Adam Dahl | University of Massachusetts Amherst (original) (raw)

Papers by Adam Dahl

Constellations, 2022

It is widely assumed that W.E.B. Du Bois’s notion of “the public and psychological wage,” famousl... more It is widely assumed that W.E.B. Du Bois’s notion of “the public and psychological wage,” famously elaborated in his 1935 Black Reconstruction in America, is primarily a feature of the racial-capitalist order within the United States. Examining his World War I era writings on imperialism, this essay elaborates a distinctive conception of transnational whiteness in Du Bois’s thought I call the dividends of empire. Like the wages of whiteness within the United States, the dividends of empire granted white workers within imperial metropoles extra-economic forms of psychological and political compensation that reshaped transnational working-class solidarities and obstructed the emergence of transnational industrial democracy. Yet unlike the wages of whiteness, they rendered white workers as passive recipients of imperial compensation akin to corporate shareholders who relinquish power over economic decisions for financial benefit. Distinct from wages, the financial language of shares and dividends allowed Du Bois to capture the failed dynamics of transnational solidarity between white and colonized labor rather than strictly the racial divisions of the U.S. working class.

Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East , 2020

Rejecting the rigid dichotomy between anticolonial nationalism and postnational solidarity, Adom ... more Rejecting the rigid dichotomy between anticolonial nationalism and postnational solidarity, Adom Getachew's Worldmaking after Empire argues that anticolonial leaders in the Caribbean and Africa did not outright reject the nation-state in their quest for self-determination. Instead, they internationalized the nation-state through the construction of new constituted powers that linked national sovereignties together in global juridical, political, and economic bodies. This essay explores a neglected question in this account: What were the constituent powers—the underlying sources of authority —that corresponded to these new global institutions? What, in other words, was the constituency of self-determination? Focusing on C. L. R. James and W. E. B. Du Bois, Dahl shows how anticolonial constituencies are at once the referent and effect of claims for self-determination. For James and Du Bois, politically delineating the constituency of self-determination is central to the institutional project of securing nondomination against international hierarchies of empire and enslavement.

Contemporary Political Theory, 2020

The neo-republican conception of freedom as non-domination has emerged as a powerful framework fo... more The neo-republican conception of freedom as non-domination has emerged as a powerful framework for conceptualizing the dynamic relationship between power, democracy, and constitutionalism in modernity. Despite this, I argue that adaptations of republican freedom to the problem of slavery displace attention to race and foreclose more productive ways of addressing how racial slavery constitutes a distinct form of oppression. To illuminate the limitations of neo-republicanism, I turn to the political thought of abolitionists David Walker and Ottobah Cugoano. Both utilize comparative histories of race and slavery to reveal the specificity of modern slavery as a form of oppression, which cannot be captured as an issue of domination in the technical sense of the term. They thus pose challenges to neo-republican theory for its failure to fully appreciate the historical differences between ancient and modern slavery. To do so would illuminate how neo-republican theory faces severe limitations in providing an adequate conceptualization of oppression in the case of racial slavery.

Journal of Politics, 2020

Although the concept of natural liberty played an essential role in the abolitionist movement, bl... more Although the concept of natural liberty played an essential role in the abolitionist movement, black abolitionist appropriations of the concept are generally reduced to Enlightenment categories of political theory. Through an analysis of Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery, I argue that the abolitionist Ottobah Cugoano developed a novel conception of natural liberty through a process of creolization. Rather than a wholesale adoption of European political thought, Cugoano reinterpreted categories of natural rights philosophy by blending natural liberty with West African social practice and the experiences of the enslaved. His primary theoretical innovation was to divorce natural liberty from freedom as self-ownership and to reorient the concept away from a focus on self-possession, private property, and individual rights toward transnational obligations to end the slave trade. Cugoano is both representative and originator of a distinct tradition of black transnational thought that exceeds the limitations of European political traditions.

While scholars of African American political thought have done a remarkable job centering focus o... more While scholars of African American political thought have done a remarkable job centering focus on black thinkers, they still largely frame their endeavor in reference to the geo-political boundaries of the U.S. nation-state, thereby ignoring the transnational and diasporic dynamics of black politics. The consequence is that alternative traditions of thought in the Americas – e.g. Caribbean traditions – are cast as irrelevant to questions of racial oppression in U.S. political thinking. This article seeks to correct nation-centric perspectives on U.S. political thought and development by demonstrating the utility of the “transnational turn.” Drawing on the framework developed in CLR James’ The Black Jacobins, it traces how an influential cohort of abolitionists in the antebellum U.S. looked to the Haitian Revolution as a model for the overthrow of slavery. Engaging the writings and speeches of David Walker, James Theodore Holly, and Frederick Douglass, it then argues that radical abolitionists operated in the same ideological problem-space as Haitian revolutionaries and adopted a specific model of revolution as much indebted to Haitian political thought as Anglo-American models of anti-colonial revolt. By implication, racially egalitarian movements and moments in U.S. political development cannot be adequately understood with exclusive reference to national traditions of thought.

Memory and justice are intricately linked. In order to adequately address historical wrongs libe... more Memory and justice are intricately linked. In order to adequately address historical wrongs liberal democracies must engage the past. Historical memory provides a connective tissue between past wrongs and present injustices. Yet the question that arises with the politics of memory and its usefulness for addressing historical injustice resides precisely in the process by which we create historical memory. More than just an objectively rendered depiction of the past, collective memory is constructed through a range of narrative and memorial practices that impart meaning to past events. This paper amends the politics of memory with a framework that attends to the complex relationship between the narrative modes by which historical wrongs are represented and present attributions of collective responsibility. By viewing memory of historical wrongs not just as objective events but also as narrative constructions of the past, we argue that the narrative form of historical injustice shapes contemporary notions of political responsibility. In elaborating this claim, we examine how different narrative representations of historical injustice engender different understandings of collective responsibility. Through a reading of the Native American political theorist Vine Deloria Jr.’s famous work, Custer Died for Your Sins, we then explore how irony and satire help expose the limitations of tragic, romantic, and comedic narratives in conceptualizing political responsibility for historical injustice.

