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9 Am. Pol. Thought 1 (2020)

handle is hein.journals/ampolth9 and id is 1 raw text is: Walt Whitman, White Revanchism, and the Dilemmas of Social Criticism LISA GILSON ABSTRACT Readers of Whitman's poetry have long celebrated his radical portrayal of crossing racial boundaries. Yet, as recent scholars have documented, Whitman erased almost all of his references to black Americans in his Reconstruction-era writings. This article argues against the standard interpretation of this erasure, contending that it was a product of a rhetorical shift, rather than of Whitman's increasing personal prejudice toward black Americans. By tracing Whitman's rhetorical strategy from pre- to post-Civil War peri- ods, I show that Whitman maintained a public commitment to a racially heterogeneous democracy. What changed, I argue, was his rhetorical approach. While Whitman's prewar poetic experimentation was addressed to Americans more generally, his postwar writings were tailored to court the Americans who were least open to his democratic project-white Southerners. I conclude by examining the limitations of both rhetorical approaches, argu- ing that they point toward the need for a pluralist approach to social criticism. A puzzle has long plagued readers of Walt Whitman's poetry and prose. Cham- pions of his writings have celebrated Whitman as an author who envisioned a truly heterogeneous, multiracial, hybrid American identity, citing poems that not only seem to approve of racial mixing but also even appear to poetically enact it. This innovative approach led black Americans from Sojourner Truth and Langston Hughes to James Weldon Johnson to proclaim Whitman as America's greatest poet and Leaves of Grass as the best expression of the real meaning Lisa Gilson is a postdoctoral College Fellow in Social Studies at Harvard University, William James Hall, 33 Kirkland Street, Cambridge, MA 02138 (lisagilson@fas.harvard.edu). For their generous and constructive critiques of an earlier draft of this article, I would like to thank four anonymous reviewers and editors Susan McWilliams Barndt and Jeremy D. Bailey. I would also like to thank Karuna Mantena, Demetra Iasimis, Tom Arnold-Forster, Merve Fejzula, Bryan Garsten, Anuja Bose, Hari Ramesh, Don Tontiplaphol, the members of the Women's Research and Writing Group in Political Theory at Yale, and, especially, Emma Rodman for their invaluable feedback. American Political Thought: A Journal of Ideas, Institutions, and Culture, vol. 9 (Winter 2020). 2161-1580/2020/0901-0001$10.00. © 2020 by The Jack Miller Center. All rights reserved.

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