagery and representation informed political discourse in the mid seventeenth century.

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Taking Modernity's Wager: Tocqueville, Social Capital, and the American Civil War

Journal of Interdisciplinary History ◽

10.1162/jinh_a_00157 ◽

2011 ◽

Vol 41 (4) ◽

pp. 591-618

Author(s):

Johann N. Neem

Keyword(s):

Social Capital ◽

Civil War ◽

Public Sphere ◽

Alexis De Tocqueville ◽

Bonding Social Capital ◽

The Public ◽

Bridging Social Capital ◽

The Republic ◽

The Public Sphere ◽

American Society

Alexis de Tocqueville watched with horror as American society and politics changed in the two decades following the publication of Democracy in America. During the 1840s and 1850s, the factors that Tocqueville had earlier identified as sustaining the republic—its land and location, its laws, and its mores—had begun to undermine it. Recent work on civil society, the public sphere, and social capital is congruent with a Tocquevillian analysis of the causes of the Civil War. The associational networks that had once functioned as bridging social capital fractured under the stress of slavery, becoming sources of divisive regional, bonding social capital.

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In Search of Bernabé: Politicized Motherhood

Ethnic Studies Review ◽

10.1525/esr.2001.24.1.29 ◽

2001 ◽

Vol 24 (1) ◽

pp. 29-47

Author(s):

Fatima Mujicinovic

Keyword(s):

Civil War ◽

Public Sphere ◽

Political Violence ◽

Historical Context ◽

The Novel ◽

Political Opposition ◽

The Public ◽

The Social ◽

The Public Sphere ◽

Individual Strategies

Connecting its storyline to the historical context of the civil war in El Salvador, this US Latina text dramatizes dehumanizing effects of political violence on individual and collective being. With an emphasis on the dialectical connection between the personal and the social, the novel focuses on individual strategies of survival and resistance in conditions of authoritarianism in order to suggest new forms of political opposition and liberation. Its narrative reveals subversive and empowering aspects of the intimate, as the discourse of motherhood and religiosity reclaims its place in the public sphere and takes a direct stance against violence and oppression.

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Republican Decision-making

Cicero ◽

10.1093/oso/9780199684915.003.0006 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 185-228

Author(s):

Malcolm Schofield

Keyword(s):

Decision Making ◽

Civil War ◽

Public Sphere ◽

Well Being ◽

Theoretical Treatment ◽

The Public ◽

The Public Sphere ◽

The Right ◽

Res Publica

On duties makes development of natural impulses to virtue the basis for how one ought to act. But identifying what actually is the right and honourable thing to do in the public sphere can still be problematic, even if the overriding importance of claims upon citizens of obligations to the res publica are recognized. When the res publica is in trouble, and when civilized order is either unstable or broken down completely, then it may become entirely opaque whether any action a citizen might take could properly or effectively promote the well-being of the res publica. For Cicero, citizen and statesman in turbulent and dangerous times, such issues were as much existential as theoretical, with the potential to destabilize theory too. This chapter first explores his theoretical treatment of decision-making in On duties, and then the difficulties of fitting principle to practice encountered in civil war and its aftermath.

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