Michael Gorup's "The Counterrevolutionary Shadow"

Michael Gorup is assistant professor of politics at Ithaca College.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Counterrevolutionary Shadow: Race, Democracy, and the Making of the American People, and reported the following:

Page 99 of The Counterrevolutionary Shadow begins with a section break. The heading atop the page reads: “Abolition, Reparation, and the Politics of People-making.” What follows is the final substantive section of the book’s third chapter.

Chapter three traces a distinctive current of abolitionist political thought that emerged in the 19th century U.S., which I call “abolition as people-making.” Here is how I explain the political content of this current on page 99:

Abolition was not a negative demand that aimed only to eliminate the old world of slavery. It also expressed a desire to create a new world: one in which those who had been historically oppressed could be made a free and politically empowered people. This would necessarily entail social transformation at significant scale. The system of slavery could not be uprooted simply by granting legal independence to the formerly enslaved. The United States would remain, in its basic relations, a slave society, wherein one portion of the population (Blacks) continued to live at the mercy of another (whites).

The preceding parts of the chapter focus on the origins of this political vision in the life and work of the antebellum Black abolitionists David Walker and Hosea Easton. On page 99, readers find me arguing for two propositions: 1. Walker and Easton were early proponents of the demand for reparations for slavery, and 2. Their conception of reparations aspired to more than just repair. For them, reparations was just as much a project that aimed to create the conditions for a collective freedom to come as it was a response to freedoms long denied. On subsequent pages I will argue that this positive conception of reparations later resurfaced among abolitionists and Radical Republicans in the Reconstruction era who called for the confiscation of plantation lands and their redistribution to formerly enslaved people.

The central claim of my book is that racism is a distinctively democratic technology of counterrevolutionary politics. Unlike other traditions of counterrevolutionary politics, racism doesn’t reject the idea of popular rule. Instead, it sutures the contradiction between democracy and despotism by enclosing who can be said to belong to “the people.” Page 99 offers a succinct representation of one of the political visions that has emerged to challenge the politics of racialized enclosure. It thus offers readers a glimpse of a revolutionary, rather than counterrevolutionary, politics of peoplehood.

Learn more about The Counterrevolutionary Shadow at the University Press of Kansas website.

--Marshal Zeringue