Book Review: Untimely Democracy: The Politics of Progress after Slavery, by Gregory Laski

• Author: Nick Bromell
• Published date: 01 October 2019
• Date: 01 October 2019
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/0090591719852308
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

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Political Theory 47(5)
scholar can hope for is persuasiveness, not apodictic proof, and Clarke has
certainly written a persuasive book.
Untimely Democracy: The Politics of Progress after Slavery, by Gregory Laski. New
York: Oxford University Press, 2018, 269 pp.
Reviewed by: Nick Bromell, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA, USA
DOI: 10.1177/0090591719852308
Untimely Democracy advances an important and controversial argument
about temporality, democracy, and race in the United States between roughly
1880 and 1920. Although located in the field of US literary studies, it has
much to offer political theorists, in particular those who have found African
American works of literature to be rich sources of political thought. There is
much to learn from both its archive of often overlooked texts and its method
of nuanced close-reading, which focuses as much on narrative form as on the
manifest content of the texts it examines. Readers in any discipline will find
it a pleasure to read. In every chapter, Laski’s clear and energetic prose is
studded with brilliantly concise formulations.
Laski shows that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a
number of writers, including W. E. B. Du Bois, Frederick Douglass, Charles
W. Chesnutt, and Pauline E. Hopkins, rejected the Progressive Era’s insis-
tence that America was fulfilling the promise of its democracy and making
steady progress toward racial equality. However, such dissent always risked
playing into the hands of racists who maintained that blacks were congeni-
tally incapable of making progress. Laski’s persuasive and insightful analysis
explains how these writers negotiated this dilemma while nonetheless mak-
ing plain that, in their view, the myth of racial progress was doing more harm
than good. Indeed, they maintained (in differing degrees) that the nation was
still stuck in its pre-Civil War racial structure and that both blacks and whites
would be better off facing this bleak fact than denying it.
The temporal state these writers call our attention to is one that Laski,
taking an apt phrase from Du Bois, names “the present-past”—a present that
is bound to the past, not a break from it. In so doing, they challenge a
progressive temporality embedded, Laski claims, in mainstream thinking
about US democracy:
In what I term their vision of untimely democracy, these figures transform the
pervasive imperative for “progress” . . . from an ambiguous and often-
misleading end into a difficult, deliberative process. Interrupting the steady

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Book Reviews
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forward movement that propels the desire for progress and has produced so
many false starts, their...