Monuments, fathers, slaves: Genealogies of American democracy

The post-revolutionary sons of America embraced the legacy of the Founding Fathers even as they resisted the authority of those fathers, deemed prescriptive and stifling. My dissertation argues that this ambivalence precipitated a crisis in antebellum consciousness in which simultaneous reverence and prodigal disregard of the past compromised democratic politics. Even as this crisis intensified in the 1850's and democracy became increasingly tenuous, citizens such as Melville and Lincoln and non-citizens such as Douglass and Brown sought to redeem American democracy. I enter this problematic of memory, amnesia, and redemption by concentrating upon the rhetorical deployment of Founding Fathers in narrative, iconography, and oratory. My study goes beyond an examination of varying textual configurations of the Founding Fathers; instead, I propose a genealogical investigation of the rituals of authority and strategies of legitimation within a national narrative fraught with contradiction and schism.;America ignored the force of Melville's critique, and continued to wage politics in the style of Ahabian expression. Landscapes from the Hudson River School and iconic memorials like the Bunker Hill Monument tell a story that inscribes the American citizen as a transcendental Emersonian hero of democracy. Yet Melville's novel, Israel Potter, reminds us that such monumental narratives bear sinister resemblance to the disciplinary individualism of Foucault's panopticon. Writings by Lincoln and fugitive slaves particularize Melville's critical irony by coupling the unhistorical presence of race with the edifice of monumental history. America emerges as a narrative steeped in the tyranny of forgetfulness.;Although Melville's dark vision could not articulate a viable politics of democracy, writings of ex-slaves, attempt to recover the legacy of freedom. Fixed in an historical void of illegitimacy and genealogical curses, fugitive slaves nevertheless make an important contribution to American political thought. Offering a redemptive politics based neither on genealogical descent nor transcendence of history, ex-slaves theorize an ironical politics that refuses to abstract democracy from its own corrupt origins.;Ruptures within fictions about Washington signal an inability to structure the past with the coherence of narrative. For example, underlying Cooper's The Spy and biographies of Washington are gaps and interruptions, spawned by the sin of the fathers--race slavery. Using congressional debates and ethnological discourse, I read Moby-Dick as a critical interpretation of how tyranny and alienation disrupt narratives, not simply Cooper's Revolutionary romance nor the quest to kill the white whale, but the narrative of the American nation itself.