One of the more striking features of the Black Lives Matter movement against racialized police br... more One of the more striking features of the Black Lives Matter movement against racialized police brutality has been the focus on violence inflicted on " black bodies. " On one hand, the language of " black bodies, " as opposed to simply " black people " or " black personhood, " makes the issue of racial violence more visceral and immediate to white audiences otherwise indisposed to perceive black pain as a moral problem. On the other hand, it represents a theoretical challenge to dominant understandings of pain, suffering, and individuality based on liberal subjectivity. Exemplifying both these aspects, Ta-Nehisi Coates's recent work, Between the World and Me, provides a deep philosophical reflection on the moral and political problem of " black disembodiment. " This article tracks the theme of disembodiment in Coates's book by foregrounding the role that feminist theories of embodiment play in his exploration of the contemporary black condition in America.

Although consent and commerce were dominant principles of revolutionary political culture, early ... more Although consent and commerce were dominant principles of revolutionary political culture, early American expansionists engaged in the continual appropriation of indigenous land. How were these principles of consent and commerce combined with processes of territorial conquest? Rather than a Lockean right of conquest where labor establishes the right to property, architects of early American expansion drew on a pos-sessory right to property in which property is established by social convention rather than natural right. Political thinkers such as Thomas Jefferson and Henry Knox enlisted the possessory right to property in the justification of early US colonization, emphasizing the importance of purchasing Indian land. Yet when Indian nations refused to sell their land, these same figures cast indigenous resistance and coercive reactions to it as exceptions to the norm of commercial expansion, giving rise to a discourse of commercial conquest that aided in the justification of native dispossession.

This essay examines the concept of " Indian nullification " in the political writings of William ... more This essay examines the concept of " Indian nullification " in the political writings of William Apess by situating his defense of native self-determination in the context of debates about the legitimacy of nullification in U.S. constitutionalism. It illustrates how Indian nullification operates, not as a feature of constitutional design asserting minority rights over the tyranny of the majority, but rather as a rhetorical form of political contestation exposing the constitutive exclusions of American settler democracy. Apess illuminates how constitutional ideals of popular sovereignty cohere around regimes of settler colonialism and indigenous dispossession, highlighting the paradox of settler sovereignty that provides the basis for American democracy. Indian nullification is not a simple demand that the boundaries of liberal citizenship be expanded to include Indians. It is a way of narrating and rhetorically representing the forms of settler conquest that establish the material and conceptual foundation of popular self-rule for white settlers.

Th is article raises a set of cautions regarding public value governance along two dimensions. Fi... more Th is article raises a set of cautions regarding public value governance along two dimensions. First, it questions the common claim that public value governance poses a direct challenge to the economistic logic of neoliberalism. Second, although public value is often presented as a democratizing agenda, leading works sidestep foundational questions of power and conflict and advance prescriptions that are at odds with important democratic values. Without attending to these problems, the public value concept risks producing a new variant of neoliberal rationality, extending and strengthening the de- democratizing, market-oriented project that its proponents seek to overturn.

Book Reviews by Adam Dahl

Political Theory, 2020

Democracy is an original, beautifully written, and sophisticated account of how autobiography rep... more Democracy is an original, beautifully written, and sophisticated account of how autobiography represents a distinct genre of political theory that holds the power to recreate political community through personal life writing. At a time when political theorists are turning increasing attention to questions of genre-how the form of political writing importantly shapes its content-Bennett successfully illustrates through a series of five chapters how personal narrative is not simply an individualistic act. Rather, he argues that life writing is a potent and patterned form of political argument aimed at reconstituting the collectivity. In this way, Bennett shows how the autobiographical "I" often becomes a vehicle for contesting and redrawing the boundaries of "We, the people." Bennett explores these dynamics through a series of chapters on exemplary autobiographical works in American literature from Benjamin

Theory & Event, 2020

In Queer Terror, Heike Schotten provides an important contribution to continued efforts to theori... more In Queer Terror, Heike Schotten provides an important contribution to continued efforts to theorize the enduring legacies of US imperialism and settler colonialism. In a creative and compelling blend of queer theory, biopolitics, canonical political theory, settler colonial studies, and critical indigenous theory , Schotten sets out to explore the roots of the War on Terror in the settler colonial project. One of Queer Terror's central contributions is to reframe "the biopolitics of settler sovereignty as operating primarily at the level of desire, not biology, which establishes the distinction between life and death via the institution of temporality" (xiv). Put differently, settler sovereignty ideologically legitimates itself through the projection of desire for the good life (i.e. for a specific form of civilization) into the future. If so, then queer theory is an ideal tool to criticize US empire and the settler colonial project because it disrupts the moral boundaries and propriety of desire.

Perspectives on Politics, 2019

American Political Thought, 2019

Jonathan Israel's impressive tome joins a chorus of scholarship seeking to replace nation-centric... more Jonathan Israel's impressive tome joins a chorus of scholarship seeking to replace nation-centric accounts of the American Revolution with transatlantic perspectives that attend to the interconnections of revolutionary thought in Europe and the Americas. Instead of casting the emergence of democratic modernity as the sole province of national revolutions, whether in Europe or America, Israel argues that it was the product of transnational discourse and consciousness. In tracing the global circulation of "transatlantic democratic thought," his central thesis is that the American Revolution's impact was not just on democratic development within the borders of the new republic; it also had international reverberations (15).