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Introduction
Christopher Looby
| THE articles by Bryan Waterman, Eric Slauter, and Joanna Brooks in this Forum on "Alternative Histories of the Public Sphere" were originally presented at a session of the Society of Early Americanists conference in early 2003. They share, as readers will see, some motives in common, among them a desire to explore the uses of the public sphere concept for inquiries into early American literature and culture. But they do not proceed strictly within categories established by Jürgen Habermas, to be sure, and in other ways they are quite different from one another.1 Bryan Waterman is investigating what he calls (using a coinage of Margaret R. Somers) the "knowledge culture" (14) of the early national period, the era's "proliferating information economy" (25). He gives a finely grained account of the surprising and hitherto unheeded lines of fracture in an intellectual network (the Friendly Club) that included members of the clergy, the legal and medical professions, as well as a journalist, a novelist, and a playwright, and in which the largest contests over public intellectual authority were intensely concentrated in the relationships among friends, family, and professional associates. Eric Slauter not only is engaged in an attempt to reinvoke some neglected Habermasian categories (privacy, for instance) but also aims to link some of the most mundane and widely circulated popular tales and images of the 1780s to some of the most refined political arguments of the day. His virtuoso delineation of thematic continuities between stray newspaper tales of hermits, on the one hand, and philosophical arguments about the very ground of political sociability in the new nation, on the other, invites readers to make similar connections between the many practically and/or theoretically distinct sectors of the unitarily imagined public sphere. Joanna Brooks is perhaps the most directly engaged with the Habermasian paradigm, though in a highly critical mode: she finds it wanting in certain respects, and she finds the use made of it by some prominent early Americanists to be narrow and prejudicial. Against those scholars who hastily concluded that African Americans were by definition nonparticipants in the early national public sphere (or only participated on condition of ceding their racial identification), Brooks finds an active and effective black counterpublic sphere taking shape precisely around an embattled assertion of racial collectivity. Her concept of "positive collective incorporation" (73) as the fundamental defining condition of the emergent black counterpublic sphere is a rich and important one: it reverses on historical grounds some of the premises (anonymity, disinterestedness, disembodiment) that have been counted as essential to the early American public sphere. The articles are all exemplary in their searching efforts to use, but not be used by, a critical concept (the public sphere) that seems at once to have been exploited endlessly in early American studies and at the same time to retain vast unrealized potential for further critical exploration. |
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Though the public sphere concept does not dominate these articles, it is worth examining for a moment that concept's status in contemporary studies of early America. Among other virtues these articles share, their theoretical asides and extensive annotations incidentally furnish a thorough and reflective inventory of early Americanist work that uses Habermas in various ways. Likewise, the responses from John L. Brooke, Ruth H. Bloch, and David Waldstreicher survey the research that has taken, in one degree or another, Habermas as inspiration, instigation, or foil. These responses all warily take note that the three articles are the work of scholars whose disciplinary affiliation is with English departments, and the commentators variously find the articles perforce unduly "literary" (Waldstreicher, 111) or "too text centered" (Brooke, 96). Bloch, more neutrally, simply observes that they exhibit the features characteristic of their disciplinary origins, that is, they are the work of "historians of literature who study texts" as opposed to "historians of political culture who study popular movements and organizations" (101). As a literary scholar myself, I find this wariness (to give it no more pointed a designation) puzzling and disappointing: it would never occur to me to hold it against a historian that she or he was too historical, or too event centered. Saying that a literary scholar is too literary or text centered is a bit like saying that a fireman cares too much for public safety or a doctor focuses too much on human health. Be that as it may (disciplinary deformation and its corollary, disciplinary defensiveness, will always be with us), it should at least be pointed out that the literary plays an essential historical role in Habermas's foundational analysis. Reminding ourselves of this historical function of the literary public sphere may help prepare us to read the following articles with better understanding. |
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