The Novel, theDemos, and Genres of the Human

Abstract

The post-Civil War novels discussed in this essay allow us to see not just the failure of liberal recognition to enfranchise freedpeople but also the legible misrecognition of how humanness is known and lived by Black subjects. By tracing uncanny or syncopated humanness that is manifest most clearly in Black kinship, these novels demonstrate the genre’s ability to represent incommensurate orders of the human. But this very affordance––the novel’s capacity to represent and reflect on contending “genres of the human” coexisting agonistically in the Atlantic world––also demands new theorizing, an account of the genre that does not obviate the multiplicity of the human by presuming a uniform demos. If the novel is to enlarge its potential for democratic thought, it will need to revise the cosmologies and geographies that have heretofore oriented our theories of the Atlantic novel.What are the implications of this discontinuous humanness for the possibilities of democracy? If multiple “genres of the human” coexist agonistically in the Atlantic world, can any novel project a demos that does not obviate that multiplicity?